If we were to boil the job of doing therapy to one thing, it would be seeking an ever-deepening “accurate empathy” meaning an emotionally engaged, empathic understanding of the other person’s experience. However, it helps to break this down just a little. Here are five therapeutic objectives that cover elements that lead towards accurate empathy.
1. SEEK: We seek to understand our client, including not only their problems and how they came about, but their strengths as well, as that will help to support motivation and curiosity.
2. BUILD: We work to help the client develop trust in the therapist and the process. That includes maintaining it, and working with the inevitable ruptures that happen along the way.
3. Help the client LEARN: We work to support clients learning or adapting skills they will need to replace their outdated EMPs and serve as automatic choices made by the schemas in their inner mind.
4. ACTIVATE the old schemas: Specifically, this is a requirement for both extinction and MR, memory reconsolidation, the two mechanisms that affect old schemas. In therapy the most practical indicator of activation is bodily affect, such as tears, which relate to the internal proto-emotion that triggered that same response in the first place.
5. DELIVER: What we want to deliver is disconfirming information to the deep down schemas that need to be changed. I emphasize the word, “deliver” because that is the most challenging part, while the disconfirmation of the schema is often easier. Together they mean using nonverbal communication like images and tone of voice, new experiences, relationship, and even words to convey a new perspective on old expectations.
There are a two other tasks that can be included with the above. One is dealing with dysregulated emotion, which overlaps with the ways we build trust and also seek understanding. The other is supporting motivation, which comes, especially, from our interest in understanding clients’ strengths, as well as our efforts at winning trust.
Should I break down and add these to make seven objectives? I’m going to stick with five because they are easier to remember and doing those five things takes care of the other two. Most important, when we do those five things, not only do we deepen accurate empathy, but we fulfill the requirements for the three change mechanisms from the last video.
In the next video, number 12, I’ll share my Five Key Questions, a science-based approach to the first of these objectives, SEEKing to understand what’s going on.
