Empathy and Detachment: Listening to Understand

Empathy helps you explore reality through the eyes of your staff, children, clients.

Detachment allows you to know clearly where you end and they begin so you can step in and out without getting stuck or overwhelmed

Strategies

Increase your awareness of the automatic judgmental thoughts you have before and after session.

Examine and confront the automatic thoughts by identifying at least 3 reasons why the person didn’t or couldn’t choose an alternate behavior, and in what ways the persons thoughts, feelings and behaviors make sense from a survival or a skills & knowledge point of view.

Listening to understand means hearing the person’s experience (not your interpretation of it), listening to understand what their thoughts, feelings and behaviors mean and helping them identify strategies to move toward a rich and meaningful life as they define it.