Difference Between Support and Advice Giving
Life’s challenges can be overwhelming; everyone deserves a space to feel heard and supported. At Roamers Therapy, we provide trauma-informed, culturally sensitive, LGBTQIA+ affirming, and evidence-based environments to help you heal, grow, and navigate your mental well-being journey. As your psychotherapist, we are here to guide you every step of the way.
Supporting someone you care about means providing assistance during difficult times, and it can take various forms, such as active listening, empathy, validation, reassurance, kind gestures, and physical touch. Active listening requires giving your full attention and showing mindful body language, helping the person feel heard. Empathy allows you to see a situation from another’s perspective, fostering connection and understanding. Validation acknowledges and understands a person’s feelings, while reassurance can restore confidence through comforting gestures. However, support is distinct from advice-giving and problem-solving, which can overwhelm or dismiss the individual’s feelings if offered unsolicited. To effectively support someone, it’s important to acknowledge their struggles, communicate your willingness to help, and ask open-ended questions to understand their specific needs. Lets take a closer look at these concepts.
What Does it Mean to Support Someone?
Supporting someone you care about often means providing some kind of assistance during a time of need. There are different ways to emotionally support someone you care about:
- Active listening
- Empathizing
- Informational support
- Validation
- Reassurance
- Kind Gestures
- Physical Touch
Active listening & Empathy
- Active Listening:
- This is the practice of attentively listening to another person.
- Active listening requires your undivided attention, eye contact, and mindful body language. This is especially helpful when someone wants to feel heard.
- Empathizing:
- Empathizing is the ability to look past one’s own emotions/biases and put oneself in someone else’s shoes, seeing a situation through someone else’s lens.
- Empathy facilitates connection and helps people feel understood.
Validation & Reassurance
- Validation
- This is when one person signals to another person that their feelings and distress are recognized and understood.
- Like empathy, validating feelings can help someone feel understood, heard, and seen. Reassurance:
- Reassurance:
- Reassurance can take the form of different behaviors, such as information sharing, physical touch, or other gestures that soothe anxiety and restore confidence.
- Reassurance can be especially helpful for people who experience low confidence or self-doubt.
Kind Gestures & Physical Touch
- Kind Gestures:
- These gestures can be anything someone does in hopes of positively impacting someone.
- This can include acts of service or gift-giving. It can be especially helpful for people with a hard time (or a period of time).
- Physical Touch:
- This is a form of support that communicates love to someone.
- Physical touch can include hugs, kisses, caresses, and cuddling. This can be especially helpful for someone whose love language is physical touch.
Other Forms of Support
Other forms of help often conflated with emotional support include advice-giving and problem-solving.
- Advice giving is when one person shares with another person their opinions or feelings on what someone should do in a situation.
- Problem-solving is when one person provides another person with suggestions on how to “fix” an issue.
Both forms of help can be helpful under specific circumstances, typically when the person in distress explicitly asks for advice or problem-solving support.
Issues With Advice Giving & Problem Solving
Advice-giving or problem-solving are often unhelpful when someone does not ask for these.
When we give (unsolicited) advice or solutions, we negatively impact the person we want to support:
- Overwhelm the individual with suggestions
- Dismiss the feelings of the individual
- Communicate a lack of empathy, care, or understanding
- Make the situation about our feelings
How to Offer Support
It’s hard (if not impossible) to always know the best way to support someone in distress. However, there are things you can do to avoid assuming the support someone is seeking.
- 1. Acknowledge/Validate
- I’m sorry you’re going through a hard time.
- 2. Communicate desire for support
- I would love to help you. Is there a way I can support you? Please let me know if you need anything.
- 3. Ask questions and don’t assume
- What kind of support do you need?
- Do you want to talk about this more?
While our physical offices are located in South Loop and Lakeview neighborhoods in Chicago, Illinois for in-person sessions, we also welcome and serve clients for online therapy from anywhere in Illinois and Washington, D.C. Clients from the Chicagoland area may choose in-office or online therapy and usually commute from surrounding areas such as River North, West Loop, Gold Coast, Old Town, Lincoln Park, Lake View, Rogers Park, Logan Square, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Little Village, Bronzeville, South Shore, Hyde Park, Back of the Yards, Wicker Park, Bucktown and many more.
At Roamers Therapy, our psychotherapists are here to support you through anxiety, depression, trauma and relationship issues, race-ethnicity issues, LGBTQIA+ issues, ADHD, Autism, or any challenges you encounter. Our psychotherapists are trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, Acceptance, and Commitment Therapy, Person-Centered Therapy, and Gottman Therapy.
Whether you’re seeking guidance on a specific issue or need help navigating difficult emotions, we’re ready to assist you every step of the way.
Contact us today to learn more about our services and schedule a session with our mental health professionals to begin your healing journey. To get started with therapy, visit our booking page.
First, decide if you’ll be paying out-of-pocket or using insurance. If you’re a self-pay client, you can book directly through the “Book Now” page or fill out the “Self-Pay/Out-of-network Inquiry Form.” If you’re using insurance, fill out the “Insurance Verification Form” to receive details about your costs and availability. Please let us know your preferred therapist. If your preferred therapist isn’t available, you can join the waitlist by emailing us. Once your appointment is confirmed, you’ll receive intake documents to complete before your first session.
This page is also part of the Roamers Therapy Glossary; a collection of mental-health related definitions that are written by our therapists.
While our offices are currently located at the South Loop neighborhood of Downtown Chicago, Illinois, we also welcome and serve clients for online therapy from anywhere in Illinois and Washington, D.C. Clients from the Chicagoland area may choose in-office or online therapy and usually commute from surrounding areas such as River North, West Loop, Gold Coast, Old Town, Lincoln Park, Lake View, Rogers Park, Logan Square, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Little Village, Bronzeville, South Shore, Hyde Park, Back of the Yards, Wicker Park, Bucktown and many more. You can visit our contact page to access detailed information on our office location.