How is empathy taught? It’s an important tool to teach kids, and it turns out there are some discreet skills to practice empathy.

The first is the ability to read nonverbal communications, particularly facial expressions, which brings us to the work of Paul Ekman, Ph.D., who has been studying facial expressions in different cultures for about 25 years, I think.

Professor Ekman has worked to categorize facial expressions and has established some interesting facts, for example some facial expressions are cross-cultural, such as an expression of disgust or contempt.

But for our purposes, teaching empathy, we need to keep in mind that facial expressions play out on our face as fast as 1/25th of a second, which is about 2 and 1/2 times faster than I can blink.

At that speed, utterances are processed subconsciously, rather than consciously, but the good news is that thanks to our mirror neurons, we sense what our conversation partner is experiencing and can then wonder if our perception is accurate, which it is an incredibly important part of the trust-building experience in a counselor-client relationship.

Often just listening intently will help the other person relax, because more often than not, what others want to hear is your feeling about the current situation, and when they sense that they are being heard, they relax.

Yet another important part of the skill of empathy is teaching people to relax, especially if I’m listening to a child.

Having a couple of breathing or visualization skills on hand is great, or teaching the Quick Coherence tool below.

1. Focus on the area of ​​your chest around your heart. (Move from the external to the internal).

2. Breathe through your heart 10 times and remember a positive fun time. Try to re-experience it fully.

3. Ask your heart, which has a brain of its own and can learn and make decisions independently of your other brain, how to handle this situation with less stress in the future.

Empathy requires attention to subtle details

According to Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D., author of the very interesting book FLOW, we humans can process sensory data, in other words, visual data such as the subtle changes in expressions discussed above and changes in tone of voice in packets of data that they include up to 7 bits of data, and the shortest amount of time between packets is 1/18 of a second.

It takes me 1/10th of a second to blink, so I’m processing observations of another person’s emotional state very quickly and mostly unconsciously unless I’m trained to notice how I’m feeling while conversing with another person.

A skill that really helps me to listen carefully would therefore be a powerful tool for teaching empathy.

My mentor in the field of domestic violence, Tony Kubicki, MS, taught me this model a couple of decades ago, and we’ll call it reflective listening. When I listen carefully, I can see how someone who is upset calms down, simply because someone is listening.

1. First, I have to commit to listening, which means I neither agree nor disagree, I just listen.

2. Then, I start repeating their words to myself, with the intention of repeating a summary to them, which I do from time to time. By repeating his words to myself, I am keeping myself from preparing a retort.

3. Having made a reflection to my speaker, I ask if I have heard him accurately and I await his response. If they say no, I simply ask them to repeat the message until they say yes, you heard me right.

4. In my summary statement, I can include a comment about the emotions I am seeing.

An example of how you might start a reflection/summary might be: “It sounds like you’re feeling really angry and want your husband/daughter/son/wife to help out more around the house with the dishes, laundry, vacuuming…? Did I hear you accurately?”

You can even engage in thoughtful listening when it is the cleanliness of your home that is being criticized. Remember, your commitment is to listen, not to agree or disagree, and when you give your partner the gift of attention, the reward in intimacy is great.

When I commit to paying attention to the expressions and the emotional message in them and listening to the story line and the emotions in the story line, I have come a long way toward empathy.

The Heartmath process will help me keep the higher perceptual centers of my brain open while I empathize, and empathy becomes a heartbeat-to-beat process.

Not sure you can pay attention to subtle, nuanced details? While practice makes perfect, you can improve your attention skills by using online brain conditioning tools, especially those that train your fluid intelligence using the dual n back task. You’ll be amazed at how effective his short-term memory becomes, and his fluid intelligence, so important in choosing what incoming data is important to pay attention to, will grow rapidly.

I hope you have fun learning and teaching discreet intimacy skills.