Frontiers Friday #57. Empathy (Part VI)
Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development
Frontiers Friday #57. On Empathy (Part VI)
Here's the final five recommendations on the topic of empathy.
In case you missed it, here's the previous 20 recommendations on Empathy, , , , and .
📝 From My Desk (Archive): Listening into Speech
How to listen to what a person "Will say, won't say, and can't say."
🔎 Research: The Role of Empathy in Promoting Change
This research study from Jeanne Watson and colleagues is a useful one. Client's view of therapist empathy--not therapist view--impacts their wellbeing and their view of themselves.
Here's a highlight from the study:The results support the view that clients’ perception and experience of therapists’ empathy contribute to changes in the ways that clients treat themselves and their experience, and that these changes facilitate improvements in clients’ self-reported functioning, including their dysfunctional attitudes, self-esteem, interpersonal difficulties, symptoms of distress and levels of depression at the end of therapy.
🔎 Research: Trust Your Gut or Think Carefully?
The subtitle of this study: "Examining Whether an Intuitive, Versus a Systematic, Mode of Thought Produces Greater Empathic Accuracy"
Most of us think that empathic accuracy arises from out gut instinct alone. However, in a series of studies, the researchers found that "people who tend to rely on intuitive thinking also tend to exhibit lower empathic accuracy."
This is one of those studies that made me rethink my prior beliefs about putting too much weight on solely my gut instinct. This study also reminded me of Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman's famous disagreement co-authored paper, Conditions for Intuitive Expertise A Failure to Disagree.
👓 Web Read: The Curious Perils of Seeing the Other Side
Perhaps this Scientific American Mind article was better suited for the previous newsletter on , but the theme of power within relationships is something to take note of.
Key grafs:a. "...Relatively dominant conflict groups (in his studies, Israelis and white Americans) feel more positively about their nondominant counterparts (Palestinians and Mexican immigrants, respectively) after taking their perspective but that swapping places mentally has no such beneficial effect for lower-status group. In fact, listening to the point of view of white Americans actually worsened the attitudes of Mexican immigrants toward this group.
b. "One possible reason for this failure is that less powerful individuals already engage in frequent perspective taking, so more of the same will not budge their attitudes."
c. "...The well-being of individuals with lower social status is of- ten subject to the changing whims others, they tend to pay closer attention to others’ minds than do more powerful individuals."
My takeaway:
This made me think about Salvador Minuchin's work in Structural Family Therapy. After reading this article some years ago, I made a note to myself that when I'm working with families, I will attempt to get parents to empathise with their kids before I get the kids to do so. Doing it the other way round doesn't seem to soften the ground in the therapy room.
⏸ Words Worth Contemplating:
"Listen deeply enough to be changed by what you learn." ~ Sustained Dialogue Institute
Reflection:
In the moment by moment conversational nature of therapy, do you notice how you are altered by what you learn from your clients?
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