how do you express empathy for someone when you feel really hurt by their
decisions and their behaviors that's a question i recently got from
one of our viewers and it really made me think
you know i'm always telling you guys how important it is to express
empathy and give positive feedback and positive reinforcement
but i also realize how extremely difficult it is
when someone has hurt you over and over again
so it's definitely a topic worth covering and that's what we're going to
talk about in today's video
for those of you who are new here i'm amber hollingsworth and you're watching
put the shovel down the youtube channel designed to help you
understand the science and psychology of addiction so
you can get your life and your family back on track and get
back to living the life that you want to live now in our online course
called the invisible intervention which is our
course for family members on how to get a loved one from denial into recovery we
really really break down the sort of step-by-step how do you
express empathy and do positive reinforcement
in this really strategic specific way but before you can even get to that
point you really got to deal with yourself you've got to get yourself
enough energy and support to be able to pull all of this
off so how do you express empathy give positive feedback pretty much like be
nice to someone who has not been nice to you i'm going to give you
three pointers on that and these are actually strategies that i use in my
office to keep my own head on straight when i'm working with difficult clients
day in and day out okay so first and foremost i want you to
realize that when i'm talking about expressing empathy towards someone
who has a substance abuse problem i am really talking to you about that
from this really like rational place not really from this
feeling place because this is a strategy and a lot of times
i'll have clients in my office who've done some things that i really
don't understand or that really upset me in some ways
and yes believe it or not counselors have feelings
about the things that their clients do too so some of the things that my
clients have done it upsets me it infuriates me sometimes
especially because you guys know that in our office we see the family members so
i know good and well what they've done to their loved ones but i also know if i
come directly at them with a whole lot of judgment it's just
not going to get me anywhere so you've got to get
into the rational part of your brain secret thought i have is you know what
you think you're a master manipulator but i'm 10 steps ahead of you
and i know exactly what i'm doing i know how to pull a person around to get their
defensive walls down to get past all of those nasty ugly
thoughts into their vulnerable self into why
they're doing what they're doing so i guess what i'm saying is like secretly
inside it's kind of a fun feeling to feel like oh i got your number and i'm
ahead of your game that's what i'm talking about when i say
this is about strategy this isn't about in your heart of hearts
you're just feeling so sorry for them this is about knowing
what you're doing which i totally get is much easier in a
counseling role than it is when it's coming directly at
you but i would have to say even as a counselor sometimes
that stuff comes directly at me too sometimes people are ugly with me and i
still have to bypass that especially sometimes when i first get a
brand new client because they're resistant a lot of times they're
reluctant they don't really want to come talk to me and i have to
quickly sort of bypass that and build a relationship with them
now the second really important piece of information i want you to remember
when you're trying to figure out how in the world am i going to be empathetic
towards this person struggling with addiction who's
hurt me many times is this expressing empathy from a
rational place in your brain is slightly different than feeling
empathy so you can go through this process of communicating
empathy without feeling it to the depths of your bones
because a lot of times it is very difficult to feel empathy for
someone who's done something that's either hurt you or hurt the people that
you care about okay here's a random side note so one of
the things that i do and i just want to sort of
check out or just tune out for a minute is i go on youtube and i watch these
videos that have all this real footage of
police interrogations where they're trying to get like these like
big time criminals and murderers to admit to what they did
i know it's kind of a morbid fascination but just hang with me
anyways i've watched like hundreds of these
and always in this interrogation the the interrogator detective i don't
know whatever they are they almost always start by expressing
empathy for the person's situation and understanding about
where they were coming from and how they might have got to that state of mind
now you have to imagine that these police investigators
probably don't really feel all that empathetic for it because they may even
be the one that saw the destruction they may even
been the one that was on the scene you know and saw every bad
thing that happened or looking at all the evidence here but
they know logically in their mind to get this person to get their defenses down
and get real with them they are going to have to come in and
build some kind of alignment I'm telling you if you don't believe me go on youtube
and watch these interrogation videos and i didn't quite realize that until i
started watching these i was like oh my goodness
that's what i do but i'm not really trying to pin someone
up in a corner like they are to to like send them to prison but i am in
some ways trying to get them to get their guard down to tell me
the real story because once i can get the real story
then i can start pulling apart those pieces with them
dig through it do all that therapy stuff so think of it like that if you have to
put yourself like i'm an investigator here and this
is what i gotta do to accomplish my mission it sounds harsh i know but
here's my saying as long as you're using your superpowers
for the good i'm okay with it which leads me to my last point about
expressing empathy when you're really hurt and you're
having a hard time feeling that empathy inside your heart
my third point is to focus on expressing empathy for their feeling
or for their situation not necessarily their behavior
because it's the behavior that you're really frustrated about and hurt about
but if you can back up and understand maybe where someone's
coming from or why they acted the way that they did
you might can at least put yourself in their shoes enough it doesn't mean you
would do what they did it doesn't mean you're justifying the behavior but you
can get yourself in this intellectual sort of place in your mind to sort of
understand maybe why that behavior came out and you can
easier get to some kind of empathy about their situation their feeling everything
that led up to it it's really hard to
express that empathy if you're focusing on their behavior or how they dealt with
that situation that they were in now if you really like this whole
strategic i'm going to accomplish what i want to accomplish kind of thinking
then you should take my masterclass workshop
on persuasion i'll put the link in the description it's totally free
it's a little bit longer of a workshop that's more in depth so you want to set
a time the time to actually watch that your there's some interaction
that goes on there but if you're really dead set of i'm
going to win this war and i'm going to do whatever it takes
that's the class for you and now your next step in this process
is going to be to watch my playlist on motivating someone to take steps towards
sobriety because now that you've got that empathy
you've got your head in the right place this playlist is going to tell you the
actual steps to take to get there i'm putting it right up here so all you
have to do is click on it