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How do you help out someone who has been struggling badly for a long time and is increasingly losing hope?
It's a tricky question. It's not like there is a silver bullet, one-size-fits-all solution. That being said, some approaches are definitely ill-advised and can have harmful consequences, whereas others lessen risks. This post will present some common pitfalls to avoid and a few rules of thumb to improve your odds of successful support.
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Similarly, a concrete story is worth at least a handful of disembodied theoretical exposés. So I'll be using a couple of fictional scenarios to illustrate what I'm talking about. We'll need characters to populate our stories with, so let's introduce a few.
To keep things intuitive, Desmond (or Des for short) will serve as the representative for the doomer who's started drowning in despair, and Adva will be his confidant, who's trying to be helpful and pull him out of his pit. Of course this naming and gendering is arbitrary and only applied for the sake of convenience. Both Desmonds and Advas come in any gender, and the exact same person can alternate between these two modes.
Before we dive into our list of pitfalls, it will be helpful to flesh out how despair tends to operate in these scenarios. Consequently, we're missing one final character, as elusive as he is important. That would be Murkle, who will stand in as a personalizationLately, I'm enjoying using allegories and characters in my posts. This one in particular was partially inspired by Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch". for all the inner dark thoughts, doubts, and disillusions covertly swirling inside Des' mind. As we will see, although it's not obvious from the outset, Murkle plays an important part in these interactions.
Murkle, the avatar of despair #
Why "Murkle"?
I initially tried to find a pre-existing entity to fill the role but there weren't that many good options. Nurgle, the god from Warhammer 40k's lore, seemed like the best fit since he is a divinity of decay and despairand plagues, but that's less relevant for our needs who sways his followers by offering them peace and comfort within hopelessness. I also considered just using a capitalized version of a related concept like "Despair" or "Gloom". But these options risked injecting too much potential ambiguity (and copyright infringement 🤫), so I just went with a custom mashup on the basis of the word "murk".
With these introductions out of the way, it's time to take a look at Murkle's playbook and his unexpected allure. Why do some people eventually surrender to him?
We won't really dissect what Murkle is made of and where he comes from in this post. We'll only be focused on how he tends to act and interfere in these interactions. Thinking of him as the holistic cloud of Des' negative thoughts will be sufficient for our ends.
With that said, the first thing to note about Murkle is that he only has power when his host buys into his spiels. This means that he's had no other choice but to hone his skills of persuasion for survival. In order to make claims that sound plausible to Des, he feeds upon his lived experience and how it shaped his interpretation of reality, whether it's accurate or not.
Usually Murkle speaks a decent amount of truth. His biggest deception is pretending to present an encompassing and inescapable perspective when in actuality it's often incomplete and warped. There's a difference, slight perhaps but nevertheless capital, between falsehood and partiality. Murkle works in distortions, not complete fabrications.
That's why trying to argue with him is a dangerous game. It only takes one refutation of what the host knows to be true for Murkle to be able to dismiss your credibility as a whole.
It's important to note that neither cynicism nor optimism is true or false. They're merely choices in framing that both come with their upsides and downsides. It's easy to cherry-pick evidence to back up whichever one you're trying to endorse. Regardless, you'll be hard-pressed to debate someone out of the stance they've chosen. Logical and factual refutations will do little to shift an emotionally loaded lived experience.
The second main thing to understand about Murkle is why people even listen to him in the first place. What are the benefits of allowing him to shower you with a constant stream of pessimism?
Although smothering what little hope you have left is pretty depressing, it's also a way out from experiencing disappointments. If you're expecting the worst, it's harder to feel let down. Furthermore, it's a release from responsibility and the guilt and shame that people often attach to it.
After all, if your actions have no influence, your efforts are doomed to fail, and the outcomes are ineluctable, then the blame rests upon external factors and providence. Learned helplessness enables a hollow modicum of comfort in inaction and complacency.
Many thralls of Murkle will protest and claim that they're not misguided doomers. They've merely come to terms with the bleak truth of the world. They're not the ones coping; you are. However, it's usually quite easy to poke holes in this narrative.
There's a simple litmus test. Acting miserable and vitriolic is proof that you haven't released your attachments. That is not the disposition of someone who has made peace with their situation. It's just sour grapes. Giving up and letting go are not the same thing.
Now that we have a decent handle on Murkle as a concept, it's time to address how to deal with him. We'll start by covering ill-advised approaches before moving on to best practices.
The main pitfalls of attempted Murkle exorcism #
Let's set the scene. Des is feeling down. He's letting some of his Murkle seep through the cracks. For some reason, Adva feels compelled to do something about it, whether she cares about him personally, or it's her actual job, or she feels like it's the social expectation, or she's uncomfortable with such raw, bleak misery, or whatever else.
There's an initial impulse most Advas feel in this situation. Fix the problem, make it disappear, or distract from it. Bring back a cheerful, or at least peaceful, atmosphere. No matter what, don't actually engage with Murkle. Do whatever it takes to muzzle the ill-mannered beast: circumvent, bulldoze, or flee.
This urge is what leads her straight into the following pitfalls.
1. There isn't a problem #
Marshall Rosenberg offers a striking example of what the first one can look like in one of his talks.
I was working with 23 psychiatrists in one community, and I was giving them an exercise on empathic connection. I asked them to write down what they would say to empathically connect with people who expressed certain things. So one of the things that I said in the role of the patient that came to see them was, "I'm feeling so depressed. I don't know that I want to keep alive. I think the world would be better off without me." And I asked each of them to write down what would be an empathic reaction to this person's statement. [...] One woman got very upset because two people in the group groaned when I read off the statement she made. She turned around and said, "Why would it bother you so much if someone said that?" Her statement to the other person was, "That's ridiculous! You have everything to offer."
– Marshall Rosenberg. (Slightly edited for ease of reading: source)
"That's ridiculous!" A famous staple of empathy and validation. How do you think that lands with Des? What about Murkle? Did that shut him up for good? Quite the contrary. He's a crafty one. He can use that, no problem. It's music to his ears, in fact.
"Well, there we go!" he whispers to Des with a twisted smirk, "Ridiculous indeed. She doesn't get it. She doesn't get you. What did you expect? No one does! Hope that'll finally teach you to shut up. Keep these thoughts to yourself. Nobody wants to hear them, and nobody can help anyway. The problem is foundational. Did you hear her? 'You have everything to offer', and yet you're still a complete failure. You have no excuses. You're truly hopeless. I told you therapy was pointless. You could have saved yourself some time, money, and heartache. I warned you. That's what you get when you don't listen to Papa Murkle."
Don't get too comfortable taking shots at Murkle. Most of the time you only end up injuring his host.
In this example, Adva might complacently feel good about what she perceives as her valiant and righteous charge against Murkle's disparagements, but I'd be willing to bet Des has only sunk down to deeper levels of despair. He mustered what he could of his courage to spill his guts as a last-ditch call for help, and all it got him was a slap in the face.
Most likely, he will dejectedly bottle it up for the rest of the session to avoid additional belittling rebukes. Then he'll scramble back to the paltry shelter of isolation, swearing off therapy for good, the last remaining embers of his hope in external support further smothered.
This little story illustrates pitfall #1: denying the problem even exists. "No, you're wrong. Everything's fine. Nothing to see here." It's a form of rejection and invalidation.
To demonstrate the remaining pitfalls, we'll slightly change our scenario. Rather than generalized depression, Des will be struggling with dating from now on.
2. You are not relevant to the problem #
In this case, Adva may try to reassure him by providing encouragements and pushing the concerns away. It'll often be something like, "I can't see any reason why you couldn't find a significant other. Any [appropriately gendered person] would be lucky to be with you." Unfortunately, neither of these statements is true.
- Sure, chance and external factors play a role. But repeated failure suggests Des does carry his share of personal responsibility for his outcomes. Murkle is well aware of this fact. He can probably think of several reasons and will easily rebuff the tepid praise.
- Even the "best" romantic suitor in the world will not be a good match for every single potential partner.
This is pitfall #2: dismissing the specific individual and situation at play. This will usually make Des feel unseen and misunderstood. Furthermore, denying personalized causes will only reinforce Murkle's favorite explanation: Des is fundamentally a screw-up in essence, and nothing can change that. There's no external reason that can be worked on; the problem is him and only him. Either that or the world is irremediably rigged. There's no changing that either, and the conclusion is pretty much the same.
There's another way Adva can stumble into this pitfall, and that's by over-focusing on general trends instead of Des' specific case. "Did you know that half of American men had zero dates in 2025? According to a study, around two-thirds of young adults aren't actively dating and lack confidence in their dating skills. Did you know..."
I'm not saying providing a broader social perspective should be proscribed, but there's a fine line between "you're not alone" and a protracted Wikipedia lore dump. People want to be empathized with as individuals, not as demographic stand-ins or statistical patterns.
3. The problem isn't that serious #
If Adva decides to switch from reassurance to offering advice, one of her favorite quips in this context is to "just be yourself". In case you couldn't guess already, I'm not impressed. Let me reassure you, I'm not about to argue that you should pretend to be someone you aren't to improve your odds of success.
But "just"? JUST!? You're talking about a long and demanding process of introspection to know who the hell "yourself" is in the first place and then the courage required to actually be that. Ain't nothing "just" about the process. That's demented.
I'm happy to endorse authenticity. It's the approach promoted by Mark Manson in Models, his popular book on dating, but he actually shares in-depth advice about all the intricacies involved, and he doesn't sugarcoat in any way the fact that it's a scary and grueling process, especially at first. Worth it, but hard.
So you can keep your "just"s. It's just another callous invalidation of Des' lived experience, a spit in the face of his struggles, that offers no challenge to Murkle, who can easily dismiss it as the nonsense it is.
Here lies pitfall #3: denying the hardships associated with the problem and the legitimate concerns and fears surrounding it. I've already touched upon it in Stop saying 'get out of your comfort zone'.
This is like a husband chiming in, "You know, hon, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" to his wife who's in the middle of giving birth as he distractedly scrolls his phone from the comfort of a cushy chair to the side. Even if the message contains a grain of truth, there's a time and a context, and this definitely ain't it.
4. The problem isn't even a problem #
The conversation keeps going. Des remains unresponsive. The swift happy-forever-after resolution lingers conspicuously out of sight. Adva's various attempts at stemming a bleeding severed artery with flimsy smiley face band-aids don't seem to be going anywhere, and she's starting to run out of inspiration.
At this point, she may decide to shift to a new strategy and go for a full-on turnaround instead. "You know, romance is overrated. Actually, being single is pretty cool." To hammer in her case, she might follow it up by prattling off a couple of supporting arguments.
By then she's really scraping the bottom of the barrel. That's not to say that her claims are necessarily inaccurate. They're just increasingly out of touch. "If you have no bread— You know what, fuck cake. Studies say that fasting is pretty good for your health, so cheer up, bud."
With this, we've uncovered our final pitfall: arguing the problem isn't even a problem to start with by channeling the power of reframing and invalidation.
Alright, let's now synthesize what we've learned about what doesn't work through these pitfalls.
Catch your Murkle before you sell its skin #
Although it's not possible to give an ultimate playbook to follow in order to be a good Adva in every single situation, there are several rules of thumb you can follow to avoid being a bad one.
In all of these examples, Adva isn't taking Des' pain and fears seriously. She isn't even really acknowledging them. She's trying to shortcut through Murkle.
Empathizing with someone starts with acknowledgment and validation, not dismissal, regardless of whether their emotions and thoughts are positive or negative, fruitful or misguided. So no matter what you do, do not disregard or steamroll that person's concerns.
Although you're free to disagree with their perspective and conclusions, start by acknowledging that what they're going through is hard. That it's scary. That it sucks. That it's fucked up. That it's unfair. Whatever applies, given the context.
Vacuous reassurance won't do the trick. When Adva tries to bypass Murkle, she only demonstrates that she is not really listening. Perhaps she's acting from desperation, afraid that staring too long into the abyss might wake her own inner Murkle.
Whatever the case may be, if the main motivation behind Adva's support is to alleviate her own discomfort one way or another, then it's merely an act of self-soothing masquerading as compassion. Any such attempt is bound to fail. As previously stated, bullshit cannot defeat Murkle.
How is Des supposed to trust someone who is averting their gaze from the problem they're supposedly trying to help with? Would you hire a surgeon who's squeamish around blood, a barber with hair allergies, or a claustrophobic spelunker?
Then what is a dedicated Adva to do in this situation?
Real empathy is better than fake solutions #
Denying and dismissing Murkle won't work. Integrating and transcending his concerns are the only ways to pierce through the despair. "No, it's not true" won't do the trick. Only "Yes! The pain is real, and yet there's still hope" stands a chance. Kiss the frog. Hug Murkle. As they would say in IFS, be the hope merchant.
First things first, give Des the space to vent the pent-up Murkle out of his system. Start by being present. Withstand the negativity. Resist the urge to prematurely cheer him up or fix the issue.
Witness the pain. Witness the fear. Witness the despair. Witness the long trail of fruitless efforts. Witness the self-loathing. Witness the grief. Hold space for it. Don't avert your gaze.
In truth, you don't even need to have a solution. Simply being on the receiving end of genuine empathy can be healing on its own. The same can't be said of hackneyed advice and reassurance. Even without a cure in sight, it's already a bit easier to bear the abyss of gloom in the presence of sympathetic companionship.
Even if you'd like to suggest some solutions, you can't formulate the right prognosis without an accurate diagnosis first. Furthermore, you need to earn enough trust for the advice to even land. So don't rush for a quick fix. Be sure to understand the issue properly. Measure twice, cut once.
Validate the legitimacy of Des' concerns — how they may be real obstacles that are worth considering — before tackling potential solutions. If you can demonstrate you understand the problem and its gravity (in Des' eyes at least), that will go a long way in reassuring him that you may be able to help him out.
Make sure Des feels seen and understood as an individual with his own specific situation before jumping to generalization and trends. Wait to get his consent before moving on to reframing his concerns and offering advice.
Commiseration comes before reassurance. Sometimes commiseration in itself is the main component of reassurance. It’s saying through your actions, “You’re not crazy for feeling the way you do”.
You might be thinking, “Gee! This sure sounds like a lot of work”. Indeed it is. If you don’t think you have the prerequisite level of personal investment, energy, or skill, just admit it and bow out politely.
Provided you’re committed to supporting Des regardless, you’ll have to pay Murkle his due. If you won’t respect the darkness, you can’t help people to the light.
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