Choices: How Do I Draw A Fine Line Between Focusing On My Studies And Helping My Sad Friend?

The most important step to drawing the line on how much you should help your friend, is to identify whether you are helping your friend, or enabling your friend. So what is ‘enabling’? It is when you are supporting a harmful behaviour of your friend’s, and always solving your friend’s problems instead of empowering your friend to become more able to solve his/her problems by himself/herself. Does this mean we should only observe on the sidelines and give encouragement at a distance, so that our friend doesn’t depend on us too much? Well, the amount of help you give your friend is more or less a continuum. As long as you don’t breach the line of enabling a bad behaviour of your friend’s, the amount of help you give should usually depend on the type of help your friend asks for. Every individual assigns a different value to the type of help given. To some, a word of encouragement may seem like a low-effort support. But to others, a word of encouragement and giving personal space to come up with their own solutions could be exactly what they need. Of course, sometimes enabling can occur out of fear, self-protection or simply a misguided act of care and love. It is okay to accidentally end up enabling our sad friend. What’s most important is that we do not continue to feed on it. I believe your good friend will also remember that you are simply trying your best, despite going in the wrong way sometimes. At the end of the day, what matters is that we still try our best to think from our sad friend’s perspective, and never stop trying to find the best way to help our sad friend, without compromising too much of our own well-being.