If Someone You Love Is Having a Hard Time, Listen to This

The Mel Robbins Podcast - Mel Robbins

In this powerful episode of The Mel Robbins Podcast, host Mel Robbins shares an essential conversation with clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa DeMoor on how to support loved ones struggling

Key takeaways

• Emotional distress is not a sign of mental illness if it's appropriate to the situation—such as sadness after a breakup or anxiety before an exam.
• Mental health is defined by whether emotions fit the circumstance and are managed well, not by feeling happy all the time.

Main topics

• Understanding healthy vs. unhealthy emotional responses
• The role of appropriate distress in mental well-being

Notable quotes

"If the kid gets dumped, we expect sadness. The absence of it would be concerning."

Conclusion

Supporting someone in emotional distress begins with recognizing that discomfort is normal and necessary. By asking thoughtful,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Speaker 1 (0:08) One of the hardest things in life is to watch somebody that you care about going through a really hard time. And I don't know about you, but in those moments, I step in and I attempt to help and make things better. And then, of course, what happens? My attempt to help just makes things worse. You know, you want to help your kid, but they just barricade themselves in their room. Your partner's depressed. Your friend is drinking too much. You're worried. You ask questions. Because you're anxious about it, you give advice. Because you can see how this might turn into some disaster. I used to do that too. But oftentimes, I wasn't helping. In fact, I was making things worse. Which is why today, I've asked one of the world's leading psychologists to teach you and me how to help someone you love without panicking, controlling, turning the situation into a fight, or making the situation even worse. You're going to learn the exact words to use when someone shuts down, pushes you away, or is making choices that truly scare you. This episode is an extraordinary resource for you because I know you want to be supportive. I know you want to see this person who's struggling truly thrive. And what you're about to learn today will show you exactly how to do that. Speaker 1 (1:33) Did you know that the average American only gets 13 grams of protein for breakfast? Now, the medical experts are recommending that I get at least 100 grams. If you're only doing 13 grams for breakfast, you're already losing out of the gate. And that's exactly why I got involved and became a co-founder in a company called Pure Genius Protein. As soon as you twist the cap and throw this sucker down, you got 23 grams of high-quality protein handled. Plus, it's sugar-free, fat-free, has no artificial flavors or sweeteners, and it's only 100 calories. Use code MEL10 at Pure Genius Protein for 10 % off, 23 grams of protein in three seconds for under $3 a shot. Speaker 1 (2:19) Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I'm really excited that you're here with me today. It's always an honor to be together and to spend this time with you. And if you're a new listener or you're here because somebody shared this with you, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. Today, we're going to talk about three questions to ask when someone you love is struggling. And one of the reasons why I wanted to share this conversation with you is because for the past several months, someone in my life has been really struggling, and my husband, Chris, and I, we've been really worried about them. So about a week ago, I went digging back through our library of episodes. I looked at over 400 episodes, and I found this particular interview that I've never forgotten. It's one that I did with clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa DeMoor. In it, She talks about three questions you need to ask somebody in your life that's struggling. And these are questions that really give you a roadmap for how to truly offer support that helps. Now, my husband and I listened to this a couple days ago, and we found it so incredibly helpful in guiding us in how to provide support that's effective for this person that we love who's struggling. And after I was done listening, I thought, you know what? I should really share this with you. Because I bet you have somebody in your life who's struggling too. So let me tell you a little bit about this extraordinary expert that you're about to spend some time with. Her name is Dr. Lisa DeMoor. She's a clinical psychologist, three-time New York Times bestselling author of the books Untangled, Under Pressure, and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. Dr. DeMoor hosts the Ask Lisa podcast. She works in collaboration with UNICEF, is a regular contributor to CBS News. She's served as a consultant to Pixar. on the movie Inside Out 2. She's also a senior advisor to the Schubert Center for Child Studies at Case Western Reserve University. And today she is here teaching you the three questions that you should ask anyone in your life who is struggling. I truly hope you will not only enjoy listening to this episode from our archives, I hope it's helpful. When my husband and I listened to this a few days ago, it was exactly... the support and the three questions that we needed so we can help the person that we love who's struggling right now. Speaker 1 (4:40) Dr. Lisa DeMoor, welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Oh, Mel, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited. I have so much I want to talk to you about. I do have a confession. You were a tow rope that dragged me up the hill of parenting teenage daughters because I was an avid motherlode reader and disciple. So thank you for your work. You have no idea what a difference it made. And when I saw that you were releasing yet another book, your latest book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, I thought, oh, wow. What was it that made you want to write this latest book, Lisa? Speaker 2 (5:27) So the way we talk about mental health as a culture does not square with how we as psychologists understand it. And what I mean by that is that so much of the discourse about mental health suggests that being mentally healthy means feeling good or calm or relaxed or at ease. And those are all good things, but those do not actually factor into how psychologists assess mental health. When we're looking at it, we're looking for two things. Do the feelings fit the circumstance? And are they managed well? So we expect to see distress. You know, if somebody gets dumped, In a romance, we expect sadness. We expect them to be really, you know, heartbroken and maybe bitter and a little angry. Like, those are all appropriate emotions. What we're really interested in is what does the kid do next, right? Do they weep? Do they talk to their friends? Do they get their ice cream? Like, do they do things to help themselves feel better? Or do they trash that kid online? Do they turn it against themselves? Do they smoke a ton of weed, right? We only worry when we're in that second category of unhealthy coping. That's what we're most interested in. Speaker 1 (6:36) Well, what's immediately striking to me is that this applies to people of all ages, right? Absolutely. That what I have noticed is that people's ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions and the ups and downs in life have gotten way worse. over time. Speaker 2 (6:59) It's true. I think we have run into a situation where for far too many people, uncomfortable feels like unmanageable. Yes. That there's not a distinction between those two. And it's an important distinction because discomfort is part of life and teenagers are going to feel it, adults are going to feel it. And it's important and we want to care for people under those conditions, but we don't want to assume that discomfort means that everything must stop. It cannot be managed. Some people find themselves there. And then we have the full force of our clinical supports that we can bring to that. But those are two Speaker 1 (7:35) very different things. Yeah. And just for the sake of this conversation, when you say teenager, what age group are you talking about? It's a critically important question. Speaker 2 (7:45) So adolescence begins at 11. And this is something that psychologists have done a terrible job of getting out to the public. Most people think 13 because they hear teen at the end of that and they think teenager. We have always marked the onset of adolescence at age 11. And that is because adolescence begins when puberty is underway. And by 11, most kids, even if you can't see it on the outside, they are underway with puberty. And we mark the end of adolescence. You can push it as far as 24, 25. You can hear the asterisk in my voice on that. By and large. Their brains are in great shape, very fully developed by 18, 19, 20. But their better reasoning is still more readily knocked offline until they're about 24, 25. So if they're very, very stirred up, young adults don't always handle things as well as they will, you know, after 24, 25. But I always get a little uncomfortable when people are like, oh, their brains are not developed until they're 24, 25. I'm like, well, but look at that. English paper that kid wrote. Look at that beautiful piece of art that kid made. That's a developed brain. But we're talking a big window here. I mean, 11 to 24, 25. I mean, those are very, very wide range of numbers and very different kinds of people filling in that space. Speaker 1 (9:06) Yes. Okay, good. I'm so glad we started there because I also honestly would lump in adults. that are emotionally immature and has never matured in terms of their emotional processing. But I'm glad that we're talking really the range of early middle school all the way through year through college. And what you're saying is that there's a difference between what you know clinically and what people believe is the baseline, that mental health does not mean... be happy? What does it mean to be mentally well? Speaker 2 (9:43) What it means is that the emotions you have are actually in concert with what's happening in your world. And I think that mental health is often defined by experiencing distress. And that is 180 from where the culture is right now. So often mental health concerns and distress are treated as though they are one and the same. But I'll give you several examples. It's so easy of where the presence of distress is actually evidence of mental health, right? So if the kid gets dumped, we expect distress. The absence of it would be concerning. If a teenager has a huge test tomorrow and they have not started studying, we want to see some anxiety. The absence of anxiety is more concerning than the presence of anxiety. If someone's really mean to you, right? If you're a teenager or an adult and someone's really mean to you, we expect to see hurt and then probably a self-protective anger. Those are all unpleasant emotions. Those are all unwanted emotions. Those are evidence that we work exactly as we should. And so to pathologize all of that means that people are spending their normal, healthy days feeling like there's something wrong with them, when in fact, that distress is proof that they work perfectly. Speaker 1 (10:56) Lisa, you're a genius. Speaker 1 (11:00) I just had this huge breakthrough because you're right. We have just painted with such a broad stroke that, you know, guilt, fear, shame, anger, upset, heartbreak, that somehow that makes you weak when what you're actually saying is no, no, no, no, no, no. If it's occurring in reaction to the appropriate situation, that is a sign that you're mentally well. Absolutely. And it's Speaker 2 (11:29) also data. That's the other way we think about all of our feelings, negative and positive. They tell us how things are going. So if every time you have lunch with somebody, you walk away feeling kind of stepped on and diminished, that's really good data. Don't have lunch with that person if you can help it, right? And if you go to a job interview and it feels just thrilling to be in the space, like that's good data. Emotions. Psychologists are surprisingly agnostic about them. Like, we don't really value positive ones over negative ones. It's just all information. And our job is to take it in. I love this reframe. Speaker 1 (12:08) I absolutely love it. I would love to tease this out a little bit more because I think this applies to all of us. It does. So, Lisa, what is a normal emotion and what's not? I guess what I mean by that question is... How do we tell the difference between something that is just an awful situation where you got to ride the wave versus something that we should be concerned about? So there's Speaker 2 (12:37) a few ways. I mean, part of it is there's no real right feeling, right? You have the feelings you have. And I think that. I would never want to say, you know, we always expect to see this feeling under these circumstances because, of course, our feelings are informed by who we are, our histories, you know, what's come before. So there's not always a perfect map of what we expect to see. And here again, psychologists can just usually just take a much more curious, like borderline anthropological stance towards emotion as opposed to judging or valuing. But here's what we don't want to see. We don't want to see emotions getting in the way of people's lives. That's where we start to be concerned. So we fully expect to see sadness under sad conditions. We don't expect to see depression, which is where mood becomes so low that it really casts a pall over everything in a person's life. We fully expect to see anxiety if there's something wrong, right? If there's... danger around you or a lethal virus in the environment, right? We expect to see anxiety, but we don't expect anxiety to become paralyzing and get in the way of people's ability to do the things that really are safe or they can and should be able to do. So for us, the index is really much more about functioning and do emotions undermine the ability to function well in the world? Because they should be supporting our ability to navigate our lives and deepen our relationships. They shouldn't be getting in the way. Speaker 1 (14:07) So the real takeaway here for all of us is that distressing emotion, it is part of being mentally well. But when you start opting out of seeing friends and you stop the hygiene protocol of taking showers and exercising and eating, or you start... over-medicating your feelings with alcohol or weed or whatever, that's the red flag? That's right. I'm going to even tease that apart a little bit more. So the emotions can either get in the way, Speaker 2 (14:39) right? So mood that actually disturbs the ability to live one's life, or, and you moved in this direction, and it's such a critically important direction, what I would call costly coping. So people are coping with moods, but they're doing it in ways that come at a cost. So either abusing substances or being incredibly hard on the people around them or turning it against themselves, whether they're running themselves down or even engaging in self-harm, those may be actually providing some relief. People only do things that actually work for them, but they come with a price tag. So that's the other thing we look for. So we look for a mood that gets in the way of the ability to live one's life or coping. that is a costly way to go about things, if not immediately, certainly over time. Those Speaker 1 (15:28) are the flags that we keep Speaker 2 (15:29) an eye Speaker 1 (15:29) out Speaker 2 (15:29) for. I Speaker 1 (15:30) got it. Two flags, mood and costly coping. And I want to role play for a little bit, if that's cool. Sure. Because I love to leave our audience in action and empowered. So if you're in a situation where, let's just talk about the costly coping stuff that you talked about. How do you... As a parent or a friend or a partner of somebody, you see somebody smoking too much weed, playing video games for too long. Those sort of coping mechanisms, you're right, let you escape. How do you even begin to approach it? Because every time we would approach it in our household, you get the big shove back. Speaker 2 (16:10) So I think the first step is to really recognize that it is working for that person. that it is serving a purpose. And you described that, right? That substances can help numb distress. They're incredibly effective at that. That's the problem with them, right? Is that they work to make Speaker 1 (16:27) pain go away. Oh my gosh, hold on a second. Can I just stop there? I don't know that I've ever heard anybody ever hit the pause button and tell the truth. That people engage in these behaviors because they work for them, which is why they become so damn defensive when you try to take them away from them. Exactly. Wow. Speaker 2 (16:54) You know, this is where I just, I'm so glad I got the training I did when I did, because the premise of my whole training is that humans are rational actors. They don't do things that don't serve a purpose. Even if those things outwardly end up causing so much trouble. There's always a rationale. And that's actually the best part about my job is that when people come my way clinically, my job is to figure out, you know, you're doing this thing that is just damaging your life and getting in the way. We have to understand why so that you then can feel like you've got some choices. Speaker 1 (17:31) Wow. I'm just letting the profound nature of what you're asking us. Speaker 1 (17:40) to do. Because I can think of several friends who had daughters in particular,