My favorite tip I read and now I use regularly is that when you ask someone with an ongoing challenge how they are doing, ask how they are doing *today*. I love how this little change communicates that you know something is ongoing and you know that coping levels change regularly, and you want to know what the current status is. To me, it also says I'll keep checking on you and keep wanting to know the answer.
Honestly this type of stuff drives me up a wall. If I have a problem, I don’t want my husband to say “wow, that sounds hard.” It is disingenuous and unhelpful. I notice this strategy works for my toddler better but by itself would also be insufficient. I find it’s best if I pair that WITH something concrete that she needs to be reminded of. Like “I know you are frustrated that your brother keeps breaking up your train tracks. Why don’t you give him a few trains to play with so he leaves you alone?” Lest I be called a helicopter parent, I would argue that we are teaching her skills so she can see resolutions with the goal that eventually we don’t have to remind her any longer.
As someone with a chronic condition myself, I understand the frustrations with always having someone try to problem solve with me. There are also people who are better or worse AT problem solving. One analogy I have used with my husband (since we both worked in tech) is the levels of tech support. When you call in for tech support, you are directed to various tiers - almost everyone gets directed to a first tier of support staff that is less trained. They ask the questions like “did you turn it off and on again? Have you done all your software updates?” Of course if you have done all these things, it is frustrating to be asked to rehash all of them. But only once you have stumped the first tier of support do you get bumped to the skilled technical who get to the root of more technical problems. Sometimes certain people will get permission to skip the first tier of support (like if they know you are a programmer etc). But when you are skilled, it can be quiet patronizing and frustrating to go through the unskilled support tier. Of course most of the people you speak with are unskilled at your issue and will not be able to help. Some people will be very skilled at a seemingly related problem that’s actually not related at all and can thus lead you astray.
The most helpful conversations that make me glad to be with my husband are NOT the empathetic ones but they are the genuine problem solving ones. The ones where we review what has been tried so far, explore possible next steps, and decide which one is most practical (and perhaps decide to sacrifice other things to dedicate resources to solving the problem). If I were to run through questions like this with someone else facing a chronic condition, I might say “what are the things you’ve tried already.” “…that sounds like a lot. You must be exhausted! What do you want to try next?” “What blocked you from trying that before or what is blocking you from trying that now?” Then you can offer help based on that - like giving babysitting support so they can make it to a new doctor.
Note the this doesn’t include offering a ton of suggestions (frustrating, bottom tier support) but is still a form of problem solving.
I'm totally with you on not liking the plain "that sounds really hard" response. I think the thing I dislike most about it is that it's lacking curiosity. I much prefer it with (or replaced by) an open ended question, one that will let me be vulnerable, or share what I need to share.
On a perhaps related theme, I'm deeply interested in the connection between chronic pain and social isolation. This not to give credence to the shibboleth that "it's all in your head." Rather, I take it that pain is an extraordinarily complicated human phenomenon that has causes, origins, and symptoms that are difficult to understand and treat. It seems that pain may be a symptom of failing to thrive. The existing medical and professional establishment seems at a loss here, which is one of Ross's points.
Back to your point: doesn't it seem like the last straw is not having a witness or to be disbelieved in our suffering? Each heart indeed knows its own bitterness. I've found having a good friend keeps me from drowning in it.
Then you might love Paul Ingraham's "Pain Science" and Todd Hargrove's "Better Movement":
Up-to-date neuroscience recognizes that processing sense-data relies on several computational layers, most of which are well below our conscious control. For example, optical (or auditory) illusions work because they exploit the quick-and-dirty pre-processing that happens to sense-data before it's anywhere near our conscious awareness. Pain is the brain's way of alerting itself to sensory signals it judges are of sufficient urgency. Pain is therefore an entirely brain-generated phenomenon — but it's not all in your head, at least not in the sense "all in your head" is usually used in order to psychologize, and probably trivialize, an individual's sensory alerts when they're socially inconvenient.
"Back to your point: doesn't it seem like the last straw is not having a witness or to be disbelieved in our suffering?"
Speaking as someone who was convinced, as an adolescent, to attribute signals of bodily discomfort later confirmed to have a genetic cause to my own aberrant psychology, yes, yes it is. To this day, I still unproductively doubt and blame myself, and probably always will. Cool, rational problem-solving mode can only do so much to undo all that social conditioning, in part because the social conditioning is ongoing:
Even medical professionals specifically scheduled to treat you rarely have time for your perceived failings, and may lead with, "Have you considered it might just be anxiety?" even when Big-Deal Diagnosis That's Definitely Not Anxiety is literally at the top of your chart. (Especially if you're a woman. Or one of "those people" for pretty much any value of "those people".) I don't personally blame the professionals much: often they literally just don't have the time.
>>The anesthesiologist explained that during surgery and recovery I would be given strong painkillers, but once I got home the pain would not require narcotics. To paraphrase him, he said: “Pain is a part of life. We cannot eliminate it nor do we want to. The pain will guide you. You will know when to rest more; you will know when you are healing. If I give you Vicodin, you will no longer feel the pain, yes, but you will no longer know what your body is telling you. You might overexert yourself because you are no longer feeling the pain signals. All you need is rest. And please be careful with ibuprofen. It’s not good for your kidneys. Only take it if you must. Your body will heal itself with rest.”
I felt totally normal immediately after a laproscopic surgery, and then overdid it immediately that night (I was running to catch the train home). Afterwards, it was easier to have pain be information, but I also had the luxury of paid sick leave and the freedom to rest.
Yeah, I think this perspective is a really good balance between being inherently distrustful of medication and being overly quick to medicate. It points out that one question to ask about medication is: on balance, is it better to mask these symptoms I'm feeling, or is it better to allow myself to feel them so that they guide my body?
Right. People who cannot feel enough pain are in deep doodoo. In large part, lepers lose extremities because they lose sensation, including pain, in extremities, so no longer adequately protect their extremities from accident.
At the same time, fatigue is also a part of life, and Germans could likewise take the attitude that they should not want to eliminate it. That doesn't stop Germans, though, from consuming about 5.2 kg of coffee beans per capita annually, about two-thirds more than Americans do annually: https://www.caffeineinformer.com/caffeine-what-the-world-drinks
That said, having many family members from Germany's spa belt, I do get a vague impression Germans are also more likely to blame excess coffee for poor health, for interfering with adequate rest.
However we slice it, the world still hosts a fair number of people who won't meet the social expectations placed upon them if they *don't* "overdo it" fairly regularly. Physically "normal" people might spend little enough time indisposed that receiving intensive social support instead of palliative drugs during those times is feasible. Others, though?
The way I see it, all drugs, even life-saving drugs, are really performance-enhancing drugs. I'm not saying that's how drugs should be used. I mean that's how, socially, they *are* used. If someone without social obligation forewent lifesaving drugs and kicked the bucket, how much would he be missed, compared to someone who made the same choice despite social obligations? The strong expectation that we not burden others *can* come along with a judgment that resorting to drugs in order to not burden others is a second-rate solution, but if the choice is between a second-rate solution and "no solution", take the second-rate solution! Perhaps this relates to the problem-solving mindset you were talking about.
Yeah, I think it really all comes down to trade-offs, and part of deciding whether to take a drug is to actually articulate what the trade-off is. If I'm deciding between taking medicine for a cold and working through it rather than taking no medication and resting, it matters what the work is and how urgent it is.
And that's not even getting into the fact that sometimes our body's distress signals are just plain wrong. People fall into depression without any changes in external factors, experience phantom pains, etc.
Great point--and as somewhat of a counter-example, many people don't get pain despite having degenerative disk disease.
"If you took a whole bunch of people who had no symptoms and did MRIs of their low back, you’d find all kinds of disc herniations and protrusions and all sorts of other things that really aren’t causing symptoms." https://undark.org/2019/08/26/problem-mris-lower-back-pain/
Yes! This drove me crazy when I was getting screened for possible miscarriage risk. People would say "a high percentage of people with miscarriages have [X]" and I'd be asking "How often do you screen people with no problems to check the base rate of [X]?"
It's also important to note that wonky bodily distress signals ≠ depression, even though it's possible depression = sickness behavior without an identified non-psychosocial cause (that is, sickness behavior that either results purely from some sort of psychosocial distress or whose non-psychosocial component isn't known and acknowledged, thus depriving the sickness behavior of the context which makes it socially legible).
"It’s not really possible to think pain away in general. Many wise, calm, confident optimists still have chronic pain.
"Pain is a motivator. It exists to get us to act. We hurt when our brains reckon we should do something differently, for safety … but safety is not always possible. The nature of the danger isn’t always clear. Or avoidable.
"And the brain worries too much… for rock solid evolutionary reasons. So it can’t be overruled by wishing, force of will, or a carefully cultivated good attitude. The brain powerfully but imperfectly controls how we experience potentially threatening stimuli, but I’m sorry to report that you do not control your brain."
Central sensitization is a big driver of chronic pain, and with the right support, people can increase their chances of training their brain out of tripping its system-wide alert too easily. But apparently, it's better done by sneaking under the brain's alarm system, with exertion that doesn't trip the pain alarm, if possible, than by mentally shouting to yourself over and over again once the alarm is tripped that your virtue depends on ignoring a blaring alarm because it's probably defective. (Much "Christian", "macho", and even "sensitive psychological" advice consists of the expectation that "worthy people" can rationally shout it down.)
People have the good sense to turn off smoke detectors when they give false alarms, but turning off potentially-false pain alarms is more morally dubious. For understandable reasons, granted.
Thank you for the explanation and for the website. My 18yo daughter has central sensitization. It's kind of a nightmare. What helps her the most so far is exercise, but the exercise has to be balanced just right to be enough to help (teach her body it's not in an emergency) but not too much to set off the alarm bells.
I think that offering solace, not problem solving was a hard lesson for me to learn in early motherhood--partly because I was traumatized by the experience of trying to comfort an incredibly colickly newborn who could not be consoled for the first several months of his life. I so desperately wanted to solve his discomfort and that experience stayed with me! But I think I've gotten better over time at waiting out the meltdowns rather than trying to "solve" them because especially with toddlers, once feelings take over they have a hard time problem solving anyway and just want to cry and be hugged or snuggle for awhile. As a friend, I actually like help with problem solving alongside comfort. I have a friend who is very thoughtful about sending care packages or Venmo-ing funds for DoorDash if I'm having a hard time. She also will ask, "would you like to vent or would it be helpful if I helped problem solve?" when I go to her in a crisis which is also so appreciated! So there's certainly a place for both strategies in parenting and friendship--so much depends on the person. Some of my kids really want problem solving help (my more analytical kiddo) and others only want comfort.
I used to say to a college boyfriend, "Sympathy or fascism?" ...which is not the *best* way of asking "listen to your feelings or problem solve?" but it still helped to ask!
I'm now in the stage of parenting teens, which means SO MUCH of my job involves simply being present and modeling my own life as they navigate theirs. Over the weekend I had coffee with a friend and she called it "house plant parenting" — the stage in which your presence is known and you're there to clear the air, but otherwise you don't reach in and interfere when they're about to bonk their head on the ground, metaphorically-speaking.
I think this is a lifelong endeavor, as a parent, and it's a hard lesson to learn as a mom who just wants to protect and comfort her clan. It's cliché but it's true: it's like helping those baby birds crack out of their shells. We think we're helping, but we're only unintentionally making them weak.
I think friendship is a different beast, though, and I do appreciate the friendships that Haley mentions: the "do you need to vent or would you like some input?" friends are the ones I go to the most. As a longstanding independent (to a fault), unsolicited advice feels nearly like an insult instead of a help.
I think it's often possible to offer hope or encouragement while knowing that I can't offer some sort of solution. I sometimes try to say things along the lines of "I know your loved one is struggling, and it's really hard for you, and it's not getting better anytime soon. But one thing I do see is how much love and care you have for them, and I think that's wonderful about you" or "I see that you're struggling with X, and I think it really boils down to the fact that you made choice Y. You stand by that choice even when it's really difficult, and I think that's great about you." It's definitely not applicable to all people or all situations, but I find it allows me to reach for hope in a genuine way when a problem isn't getting better anytime soon.
solving your kids' problems for them for them is disabling. no matter their ages. my dad was a trust fund baby. small trust fund. not quite enough to live on, but enough to rob him of ambition. he had a college degree because that was easy to get after WWII. but, he always had his mother to go to for money which was his main 'problem' and his constant solution. other problems, those that arise in childhood, that would be so easy for parents to resolve are best left to kids to work out with us supervising so there is no loss of life or limb. letting the kid figure out how to climb up on the chair, not pulling him up. explaining how to take turns and maybe setting a timer rather than strong arm intervention. even for teenagers, curfews are not a great idea. rather an early get up time the next day, routinely, is a better way to learn self regulation. on saturdays and sundays, when i was a teen, there was always a job to go to so i quickly learned not to stay out too late. things like that with logical, flowing consequences teach self regulating behavior so much better than constant parental intervention. now, as a parent and grandparent, i am proud to have my kids come to me with the occasional problem that requires deep confidence and discussion. they learned to trust me when they were toddlers and teens.
My favorite tip I read and now I use regularly is that when you ask someone with an ongoing challenge how they are doing, ask how they are doing *today*. I love how this little change communicates that you know something is ongoing and you know that coping levels change regularly, and you want to know what the current status is. To me, it also says I'll keep checking on you and keep wanting to know the answer.
Honestly this type of stuff drives me up a wall. If I have a problem, I don’t want my husband to say “wow, that sounds hard.” It is disingenuous and unhelpful. I notice this strategy works for my toddler better but by itself would also be insufficient. I find it’s best if I pair that WITH something concrete that she needs to be reminded of. Like “I know you are frustrated that your brother keeps breaking up your train tracks. Why don’t you give him a few trains to play with so he leaves you alone?” Lest I be called a helicopter parent, I would argue that we are teaching her skills so she can see resolutions with the goal that eventually we don’t have to remind her any longer.
As someone with a chronic condition myself, I understand the frustrations with always having someone try to problem solve with me. There are also people who are better or worse AT problem solving. One analogy I have used with my husband (since we both worked in tech) is the levels of tech support. When you call in for tech support, you are directed to various tiers - almost everyone gets directed to a first tier of support staff that is less trained. They ask the questions like “did you turn it off and on again? Have you done all your software updates?” Of course if you have done all these things, it is frustrating to be asked to rehash all of them. But only once you have stumped the first tier of support do you get bumped to the skilled technical who get to the root of more technical problems. Sometimes certain people will get permission to skip the first tier of support (like if they know you are a programmer etc). But when you are skilled, it can be quiet patronizing and frustrating to go through the unskilled support tier. Of course most of the people you speak with are unskilled at your issue and will not be able to help. Some people will be very skilled at a seemingly related problem that’s actually not related at all and can thus lead you astray.
The most helpful conversations that make me glad to be with my husband are NOT the empathetic ones but they are the genuine problem solving ones. The ones where we review what has been tried so far, explore possible next steps, and decide which one is most practical (and perhaps decide to sacrifice other things to dedicate resources to solving the problem). If I were to run through questions like this with someone else facing a chronic condition, I might say “what are the things you’ve tried already.” “…that sounds like a lot. You must be exhausted! What do you want to try next?” “What blocked you from trying that before or what is blocking you from trying that now?” Then you can offer help based on that - like giving babysitting support so they can make it to a new doctor.
Note the this doesn’t include offering a ton of suggestions (frustrating, bottom tier support) but is still a form of problem solving.
I'm totally with you on not liking the plain "that sounds really hard" response. I think the thing I dislike most about it is that it's lacking curiosity. I much prefer it with (or replaced by) an open ended question, one that will let me be vulnerable, or share what I need to share.
Great reflections, as always, Leah.
On a perhaps related theme, I'm deeply interested in the connection between chronic pain and social isolation. This not to give credence to the shibboleth that "it's all in your head." Rather, I take it that pain is an extraordinarily complicated human phenomenon that has causes, origins, and symptoms that are difficult to understand and treat. It seems that pain may be a symptom of failing to thrive. The existing medical and professional establishment seems at a loss here, which is one of Ross's points.
Back to your point: doesn't it seem like the last straw is not having a witness or to be disbelieved in our suffering? Each heart indeed knows its own bitterness. I've found having a good friend keeps me from drowning in it.
Then you might love Paul Ingraham's "Pain Science" and Todd Hargrove's "Better Movement":
Up-to-date neuroscience recognizes that processing sense-data relies on several computational layers, most of which are well below our conscious control. For example, optical (or auditory) illusions work because they exploit the quick-and-dirty pre-processing that happens to sense-data before it's anywhere near our conscious awareness. Pain is the brain's way of alerting itself to sensory signals it judges are of sufficient urgency. Pain is therefore an entirely brain-generated phenomenon — but it's not all in your head, at least not in the sense "all in your head" is usually used in order to psychologize, and probably trivialize, an individual's sensory alerts when they're socially inconvenient.
https://www.painscience.com/articles/pain-is-weird.php
https://www.painscience.com/articles/mind-over-pain.php
https://toddhargrove.substack.com/p/predictive-processing
"Back to your point: doesn't it seem like the last straw is not having a witness or to be disbelieved in our suffering?"
Speaking as someone who was convinced, as an adolescent, to attribute signals of bodily discomfort later confirmed to have a genetic cause to my own aberrant psychology, yes, yes it is. To this day, I still unproductively doubt and blame myself, and probably always will. Cool, rational problem-solving mode can only do so much to undo all that social conditioning, in part because the social conditioning is ongoing:
Even medical professionals specifically scheduled to treat you rarely have time for your perceived failings, and may lead with, "Have you considered it might just be anxiety?" even when Big-Deal Diagnosis That's Definitely Not Anxiety is literally at the top of your chart. (Especially if you're a woman. Or one of "those people" for pretty much any value of "those people".) I don't personally blame the professionals much: often they literally just don't have the time.
This op-ed on pain as teacher really stuck with me (with the caveat that it does stink to be undermedicated for pain, and that this can happen particularly for women): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/sunday/surgery-germany-vicodin.html
>>The anesthesiologist explained that during surgery and recovery I would be given strong painkillers, but once I got home the pain would not require narcotics. To paraphrase him, he said: “Pain is a part of life. We cannot eliminate it nor do we want to. The pain will guide you. You will know when to rest more; you will know when you are healing. If I give you Vicodin, you will no longer feel the pain, yes, but you will no longer know what your body is telling you. You might overexert yourself because you are no longer feeling the pain signals. All you need is rest. And please be careful with ibuprofen. It’s not good for your kidneys. Only take it if you must. Your body will heal itself with rest.”
I felt totally normal immediately after a laproscopic surgery, and then overdid it immediately that night (I was running to catch the train home). Afterwards, it was easier to have pain be information, but I also had the luxury of paid sick leave and the freedom to rest.
Yeah, I think this perspective is a really good balance between being inherently distrustful of medication and being overly quick to medicate. It points out that one question to ask about medication is: on balance, is it better to mask these symptoms I'm feeling, or is it better to allow myself to feel them so that they guide my body?
Right. People who cannot feel enough pain are in deep doodoo. In large part, lepers lose extremities because they lose sensation, including pain, in extremities, so no longer adequately protect their extremities from accident.
At the same time, fatigue is also a part of life, and Germans could likewise take the attitude that they should not want to eliminate it. That doesn't stop Germans, though, from consuming about 5.2 kg of coffee beans per capita annually, about two-thirds more than Americans do annually: https://www.caffeineinformer.com/caffeine-what-the-world-drinks
That said, having many family members from Germany's spa belt, I do get a vague impression Germans are also more likely to blame excess coffee for poor health, for interfering with adequate rest.
However we slice it, the world still hosts a fair number of people who won't meet the social expectations placed upon them if they *don't* "overdo it" fairly regularly. Physically "normal" people might spend little enough time indisposed that receiving intensive social support instead of palliative drugs during those times is feasible. Others, though?
The way I see it, all drugs, even life-saving drugs, are really performance-enhancing drugs. I'm not saying that's how drugs should be used. I mean that's how, socially, they *are* used. If someone without social obligation forewent lifesaving drugs and kicked the bucket, how much would he be missed, compared to someone who made the same choice despite social obligations? The strong expectation that we not burden others *can* come along with a judgment that resorting to drugs in order to not burden others is a second-rate solution, but if the choice is between a second-rate solution and "no solution", take the second-rate solution! Perhaps this relates to the problem-solving mindset you were talking about.
Yeah, I think it really all comes down to trade-offs, and part of deciding whether to take a drug is to actually articulate what the trade-off is. If I'm deciding between taking medicine for a cold and working through it rather than taking no medication and resting, it matters what the work is and how urgent it is.
And that's not even getting into the fact that sometimes our body's distress signals are just plain wrong. People fall into depression without any changes in external factors, experience phantom pains, etc.
Great point--and as somewhat of a counter-example, many people don't get pain despite having degenerative disk disease.
"If you took a whole bunch of people who had no symptoms and did MRIs of their low back, you’d find all kinds of disc herniations and protrusions and all sorts of other things that really aren’t causing symptoms." https://undark.org/2019/08/26/problem-mris-lower-back-pain/
Yes! This drove me crazy when I was getting screened for possible miscarriage risk. People would say "a high percentage of people with miscarriages have [X]" and I'd be asking "How often do you screen people with no problems to check the base rate of [X]?"
It's also important to note that wonky bodily distress signals ≠ depression, even though it's possible depression = sickness behavior without an identified non-psychosocial cause (that is, sickness behavior that either results purely from some sort of psychosocial distress or whose non-psychosocial component isn't known and acknowledged, thus depriving the sickness behavior of the context which makes it socially legible).
https://www.painscience.com/articles/mind-over-pain.php
"It’s not really possible to think pain away in general. Many wise, calm, confident optimists still have chronic pain.
"Pain is a motivator. It exists to get us to act. We hurt when our brains reckon we should do something differently, for safety … but safety is not always possible. The nature of the danger isn’t always clear. Or avoidable.
"And the brain worries too much… for rock solid evolutionary reasons. So it can’t be overruled by wishing, force of will, or a carefully cultivated good attitude. The brain powerfully but imperfectly controls how we experience potentially threatening stimuli, but I’m sorry to report that you do not control your brain."
Central sensitization is a big driver of chronic pain, and with the right support, people can increase their chances of training their brain out of tripping its system-wide alert too easily. But apparently, it's better done by sneaking under the brain's alarm system, with exertion that doesn't trip the pain alarm, if possible, than by mentally shouting to yourself over and over again once the alarm is tripped that your virtue depends on ignoring a blaring alarm because it's probably defective. (Much "Christian", "macho", and even "sensitive psychological" advice consists of the expectation that "worthy people" can rationally shout it down.)
People have the good sense to turn off smoke detectors when they give false alarms, but turning off potentially-false pain alarms is more morally dubious. For understandable reasons, granted.
Thank you for the explanation and for the website. My 18yo daughter has central sensitization. It's kind of a nightmare. What helps her the most so far is exercise, but the exercise has to be balanced just right to be enough to help (teach her body it's not in an emergency) but not too much to set off the alarm bells.
I think that offering solace, not problem solving was a hard lesson for me to learn in early motherhood--partly because I was traumatized by the experience of trying to comfort an incredibly colickly newborn who could not be consoled for the first several months of his life. I so desperately wanted to solve his discomfort and that experience stayed with me! But I think I've gotten better over time at waiting out the meltdowns rather than trying to "solve" them because especially with toddlers, once feelings take over they have a hard time problem solving anyway and just want to cry and be hugged or snuggle for awhile. As a friend, I actually like help with problem solving alongside comfort. I have a friend who is very thoughtful about sending care packages or Venmo-ing funds for DoorDash if I'm having a hard time. She also will ask, "would you like to vent or would it be helpful if I helped problem solve?" when I go to her in a crisis which is also so appreciated! So there's certainly a place for both strategies in parenting and friendship--so much depends on the person. Some of my kids really want problem solving help (my more analytical kiddo) and others only want comfort.
I used to say to a college boyfriend, "Sympathy or fascism?" ...which is not the *best* way of asking "listen to your feelings or problem solve?" but it still helped to ask!
I'm now in the stage of parenting teens, which means SO MUCH of my job involves simply being present and modeling my own life as they navigate theirs. Over the weekend I had coffee with a friend and she called it "house plant parenting" — the stage in which your presence is known and you're there to clear the air, but otherwise you don't reach in and interfere when they're about to bonk their head on the ground, metaphorically-speaking.
I think this is a lifelong endeavor, as a parent, and it's a hard lesson to learn as a mom who just wants to protect and comfort her clan. It's cliché but it's true: it's like helping those baby birds crack out of their shells. We think we're helping, but we're only unintentionally making them weak.
I think friendship is a different beast, though, and I do appreciate the friendships that Haley mentions: the "do you need to vent or would you like some input?" friends are the ones I go to the most. As a longstanding independent (to a fault), unsolicited advice feels nearly like an insult instead of a help.
"house plant parenting!" what a phrase!
I think it's often possible to offer hope or encouragement while knowing that I can't offer some sort of solution. I sometimes try to say things along the lines of "I know your loved one is struggling, and it's really hard for you, and it's not getting better anytime soon. But one thing I do see is how much love and care you have for them, and I think that's wonderful about you" or "I see that you're struggling with X, and I think it really boils down to the fact that you made choice Y. You stand by that choice even when it's really difficult, and I think that's great about you." It's definitely not applicable to all people or all situations, but I find it allows me to reach for hope in a genuine way when a problem isn't getting better anytime soon.
solving your kids' problems for them for them is disabling. no matter their ages. my dad was a trust fund baby. small trust fund. not quite enough to live on, but enough to rob him of ambition. he had a college degree because that was easy to get after WWII. but, he always had his mother to go to for money which was his main 'problem' and his constant solution. other problems, those that arise in childhood, that would be so easy for parents to resolve are best left to kids to work out with us supervising so there is no loss of life or limb. letting the kid figure out how to climb up on the chair, not pulling him up. explaining how to take turns and maybe setting a timer rather than strong arm intervention. even for teenagers, curfews are not a great idea. rather an early get up time the next day, routinely, is a better way to learn self regulation. on saturdays and sundays, when i was a teen, there was always a job to go to so i quickly learned not to stay out too late. things like that with logical, flowing consequences teach self regulating behavior so much better than constant parental intervention. now, as a parent and grandparent, i am proud to have my kids come to me with the occasional problem that requires deep confidence and discussion. they learned to trust me when they were toddlers and teens.