He says he has learned, especially with depression and anxiety, to shift from asking “What’s the matter with you?” to “What matters to you?” If you want to find a solution, you need to listen to what’s missing in the depressed or anxious person’s life—and help them to find

As soon as somebody starts talking about times when they felt excluded, betrayed, or wronged, stop and listen. When somebody is talking to you about pain in their life, even in those cases when you may think their pain is performative or exaggerated, it’s best not to try to yank the conversations back to your frame. Your first job is to stay within

What psychotherapy realizes is that, in our agony, what we desire more than anything, more than we usually even understand, is companionship: for someone else to know that we are suffering and to feel a measure of our pain more or less as we experience it. We yearn to feel that another person appreciates the scale of our despair and the magnitude o