Most of us want to be helpful when someone we love is struggling. A partner is overwhelmed at work, a friend is spiraling about a diagnosis, a family member is stuck in a loop of worry — and our instinct is to say something that makes it better. But two new studies published in the journal Emotion suggest that the kind of help we offer matters more than most people realize, and that the wrong kind of reassurance can quietly backfire on both the relationship and the person we’re trying to comfort.
Two Ways of Trying to Help
Researchers distinguish between two broad strategies people use when trying to help a loved one manage stress:
– Commitment-focused support — helping someone stay engaged with a new, more workable perspective or goal (“You can handle this,” “Here’s how we tackle this together”)
– Decommitment-focused support — trying to talk someone out of the old, distressing perspective by minimizing it (“It’s not as bad as it seems,” “Don’t worry about it”)
Both are offered with good intentions. Both are common. But they don’t land the same way.
In an online study of 261 participants coping with pandemic-related stress, people whose partners encouraged them to broaden their perspective toward possible positive outcomes felt more supported and reported better relationship quality — and their partners, in turn, felt more effective and more connected. But when partners instead tried to talk them out of their concern by framing the situation as “not that serious,” the opposite happened: the person receiving that support felt judged, not comforted, and both partners reported worse outcomes for the relationship. A companion study with 86 friend groups found the same pattern held for friendships, not just romantic partnerships.
The takeaway isn’t “always look on the bright side.” It’s more specific than that: help someone move toward a workable next step rather than talking them out of a feeling they’re still having. Minimizing someone’s stress — even gently, even lovingly — tends to read as dismissal rather than support.
What Else Recent Research Tells Us
This fits into a fast-growing area of research on what psychologists call interpersonal emotion regulation— how people manage not just their own emotions, but each other’s, inside close relationships. A 2025 integrative review in Personal Relationships by Nozaki and Gross traces how this field has shifted from a purely individual model of coping toward understanding emotion regulation as something that happens between people, often several times a day, largely below conscious awareness (Nozaki & Gross, 2025).
A related 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychology looked specifically at how couples perceive each other’s success at emotional support, and found that a partner’s perceived effectiveness at helping — not just the objective content of what they said or did — was a meaningful predictor of relationship quality, emotional closeness, and intimacy over time (Frontiers in Psychology, 2025). In other words, feeling helped matters as much as being technically correct.
There’s also an important caution embedded in this literature around co-rumination — the well-intentioned habit of dwelling extensively on a problem together. Ongoing laboratory research on couples’ emotional sharing distinguishes natural, supportive processing of a stressor from prolonged, repetitive focus on the problem itself; the latter can deepen companionship in the short term while reinforcing distress over time (PMC, 2025).
Put together, the research points toward a fairly consistent picture: effective support tends to validate the feeling first, then help the person move toward agency and a next step — rather than minimizing the feeling, or looping endlessly around it.
Practical Takeaways for Supporting Someone You Love
– Name the feeling before you try to fix it. “This sounds genuinely stressful” lands very differently than “it’s not that bad.”
– Help them commit to a next step, not disengage from the problem. “What’s one thing we could do about this” tends to help more than “try not to think about it.”
– Watch for co-rumination. If a conversation about the stressor keeps circling without moving anywhere, it may be reinforcing distress rather than relieving it.
– Check in on how your support is landing, not just what you intended by it. Perceived support, not just offered support, is what predicts better outcomes.
– This applies to friendships too, not only romantic partnerships — the friend-group study found nearly identical patterns.
When Support at Home Isn’t Enough
Sometimes stress in a relationship — whether it’s a couple absorbing each other’s anxiety, a parent trying to support a partner or a child, or a friendship strained by one person’s ongoing crisis — benefits from more structured help than either person can offer alone. If you’re finding that your usual ways of supporting someone you love aren’t working, or that stress is starting to wear on the relationship itself, it may be worth talking with a therapist together or individually.
At Lindquist Psychological we work with individuals in Pittsburgh and throughout PSYPACT states navigating exactly these dynamics — through relationship-focused therapy, anxiety therapy, and therapy for men who often carry stress silently rather than asking for support. We also offer secure online therapy for clients across PA, NY, and NC. You can read more reflections on emotional regulation and relationships on our blog, including a recent piece on self-awareness in healthy relationships. If you’d like to talk, you can reach out here.
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References
American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Manage stress: Strengthen your support network. https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/manage-social-support
Nozaki, Y., & Gross, J. J. (2025). Bridging supportive communication and interpersonal emotion regulation: An integrative review. Personal Relationships. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075251335816
Strategy matters when helping a loved one manage stress. (2026). Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001648
Additional studies referenced without full citation data available at time of writing (Frontiers in Psychology, 2025, on perceived emotion regulation success in couples; ongoing laboratory research on dyadic coping and co-rumination, 2025) can be located via the linked sources above for further reading.
