Guide for middle schoolers and high schoolers

Teddy Bear Talk Support (TBTS) is about helping people process things out loud. Sometimes it can help a lot if someone just listens while you talk. The goal of TBTS is to make it so that all it takes to harness this power of listening is to ask someone to be a “teddy bear.” Agreeing to be a teddy bear means that the listener will do very little talking. The only talking that the teddy bear does happens only when the talker asks for it. For example, the talker might want the teddy bear to

• Paraphrase parts of what the talker said
• Offer some open, honest questions
• Make guesses at what's at the bottom of what the talker is speaking about, for example, make guesses at what feelings and needs are underlying what the talker is saying
• Serve as a scribe who writes down parts when asked

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Why teddy bears? How come the listeners are called teddy bears?

TBTS was inspired by a story about a teddy bear:

At a university computer center in the 1990s, there was a technical support help desk that had a teddy bear to greet you when you came for help. The rule was that before you could talk to an actual person, you had to first explain the problem you were having with your computer to the teddy bear. If talking to the teddy bear solved your problem, then you'd be on your way and you wouldn't have taken up any of the real people's time. Many problems fell in this category, and so the people who worked at this tech support help desk were able to save a lot of time this way.

Having another mind to think through things with is very valuable. There are plenty of cases where all that the other mind needs to provide is a forum for having you say things out loud to someone. You automatically bring yourself to the situation in a different way if there's someone else holding the space with you, even if they're not saying anything. As a result, you can hear yourself differently. What you have to say can unfold in a very different way.

After learning of the teddy bear story, I started thinking about how humans could serve as teddy bears. These "human teddy bears" would be operating in what I called "teddy bear mode," where they were only listening, or where they could also do a few other limited things, like ask open, honest questions, or make guesses about what seemed important.