Advice for Families of Addicts/Alcoholics (Expressing Empathy When You're Angry)

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 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 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 ten 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 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 will 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 when 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 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 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 gotta 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. 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 like send them to prison. But I am in some ways trying to get them to get their guard down to town, 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 got to do to accomplish my mission. It sounds harsh, I know, but here's my thing. 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. But 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, 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 get 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 there's some interaction that goes on there. But if you're really dead set up, 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 most 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.