I just came across this tonight, I was talking to a girl about a biography of Picasso that I was reading.

While I was reading, I came across a line that said "Picasso was too strong of a personality to follow, he was a leader but he could only lead when he had all of the other areas in his life working in conjunction with his work" I found the sentence spoke quite a lot to me, so I underlined it and filed it away in my brain.

Then later tonight, I was talking to a friend about the line that I read. I mentioned how I felt it spoke to me and answered a lot of the issues I've been having lately with my own life.

When I told her this, she added her own two cents in and said that she experiences it too and sometimes feels like she's not apart of society and so on.

When she told me that she was experiencing her own problems, I took that as a way to stop talking about my own and start to inquire about hers. Seeing if I could maybe learn something from her.

So I asked her, how she deals with the problem which got us down a huge rabbit hole of some of the things SHES going through.

What started off as a conversation about myself, turned into a long conversation where she opened up completely to me and I did very little talking. Even though I brought up my issues first.

After we parted, I thought about it for a while.

I think what I did above is a very powerful method of conversation because if you're telling someone that you feel a certain way or are experiencing something and the person you're talking to tells you that they have experienced the same thing then chances are that they ALSO want to talk about their problems. There's also a high possibility that they haven't shared these issues with someone else before and they're using your problems as a way to bring up their own in a safelight.

Here's an example.

Imagine you felt you were a loser but no one around you feels the same way. Are you going to talk about it?

Probably not.

But what if you feel like a loser and someone else tells you that they do too. Are you going to talk about it?

Probably, because you both feel safe.

A much more extreme example is sexual harassment, if a girl gets harassed and she thinks no other girls are, then she won't say anything but if another girl comes forward all of the sudden multiple girls do because now it's safe.