What Rick Moranis Taught Me About Emotional Support
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
On New Year's Eve I was scrolling through social media when I saw a post from Mel Robbins. It was about this tradition she had done with her husband for 18 years. Every year, before embarking on a new one, they would sit down together and go through 6 questions. She had put together a free workbook with the content and so I decided to download it and take a look.
After skimming through I thought some of the questions would be fun to discuss and so I texted the PDF to my husband. My actual text went as follows:
"When we're hanging out tonight and have any lulls we should go through some of these questions."
I figured during cocktail hour at the New Years Eve Party we could casually chat about it. What I forgot is that I sent this PDF to my must-follow-all-the-rules husband who immediately took to heart the directions on page one which said to print them out. So instead of a casual conversation I came home to 2 copies of the entire 20-page document ready to go (love him for this). A few hours later we were at the hotel bar, pen and paper in hand, and going through the workbook. What's ironic is that one of the questions is about highs from the year and when we were sitting there, having great conversation, learning more about ourselves and each other, laughing and smiling, and reminiscing at all the things we did in 2025, I thought, this is a high point.
When we were trying to write out all our lows for the year, one of the questions at the bottom of the page asked what we needed most in those low moments. It was such an amazing question to discuss with someone you live with because when you live with someone you are going to be with them during nearly all of their low moments, and so being able to understand what they need is a game changer.
It led us both into a conversation about Rick Moranis and The Little Giants. The scene is the moment when the kids find out they didn't make the football team. He walks up to them, witnessing their sad defeated faces, and instead of trying to tell them to be proud of themselves or making the focus on whether or not they had fun, he empathized: Well, this sucks.
That's all he said. Three words. It was an incredibly emotionally healthy response, especially considering it was a feature film in the 90s.
The Little Giants came out over 30 years ago and yet I still remember that one scene because it's a powerful lesson in emotional support. While we are all a little different with what we need in our lowest moments, I think a universal truth is that we all need someone to sit with us in our pain; we need someone to acknowledge what we are feeling before they try to move on to anything else. It's why sitting shiva in the Jewish culture has endured for so many years. When someone passes you have seven days surrounded by people not trying to fix your grief but just being with you while you process.
As we start this New Year, I hope we all are able to practice the kind of empathy that doesn’t rush, doesn’t fix, doesn’t gloss over, but simply says, this sucks, but I’m here.
