There’s a big difference between agreeing with someone, and acknowledging their emotional state.

In these situations people just want to hear you acknowledge that you understand they are in pain, no necessary agree with their cause of action.

If you’re not sure what to ask, then your best course of action is to enquire about why they think they feel a certain way. Why does they job makes them stressful, why does talking with a certain person make them anxious. You’re not rendering judgement on their emotions or feels, you simply acknowledge they are what they are, and that’s normal.

For some specifics the following might be useful:

“Why do you think X makes you anxious”

Once they answer

“Yes, I understand now why that might make you anxious”

Or

“It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious”

If there behaviour is causing issues:

“It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious, that’s ok, but the way you’re dealing with it is causing issues for X. Perhaps we can find a better way for you to cope?”

For more, it’s worth looking at Mental Health First Aid. It can provide a number of very practical tips of dealing with someone in crisis, which are also excellent for helping those that just need to vent to someone.

> There’s a big difference between agreeing with someone, and acknowledging their emotional state.

This has been a key takeaway for me too, also in the context of intimate partner communication.

However, I would say that there can for sure be pitfalls with it— it's easy to believe that you are communicating only acknowledgment of emotional state, but have the listener receive it as signing on to their interpretation of the facts, the overall premise, their assessment of the other players' actions and motivations in the story, and so on.

This can lead to major misunderstandings down the road, when the person presents concrete actions that they are expecting will be taken. They may not be anticipating any pushback on this because previous validation-of-emotional-state conversations led them to believe you were both on the same page, when in fact you have significant concerns (whether it was that they misjudged the situation, escalated it unnecessarily, viewed someone else's actions unfairly, failed to accept a compromise or take possible corrective actions, whatever it is).

At that point, it's probably the type of conflict best taken to a professional to sort out, but I think of these situations when I see relationship coaches on TikTok talking up this kind of emotional validation as being a silver bullet for resolving all conflicts and achieving lasting harmony.

I can really empathize with this struggle.

>As a listener, are you agreeing with this or are you neutral nodding your head?

The "trick" I do is to try to set aside whatever train of thoughts I might have had before the person spoke to me, and try to imagine that the thing they talk about is happening to me. And then, voice my reaction to that. So if someone told me that "I'm fearful for my job. I think I might be fired soon", the first that comes to mind is "Oh my god, that's horrible! Why do you think that happens? Have they hinted about this before?"

Now, this maybe works a handful of times in the conversation. A second thing that you can do is trying to imagine the relations of the thing that just got told to you. By relations, I mean relating to anything, how it connects to anything: the speaker's environment, life circumstances, your shared universe, anything. Continuing the example above: "The timing is such a shame, given what's going on in your life, I would have liked it that at least the job is stable".

Third thing, you could discuss the persons possible actions and reactions to the event, and how others in their life have, or will have taken it. Continuing: "Do you have anything else lined up, just in case?" "Could your side gig support you until you find another job?" "How did your spouse take the news?"

And the fourth thing, it's always worth thinking about WHY the other person told you the thing they did. What are you to this other person? A friend? Colleague? Are you their superior? Spouse? Do you relate, in a way, to the thing that they told you? Are you maybe a recruiter, and that's why they tell you that they are fearful for their job? The answers to these questions can bring you closer to your natural response to the situation.

At least personal type conversations, “that sucks” is very very often exactly the right thing to say. Even in work situations it can be a reasonable first response, at least with people not too much further up the org chart than you: “The load balancer latencies have just spiked” “That sucks”. (I’d suggest against using it if CTO comes in yelling about the entire network being cryptolockered though. Unless it’s “That sucks, but I told you so. I quit.”)

You could try to associate this with the rubber duck trick where you just tell your problem to anyone, just to articulate the problem may very well solve it. You don't need input.

In my experience this is also a women-men difference in brain wiring. Men often looks for help when he fails to solve a problem, women always looking for emotional support before solving a problem.

If you give a solution for someone looking for an emotional support or vica-versa you've expreienced one of the main source of frustration in relationships :)

Also a lot of emotional problems don’t need to be solved, you just need to process the feelings and move forward.

There's a term that's useful here: active listening. If they are fearful for their job, express concern and ask them to tell the story:

"Oh no, that's terrible! Why are you fearful, are you all right?"

and you remain active by asking follow-up questions. For example to plug gaps in the story:

"Wow! Did your manager say that to your face? Or was it hearsay through that one co-worker?"

and so on. Expressing emotions is also perfectly fine:

"I feel bad. Wish I could do something for you."

I'd only interject long enough to get them talking again. If they need your help they'll have asked it by now :)

There’s a fantastic book and tv series by a research psychologist Brene Brown where she talks a lot about how to be on the listening end of these kinds of conversations. Often in these situations the other party just wants to have their emotions validated by someone they trust. Just being there to acknowledge their feelings and see their pain is enough (and trying to do more can sometimes make things worse). I highly recommend checking Brown out, she is quite incredible.

I agree and would like to emphasize the word "validation".

It is less about "solving a problem" and more about "figuring out how to feel about the problem".

Validation can help reduce emotional turmoil, distill it into a calmer set of feelings.

The feelings may still be strong. The situation may still suck.

But at least you can be sure of how much it sucks - because someone else you respect, see's it as valid too.

> When I try to do this I end up basically saying "that sucks", "hmm hmm", "yeah", etc which is very frustrating to me as I'd hate someone doing that to me.

Something my sister does, which I hate, is follow up "hello" with a falling-pitch "how are you". This really bothers me every time she does it to me, which is pretty often.

But I have a lot of problems responding to (strangers) asking me how I am, and I've tried her approach of mostly ignoring the question and reflecting back a falling-pitch "how are you", and it seems to work very well. No one ever complains that I ignored their question, and the focus goes back on them, where I want it, instead of me.

If I were to judge this strategy by how I personally feel about it, it would be one of the most grossly offensive things you could say. And it still makes me uncomfortable to use it. But the lesson here appears to be that I shouldn't use myself as a reference for how to interact with other people.

It sounds to me like you want some way to engage with what the other person is sharing. I find that I get a lot of mileage out of asking <i>really dumb questions.</i>

So with your example, I would first accept their feelings - we've all been insecure about jobs from time to time - and then try to probe into them.

"Has your boss been talking about money being tight? Did one of your big customers just drop?"

"Has your boss been talking about your performance? Do you see others on your team being dismissive of your role?"

Questions like this let the counterparty know that a) they matter to you and b) you're hearing what they're saying. I think that's what you're saying you want to convey. I could be way off base here.

It's very cool that you are sensitive to how frustrating saying "that sucks" is for you. Many people are looking for just that, though. It might be informative to try out "that sucks" enough times to see what response it gets from the person you're interacting with. You might be surprised. (I was.)

This is hard for me too. If it's a big complicated thing, I try to recapitulate what they said which then leads to them feeling more listened to. That way, I stay busy and feel like I am engaged without trying to solution for them. If it's a simpler thing, this advice doesn't work and can feel condescending. Ymmv.

> Let's say someone is telling you they are fearful for their job, they think they will get fired soon, even though they have nothing specific to point to. As a listener, are you agreeing with this or are you neutral nodding your head?

As a listener, I'm my goal is to create an environment for them to talk about what bothers them in the most vibrant, and exploratory way possible. I realize that's not exactly the most helpful explanation so allow me to go into more detail. There's a few conversational techniques that I pull from heavily when I'm trying to actively listen: conversational orienteering, and open ended questions, non-Sorcratic questioning.

For lack of a better term[1], conversational orienteering is actively being aware of the topic of conversation and its local topology. Given a topic, one should be able to generate several other topics: one that is more abstract, one more specific, and several adjacent. Over time, a listener gets a sense of where a conversation wants to go and uses the conversational topology to orient towards that goal. It took me a bit of practice to be good at picking topics not too far and not too close to the one at hand - too far can make conversations feel disconnected and random, and too close can make someone feel like they are being misunderstood.

Secondly, I don't think open-ended questions needs much explanation, but when someone is venting or needs support, hows, whys, and whens give the speaker much more room to express themselves than 'Do you...'s.

Thirdly, it's important to be non-Socratic in questions and responses. Leading the speaker is much much worse than telling them advice and should be avoided at all cost.

If you've ever worked a problem out verbally, you should be able to recognize that these principles work to cultivate a good verbal environment for the speaker. I don't see them as not helping, so much as creating an environment where they have the best shot at verbally processing their issue. I think it's important to recognize that emotions can get in the way of people being able to take action and that speaking can help diffuse strong emotions so that someone is ready to take a concrete step toward fixing their problem. I've seen that happen a lot. Even just feeling understood can help people feel better about making a real decision.

It's probably also important to point out that there are some people for which verbal processing works really well and some who can complain endlessly. It's important to recognize the difference. For the later, value your time. Maybe give them 15mins of listening and then decide to change the subject, for them verbal processing is not going to help. They probably need to work on issues in a clinical or therapeutic environment you cannot provide.

Hope this gives some insight, and even if it doesn't, feel free to tell me too.

1. If this actually has a term, please let me know. I'm coining one just to be able to talk about it.