The unemployment rate is about 10 percent and that means many of us who still have gigs probably know someone who’s jobless. What have you done lately to help out that unemployed friend? Have you called? Have you written? Have you bought the poor sap a cup of coffee? Some of you have told me you just don’t know what to say when you meet a unemployed friend at the supermarket or a cocktail party. Some of you, whether you realize it or not, start to distance yourselves from these individuals that were once your favorite office mates, or even friends. Some of you say, “I never really was close to that laid off coworker so I don’t have to help, right?” Wrong. You need to help out and you need to realize your apprehension is normal. “The main challenge in this situation is that most of us project onto the laid-off person how we’d feel if we were laid off,” says Karen Romine, a psychotherapist in Santa Monica, Calif. “In most cases, this means we see them as a helpless victim who’s in real trouble.

Original Source of Don’t ignore jobless friends during their “darkest night”