how connection developsA friend may call after something has gone wrong. They may also call because an idea is beginning to take shape. Perhaps they are considering a course, wondering about a move, or returning to something they once enjoyed. In each conversation, another person's response can matter. The kind of support that fits, however, may be quite different.
In their 2015 paper on thriving through relationships, psychologists Brooke Feeney and Nancy Collins bring both situations into an account of social support. Their model gives relationships a role in helping people withstand adversity, recover, develop their abilities, and participate in opportunities that make life meaningful.
This is a theoretical synthesis of research. It organizes evidence and proposes pathways for further investigation. Its contribution is a detailed account of what support can help make possible, including at times when no crisis needs resolving.
What thriving includes
Feeney and Collins use thriving to describe well-being across several connected domains. These include happiness and satisfaction, purpose and growth, psychological capacities such as self-acceptance and mastery, meaningful social relationships, and physical health.
Those domains need not move together. Someone recovering from a loss may experience moments of closeness while remaining deeply sad. A person learning something important may feel challenged and uncertain while developing a stronger sense of purpose. The model leaves room for these uneven experiences rather than requiring a constantly positive state.
The authors also place thriving within a person's circumstances. Financial resources, illness, discrimination, and the opportunities available in a community shape what is possible. A caring relationship can contribute within those conditions. It cannot be assumed to remove them.
This broad definition changes the question asked of social support. Researchers can examine whether a response helps someone feel safer now, and whether it supports their capacity to engage with life over time. Immediate relief and longer-term development each deserve attention. The authors reserve thriving through adversity for growth beyond a previous baseline. That is the direction their model seeks to explain, while comfort and recovery remain valuable in their own right.
A source of strength during adversity
The first support function is what the authors call a source of strength. It begins with the familiar experience of having somewhere to turn when life becomes difficult. A trusted person may offer comfort, practical assistance, protection, or a place where distress can be expressed without further humiliation.
Feeney and Collins extend this function beyond refuge. They describe support that helps a person draw on existing strengths, develop capacities needed for the situation, and gradually rebuild after disruption. Another person might help make an overwhelming task manageable, recognize an ability the recipient has temporarily lost sight of, or remain involved as circumstances change.
Perspective can be part of this process. Someone who knows us may help us see possibilities that are difficult to notice while distressed. In the model, this remains responsive to the person's situation and needs. Requiring someone to discover a lesson in suffering would change the function of the interaction. The immediate need may be acknowledgment, rest, protection, or help with a concrete problem.
Growth is therefore a possible direction within the model, not an obligation placed on someone experiencing hardship. Support can be valuable before a person knows what comes next. The authors describe a possible shift from attending to safety and security toward pursuing gains once those needs are met. That sequence gives timing a place in the account. The response that helps someone through the first days of a disruption may differ from the response that helps them begin rebuilding.
A relational catalyst for possibility
The second function is a relational catalyst. It concerns the ways other people can help us engage with opportunities for exploration and development in ordinary life. These include play, learning, hobbies and creative interests as well as more formal goals. The possibility need not begin with something wrong or culminate in a public achievement.
The authors describe several stages. A relationship can nurture curiosity and interest. Another person can help us recognize a possibility, consider its significance, and prepare to pursue it. During the attempt, support may involve encouragement, availability, and respect for our initiative. Afterward, it can include sharing pleasure in progress or helping us adjust when an approach does not work.
Consider someone mentioning a subject they would like to study. Interest from a friend may give that emerging ambition room to develop. Practical discussion might help them find a workable course. Later, encouragement can accompany the effort without requiring the friend to choose the subject, pace, or destination.
In this illustration of the model, support changes as the idea develops. Once the person begins the course, the friend's contribution may be quiet availability rather than more advice. Feeney and Collins include knowing when to refrain from interfering as part of providing a secure base. Someone can be involved enough to understand what matters while leaving the other person free to do the work.
Sharing good news brings another part of support into view. The authors draw on studies of what happens when people tell close others about positive events. An interested, constructive response was associated with greater enjoyment and benefits for the relationship. The term they use is capitalization, the additional value that can come from sharing something good. A person's pleasure in making progress can become an experience enjoyed together, extending support beyond the moments when assistance is needed.
The person's own interests remain central. A partner's preferred version of success may be very different from the life the recipient wants to build. Feeney and Collins describe support that helps people move toward their own valued possibilities. They also include adjustments, balance with other parts of life, and sometimes reconsideration of a goal that is unlikely to be fruitful. A caring response can help someone change direction while remaining interested in what they hope to make possible.
Why the fit of support matters
The two functions cannot be identified simply by counting advice, reassurance, or practical help. The same action can serve different purposes depending on the circumstances.
A lift to an appointment might help someone cope with illness. A lift to an evening class might make exploration possible. Advice can clarify a difficult decision, yet arrive too early when a person is still trying to explain what happened. Encouragement can communicate confidence, yet feel like pressure when it carries an expectation the recipient does not share.
The authors distinguish responsiveness to need from sensitive delivery. Responsiveness concerns whether the type and amount of support fit. Sensitivity concerns whether it is offered in a way that conveys understanding, care, and respect for the recipient's autonomy.
These distinctions help explain why the amount of support received is an incomplete measure of its value. Help offered with criticism, control, or an implied debt can introduce another burden. Good intentions alone do not tell us how an interaction was experienced.
They also help explain a puzzle the authors identify in the research. Confidence that help will be available has been more consistently linked with well-being than reports of how much help people actually received. The authors suggest that measures of received support often miss its quality, its source and its role outside stressful times. Knowing that a friend would welcome a call is a different experience from counting how many favors that friend performed. A person may use little practical help while remaining confident that the relationship can hold a difficulty or a new ambition.
The model gives attention to the recipient's interpretation while also allowing that some effective help may be quiet or only partly noticed. A person might benefit from practical assistance without naming it as a major supportive event. The effects of support and the visible performance of helpfulness are separate things to examine.
How an interaction might contribute over time
Feeney and Collins propose several routes from supportive encounters to longer-term thriving. A response may change immediate emotions, how a person views themselves, their appraisal of a situation, or their willingness to act. It may help them make progress, strengthen trust in the relationship, influence physiological responses, or support patterns of daily living.
These routes can interact. Feeling understood might make a challenge seem more manageable. Making progress could strengthen confidence. A supportive response on one occasion might also inform whether someone expects help to be available the next time. In the model, that expectation then becomes part of the next encounter. It may influence whether a person asks for assistance, how they interpret the response and whether they feel able to pursue an opportunity. The relationship carries a history into each new situation.
The full chain remains a proposal to investigate. Evidence that a particular response improves an immediate experience does not, by itself, establish that repeated responses produce every long-term outcome in the model. The paper's value is partly in specifying these intermediate steps so researchers can test them.
The conditions that allow care to work
Providing responsive support takes skills, resources, and motivation. A person needs some understanding of the recipient, enough capacity to respond, and a reason to direct that capacity toward their welfare. Someone can care deeply and still be short of time, money, emotional energy, or knowledge of what would help. The authors distinguish motivation to support from the resources and skills needed to do it. That distinction makes the provider's circumstances part of understanding an interaction, alongside the recipient's needs.
Recipients also participate in the interaction. Expressing a need, indicating what is useful, and responding to another person's efforts can shape what happens next. These are possibilities within a relationship, not a basis for assigning responsibility to someone whose needs have gone unmet. The authors acknowledge that this side of the process needs more research.
Their model also includes the potential value of giving care. Being able to contribute can carry meaning, while repeated responsiveness can strengthen the relationship itself. Mutuality here develops across a relationship. It need not mean that assistance is repaid immediately or in an identical form.
Nor must every function belong to one person. Friends, family members, mentors, and other close relationships may provide different kinds of support. Someone may be especially good company during recovery, while another welcomes the early, uncertain stages of a new idea. A social world can hold both the place where we regain our footing and the people who are interested in where we might go.
Sources
Feeney, B. C., & Collins, N. L. (2015). A new look at social support: A theoretical perspective on thriving through relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 19(2), 113–147. Read the author manuscript.