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Therapeutic Empathic Listening
from A
Fresh Look at Being Human
by Mystic Life
General thoughts...
1. Advice often does damage by taking away power.
2. Recognize feelings of another without taking responsibility for them.
3. People inherently want to be congruent and validated.
4. Be accepting both in the content of what you share and in the process of
how you
share it.
5. Don't change people; allow them to be themselves.
6. People tend to go deeper and deeper in communication until there is an
interruption
to the exploration.
7. Don't solve another's problems; facilitate self trust so they can solve
their own
problems.
8. Take no responsibility for another's life situation as their path is not
yours.
Here are some approaches to listening that I've found to be usually congruent...
1. Relaxed facial expression.
2. Direct (though not to the point of discomfort) eye contact.
3. Open body posture.
4. Minimal reinforcers (such as "I understand," "Right," "I see," etc.).
5. Smiling only when appropriately reflecting mood of topic.
6. Paraphrase what you're hearing to demonstrate you understand.
7. Reflect content and feelings.
8. Make tentative connections in what you're hearing...forming them as questions.
9. Allow both negative and positive emotions to be expressed.
10. Witness the other's "true self" beneath their fear and doubt.
Here are some behaviors I've found to be usually incongruent...
1. Asking irrelevant questions.
2. Having an agenda for the other person.
3. Inappropriately timed humor.
4. Giving unsolicited advice.
5. Inappropriately timed personal disclosure/redirection of conversation towards self.
6. Lying.
7. Not listening/drifting away from being focused.
8. Thinking about unrelated things.
9. Changing the subject.
10. Guiding/controlling/manipulating the conversation.
11. Criticizing the others thoughts/behaviors.
12. Filling "dead air" with surface chat.
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