One of the worst things one can tell to a sick or unhappy person is: Be positive! Hold on! Head up! You can do it! – Come on, lighten up –

This irritating encouragement of a suffering and frightened soul makes the person feels even worse! Such a pseudo encouragement – by people who think they are doing a good thing, can actually depress a person so much that one can even fall into a worse state of hopelessness and sadness. On the other hand, not to be mistaken, those people are not wrong when utter meaningless words that have an opposite effect, since no one is wrong of something he/she does not know – and the ignorance mostly results in a serious sense of self-assurance – so we become convinced that we do the right thing. What’s wrong with these sentences?

Well, the thing is simple. When a person is heartbroken, broken by the very notion, depressed and desperate, the only way to reach him is an initial empathy, or an understanding of his/her condition. By using such quasi-stimulating sentences, the gap is actually increasing; the desperate person begins to feel even more desperate due to the inferiority imputed here. Because when someone tells you – be positive, lighten up, you can do it – he/she actually tells that you are weak and it is bad for you, confirming the bad situation anyway.

If you do not belong to those people who can comfort a person by primeval humor, whatever has happened on the scale of accidents – from a death to a love separation – then at least do not utter these pseudo-encouraging clichés that are not only needless, but can also be counterproductive. Another barrier is the fear – when a person if fearful of death, illness, bankruptcy, divorce – not only he/she can not comfort anyone, but the effect is frightening! Fear paralyzes the brain and the centers of humor and empathy. A person who feels fear can not comfort neither himself/herself nor anyone else. But our society is such that the form is above all. Not wanting to offend someone, people are so scared when it comes to comforting that they often need sedation.

Comforting is a knightly virtue – not for everyone; in order to comfort others, the person has to be, above all, hypersensitive and feels the trouble and pain of others. Then, he/she has to be brave, since the cowards only spread fear. Furthermore, he/she has to be intelligent to recognize which words are needed for the person concerned. And finally, he/she has to be full of faith and hope, because false emotions are offensive.

In addition to all of this, he/she has to be witty, since the laughter knows the best to eliminate the grief, the despair and the worry. Thus every person needs to think carefully whether he/she has the qualities to comfort someone at all, and not to make the things worse for the sake of the form.

Frankly, there was nothing more unbearable in moments of primeval pain and despair as those empty encouraging sentences, and it was confirmed to me by other people who were the victims of false comforters in one way or another. The fake comforters are the same as the fake benefactors. They are the ones who say – I am here if you need something – and pray to God not to tell them that you need something… so the comfort is an art of contacting the souls, not a social convention and hypocrisy. Indeed, a person with pronounced sense of black humor can produce well-being, that is, his/her grotesque comforting can be so funny that the laughter can upbeat. However, the proportion of those with a sense of black humor is limited, especially in situations when a person intends to kill himself/herself.

Therefore, everyone needs to make a small test – do I have the capacity to be a comforter or is it better not to act.