Persons engaged in addictive and defiant behavior tend to treat parents, family, and others as objects. Many of my teen and adult clients struggle with understanding how others might feel in various situations. The main issue is that my clients are primarily focused on their needs. They don’t often care how their actions impact those around them. This applies to substance and porn/sex addiction and other issues.

Exercises for Teaching Empathy

  1. I ask clients to select a current news story in which someone is a victim. They have to work on the assignment as that victim and write about their experience during the event described. At first, they do a pretty awful job, just giving the facts. They usually have to redo this “homework”.For example, someone wrote about being the mother of an infant who died as a result of using a faulty infant carrier. The baby carrier had been recently in the news for causing infant death. I asked him to think about what it might have been like for the woman to have carried that baby inside her, to have shared her blood, her oxygen with it. To have lovingly patted her pregnant belly and talked to her baby before it was born, to have held the baby to her breast and nurtured it. To think about how she loved the baby so much that she wanted to keep it close to her, to hear her heartbeat and smell her scent, and so purchased this baby holder to enhance the experience for her baby. And then the baby died as a result of her wanting to provide an ongoing love experience for the baby.
  2. This exercise is one where I hand everyone a sheet of pink copy paper and ask them to describe the qualities of the woman they love the most. Could be a sister, a wife, a mother, daughter. Then, after they have written all the qualities of that person on the paper, I have them wad it up into as tight and compact a ball as they can. They’re pretty uncomfortable doing this part, which is a good sign. Then, when they can’t compress it into any smaller or tighter ball, I ask them to unroll it and straighten it out. To try and get all the wrinkles and creases out of the paper. Of course, they can’t get it completely flat again. The point is that when someone is sexually assaulted, it can affect every aspect of their life and things can never, ever, really be quite the same.

I tailor exercises for each client. As you might see, this is a very integral component to the counseling psychotherapy process.