Note: This is a compilation of Frontier Friday, a weekly Substack published, originally released on 28 Aug. 2021
PART I
Here’s one of the “Daily Stories” that I’ve kept from 2019. ~~~ # 57. Communicating Empathy is Hard…
Date: 8 Mar19
“Amelia, I know you want to play… but I’m so tired from work. Can you just get on with your dinner and stop dillly dally?”
My 5 year-old says to me, ‘Papa, I know you are tired from work, but I’m also very tired from school… you did one thing, and I did so many things today… sports, dancing, singing, writing alphabets…’
She’s saying what I said. Her mimicry tells me how un-empathic I’ve been with her, how self-absorbed my attempts to relate and communicate understanding.
In my attempts to communicate empathy, I need to focus less about me, and more about the effects on the other person.
The very few times I managed to communicate a deep sense of understanding, I see a sigh of relief in my daughter, a softening, and often, tears come along. No need to stand stubborn, resist. No need to fight.
Communicating empathy is hard. It is not just about understanding, but it’s about helping the other feel understood. It is an act of not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”
~~~
Talking about empathy with therapists is somewhat like a fish trying to describe water. It’s difficult. But it’s the life-blood of not only of therapeutic communication, but of our humanity. In the next missives, we will also talk about the unintended consequences of empathy. Today, here are 5 recommendations to get us going.
- From My Desk: “Listening in Speech”I was a great husband before I was married. I was a great parent before I had kids.I was a great psychotherapist before I began clinical practice.In my clinical practice, given my years of training and experience, I thought one of my most potent skills as a therapist was listening. I was wrong.
Since then, I’ve learned that there is a scaffold to guide us in our attempts: It is the “Will Say, Won’t Say, and Can’t Say”
- Music: Father’s Daughter
For many reasons (and beyond reason), I found myself listening to this several times in the last week (Link for Spotify). Sung by my childhood hero Eddie Vedder’s daughter, Olivia Vedder (17 yr-old).
This is the soundtrack for a Sean Penn film called Flag Day, a trued story about a con-man father and his daughter. I can’t wait to watch it. (BIG Fan of Sean Penn).
Bonus: Watch Eddie Vedder talk about what it’s like growing up not knowing his father.
- Bookworm: See No Strangers
I’ve mentioned this book before in . Part memoir and part manifesto. I’m moved by Valerie Kaur’s stories of struggles growing up as a Sikh in America, and her call for deep empathy to the wider community. Perhaps the appeal of this book to me is because I feel like a perpetual outsider, both as a Chinese living in Australia, and also in professional circles. This book points out summons empathy as the road to revolutionary love.
- Research: Practitioner Empathy and the Duration of the Common Cold David P. Rakel et al 2009
Empathy and common cold?? Turns out that a clinician’s empathy has an impact on the severity and duration of common cold. Amazing.
- Words Worth Contemplating:
“Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear.” ~ Valarie Kaur.
Reflection:
Park aside 3 mins. Take a moment and listen to this track with your eyes closed. Notice the movements and stirrings in your body. Empathy requires an act of softening. Soften your demands upon yourself. Listen to the softer voices, the voices that are less privileged, and even the voices that are voiceless. We are all practitioners of the listening art-form.
PART II
- New From My Desk: Father-Figures and The Good Ancestor
A piece I recently wrote for the Redemptorist Monastery. I’ve re-circulated this in my other blog, Full Circles: Reflections on Living.
With gratitude to all father-figures on Fathers’ Day.
- Watch: Empathic Listening, Carl Rogers
I haven’t found counselling and psychotherapy textbooks doing justice to the work of Carl Roger’s and his profound contribution to the field.
I highly recommend that you get a chance to watch him in conversation. He was a real pioneer in insisting that therapy sessions be recorded and analysed.
They are some clips available online. If you have access to Alexander Street Press (University libraries might subscribe to them), you can look it up. If not, try the Milton Erickson Foundation online store..
Here’s a link to some notes I took based on a clinical demonstration that Rogers conducted with a lady in her mid-30s, who lost her twins and unable to get pregnant. Feelings of being a failure. ambiguous loss.
Watching several of Rogers in action, I’m struck by the fact that he rarely asks a question! However, his dynamic empathic reflection seemed to have the ability to move the conversation deeper.
This recommended clip is one with Rogers talking to a group of students on empathic listening.
- Bookworm: Empathy
I referenced Roman Krznaric work in The First Kiss. His work offers us a reminder to look more towards “outrospection” than introspection, more perspective getting than perspective taking (i.e., literally asking someone vs making mental leaps in our heads).
- Movie: The Sound of Metal
Good stories told well have an embodied way to move us towards empathy. This movie is about a drummer who loses his hearing and him confronted with his dark history and addiction.
Stellar acting by Riz Ahmed. It is on Amazon Prime.
(Tip: The sound design of this movie is so well done. Experience this show with a good sound system or a headset).
- Words Worth Contemplating:
Ghandi’s Talisman
One of the last notes left behind by Gandhi in 1948, expressing his deepest social thought:
“Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test.
Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself,
if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her].
Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny?
In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?
Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away.“
Reflection:
Who are the father-figures in your life? Who took the time guide you in a deep way? Many clients that I’ve asked don’t have any. Masculinity has gotten a bad-press of late, but true father-figures are so much needed in a father-hungry world. How do you become a father? A child comes into the picture. How do you become a father-figure? A child chisels you, breaks your well-intended expectations and inflicts backaches and heartbreaks. How do you become a father-figure in the family? You lead. How do you become a father-figure if you have no child? You lead. Both responses are the same.
(For more, read this).
PART III
- From My Desk: To Understand? Easy. To Help Someone Feel Understood? Difficult.
Perhaps that’s why skills in clinical case formulation and skills inf helping someone feel understood are mutually exclusive.
- Wed-Read: Backlash of R U OK day
The premise of this article is about the potential backfire effect of the R U OK campaign.
Here in Australia, it was R U OK day yesterday. I love the intent behind this, but I’m a little conflicted about its effects. Hearing from youths that I work with, it seemed to have an unintended consequence of backfiring for those who are in distress. As kids being kids, they mock the statement.
An interested tweet in response to ‘worst corporate “wellness” horror stories’: “About 5 years ago we had to attend a mandatory, all-day wellness session. I was badly burned out and stressed about the work I would now have to take home and stay up til midnight finishing due to the session. The topic? Avoiding burn out and stress, and the importance of sleep.”
- Web-Read: The Double Empathy Problem: On the Ontological Status of Autism
Often, we conceive the idea that an autistic person is someone with deficits in cognitive empathy. However, this point of view fails to also consider the lack of empathy for people on the spectrum.
Damian E M Milton notes:
“In analysing the interactions that ‘autistic people’ have with the wider population, it is easy to problematise the definition of autism as a ‘social deficit’ located within an individual’s mind. Differences in neurology may well produce differences in sociality, but not a ‘social deficit’ as compared to an idealised normative view of social reality.”
(I learned about this study from reading author Katherine May’s account of her discovering that she was on the spectrum in her mid-adulthood.)
- Research : Effects of biological explanations for mental disorders on clinicians’ empathy
This PNAS study really fascinates me.
The gist: Clinicians with biological explanations (e.g., genetic or neurobiological) significantly reduces clinician’s empathy.
The take-home: Our beliefs can spill out into the relational space.
- Words Worth Contemplating:
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. —Alan Turing. The Imitation Game
Reflection:
What beliefs do you carry that improve and/or impede your relationship with your clients? And… What beliefs of your clients challenges you?
PART IV
- 📕Bookworm: Against Empathy
Much of my thinking about the flipsides of empathy stems from Paul Bloom’s work. He says “empathy is innumerate.” In other words, we are likely to care more about a single story of a child in poverty, than a statistic about the suffering of many children. Instead, he argues for more rationale compassion.
Semantics? Or is there more to this?
- 👓 Wed-Read: The surprising downsides of empathy
This BBC article does a good summary on the downsides of empathy. Excerpts:
‘A final downside of empathy is sometimes-incapacitating emotional impact. The philosopher Susanne Langer once called empathy an “involuntary breach of individual separateness” – and this seems to apply particularly when we observe someone suffering, such as a loved one.
..We ought to start making a clearer distinction between empathy and its apparent synonym: “compassion”. If empathy is about stepping into someone’s shoes, compassion is instead “a feeling of concern for another person’s suffering which is accompanied by the motivation to help”, according to Singer and Klimecki. To be compassionate, it does not mean you have to share somebody’s feelings. It is more about the idea of extending kindness towards others.
Bloom uses the example of an adult comforting a child who is terrified of a small, barking dog. The adult doesn’t need to feel the child’s fear to help. “There can be compassion for the child, a desire to make his or her distress go away, without any shared experience or empathic distress,” he writes.’ - 🎧 Listen: No Stupid Questions Podcast
I love the conversations between Stephen Dubner (famed Freakonomics author) and Angela Duckworth (yeah, the Grit researcher).
Take a listen to episode: 44. Is Empathy in Fact Immoral?, as they delve into this topic of the downsides to empathy.
I like their take on this:
Empathy is a good first, bottom-up step towards compassion.
(In the second part of this podcast, Dubner and Duckworth talks about why people like to take personality tests. Reminded me of Annie Murphy Paul’s book The Cult of Personality Tests.)
- 👓 Web-Read: Dark Sides of Empathy
This NPR article features an author of the book, The Dark Sides of Empathy. Fritz Breithaupt . This book sits on my shelf and is taunting me.
A snippet from the interview with Breithaupt:
Interviewer: In your book you talk about something you call “vampiristic empathy.” What do you mean by that?Breithaupt: Vampiristic empathy is a form of empathy where people want to manipulate the people they empathize with so that they can, through them, experience the world in such a way that they really enjoy it. An extreme case of this is helicopter parenting. Helicopter parents are constantly trying to steer their kids in the directions they think are the right directions. Of course they want the best for their children. Very understandable; I have kids and I want what’s best for them too.
But I think there’s something else seeping in. There’s this sort of living along with the kids, imagining how it must be like to have a life that’s marked by successes, where obstacles disappear and life can be enjoyed. But that also means that the parents are co-experiencing that life, so they start taking over … they basically want to use the child almost as a pawn.
In a sense, extreme helicopter parents are robbing their kids of a selfhood so that they can basically project their own self into these kids. [emphasis mine] - ⏸ Words Worth Contemplating:
“It’s not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists.”. ~ Paul Bloom, developmental psychologist.
Reflection:
Looking back, has there been times when empathy didn’t serve you well?
PART V
- 📝 From My Desk (Archive): It’s Not About You
A short-story of how I got so self-absorbed.
- 👓 Web Read: We Have Many More Than Five Senses — Here’s How To Make The Most Of Them
Key graf:
People who are better at so-called “cardiac interoception” experience emotions more intensely, enjoy more nuanced emotions, and are better at recognising other people’s emotions, which is a critical first step in empathy”
- 📽 Movie: Unheard Woman (“Eine unerhörte Frau”)
This is a german film is based on a true story of a mother fighting to have the medical profession treat her daughter, while people thinks she has munchausen by proxy.
I saw this more than 4 years ago (on a plane) and it still lingers, particularly the fight of the mother to get someone who understands and beliefs her.
- 🔎 Research: Empathy (Psychotherapy_Elliot, Bohart Watson & Greenberg, 2011)
This meta-analysis by Robert Elliot and team is a good “zoomed-out” picture on the impact of empathy on therapy outcomes (attributable to about 9.6% of the variance in outcomes, compared to treatment differences of 0-1%).
Carl Rogers was on to something. (Stay tuned, as I’m working on doing a de-construction of one of his sessions).
- ⏸ Words Worth Contemplating:
“When someone is nasty, rude, hateful, or mean with you, pretend they have a disease. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them which can soften the conflict”
~ Kevin Kelly, 1 of the 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice when he turned 68.
Reflection:
Were there times when you experienced invalidation and/or were being misunderstood? What were the effects on you? What did this teach you about engaging with people who appear “difficult” to work with?
PART VI
- 📝 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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