What we’ve said about Empathy

“Be real. Simply perceive what's going on. And if you can demonstrate to a patient that you have an understanding of their internal experience and their past experiences, that's the important part. That's the empathy”

“If you're not doing some amount of containment, technically, you're not really having a conversation so much as you're both talking at the same time”

“containment as more of processing and putting thoughts into a container and metabolizing thoughts in a way that they can kind of hear back and mirroring as a way to show that this person has an individual self that can be seen and is important and recognized”

“I'm going to define it as getting the patient to talk more to continue their narrative without changing the trajectory or content of the narrative”

“you may find that you get a richer narrative or more information that you would not have gotten if you prompt people to continue talking on one line of thought one line of narrative rather than asking specific questions”

“it's important for psychiatrists, clinicians, psychologists, therapists to have a wide variety of hmms and hmms in their You know, in their back pocket to try out nonverbal acknowledgement sounds very important, right”

“You can say, you know, I can feel how sad you are touching on these memories again right now. Just by saying that, you may cause the patient to continue speaking”

“You basically punctuate by basically emphasizing some particular word or turn of phrase that someone has just said to you. Okay. You're not introducing new content, but you're just sort of highlighting something that they've said”

“Don't argue with the delusions, but also don't agree with the delusions. Right. You have to keep in mind that when you live in the world of the patient, you're not. agreeing with the delusions necessarily”

“Do they seem to be able to automatically access and describe the reactions and internal motivations of other people? Or do they mostly conceptualize things outside themselves? Like all these other people are doing things to me”

“when a person doesn't have the micro expressions that match another person during a conversation, it's some kind of a breakdown of the ability of that person to fully and very rapidly comprehend what is going on in the other person emotionally”

“It's not because he has some kind of a strong moral core where he has deliberated and felt about other people's reactions. It's because it seems to be easy and doable and pleasurable in the moment that he does it”

“When we make this stuff about us versus them, we really miss that all these aspects are a part of ourselves. The best writers in regards to understanding personality are the ones who can find the pieces inside of them that are in the other people”

“We all have the ability to operate at different levels of functioning. And if you are honest with yourself, you'll see that there's a ton of times in your lives that you regress. During breakups, that's a big one”