A friend of mine talked about this book and it sounded interesting so I decided to check it out! There Is No Good Card For This is a book about how we can respond (and why we should respond) when someone we know meets terrible circumstances.

The book is divided into three parts: why we should reach out, three principles for acting, and how to avoid some common pitfalls. Basically, we shouldn’t be letting our fear of being annoying or saying the wrong thing stop us from reaching out to people and as long as we’re acting from a place of good intentions (your kindness is your credential), learn to listen, our small gestures can make a huge difference.

I took a lot of notes throughout the book, but one thing I really liked was the section on foisters and fretters, which are two types of behaviours that will not help a friend in pain. Foisters impose their will on the person and all actions taken are the ones that foisters want to take. Fretters take someone’s pain and make it all about them. Both are bad, and the book goes through the actions that these two types of people make and how you can avoid them.

Incidentally, I took a class on resilience, compassion, and empathy and I thought it was interesting how everyone seems to define it differently. The book defines empathy as “compassion + imagination”, whereas in my class, compassion was defined as empathy combined with action. Regardless, I think that as long as you are putting yourself in someone’s shoes (as much as you can) and acting to help them, that’s a great thing to do.

Overall, I found this to be a practical book! Some of the principles for helping and reaching out seem obvious, but the authors have included lots of example conversations, where they can go wrong, and where they can go right, so it’s easy to take what the book says and apply it to real life.