Empathy and the psychotherapeutic humanities.

One of the most important skills of a helping person is empathy. Empathy is the ability to put oneself in the other person’s shoes while still remaining in one’s own. Empathy is the ability to be responsive without being reactive.

Empathy is based on the platinum rule not the golden rule. The platinum rule is “do under others as they would have you do unto them.” In order to follow the platinum rule the person using empathy must know something about the person’s culture which includes their values, beliefs, opinions, traditions, preferences, and practices. Where does a person learn about another person’s culture, thought system, and world view?

The psychotherapeutic humanities: fiction, poetry, film, visual arts, dance, and music are a good place to start. Theology, cosmology, anthropology, history, and sociology are other sources of information contributing to richer understanding.

There will be a series of articles on this blog describing various examples of the psychotherapeutic humanities, especially novels, poetry, film, and music. What are the novels, poems, films, and music that have enriched your understanding of the other to enhance your empathic skills?

Article of the week - Practicing psychotherapy in post Dobbs America

There is an excellent article in the Psychiatric Times on January 18, 2023, entitled "Abortion and the Psychiatrist: Practicing in Post Dobbs America." The topic applies to any mental health professional not just psychiatrists. The bottom line is that the laws that apply vary widely from state to state and the risks of legal prosecution for both patient and therapist vary widely as well. All psychotherapists should be aware of the issues that arise in working with patients of child bearing age.

For the article click here.

Article of the week will be posted on most Saturdays highlighting and referencing an article of interest to people interested in the mental health of members of our society and planet.

Music Therapy - Walk right in and sit right down, The Rooftop Singers

Walk right in and sit right down was recorded by The Rooftop Singers in 1962. The song was an old folk tune attributed to Gus Cannon who wrote it in 1929. I sometimes sing it to my clients when I greet them in the waiting room and invite them to the consulting room. The lyrics are perfect for psychotherapy: “Walk right it and sit right down, daddy let your mind roll on.” 

Usually clients under 50 do not recognize this song but when I tell them about it they usually smile and laugh and relax and I say “So, what’s been happening to you,” and we’re off and running for 55 minutes.

An article is posted about Music Therapy most Thursdays.

Cinema Therapy - The Sinner, First season

The Sinner is a TV show which ran for four seasons with the primary character being Harry Ambrose a police detective who has ghosts of his own life which haunt him. Nonetheless his interest in his cases are not the what and how but the why and the why is what drives the creative tension in each season and the episodes.

The first season is about Cora Tanetti, a young mother, who stabs a man at the beach impulsively while on a picnic with her family in front of many witnesses. Harry thinks that Cora’s behavior is the result of psychiatric issues and digs into her past in an attempt to understand her behavior.

This series is a very good depiction of the consequences of trauma and how PTSD contributes to acting out that can be sometimes lethal to self and others. The viewer comes to understand Cora’s trauma and its influence on her cognitive and emotional dysregulation. This understanding contributes to an experience of compassion for Cora and appreciation of Harry’s persistent effort to get to the bottom of things.

This TV series might be helpful to increase the understanding of trauma and its effects for students in human services fields and the general public.

Bibliotherapy - Skylight by Jose Saramago

 Skylight by Jose Saramago

Ordinary people with ordinary lives each with its own drama.

From Amazon web site : Lisbon, late-1940s. The inhabitants of an old apartment block are struggling to make ends meet. There’s the elderly shoemaker and his wife who take in a solitary young lodger; the woman who sells herself for money and jewelry; the cultivated family come down in the world; and the beautiful typist whose boss can’t keep his eyes off her.

Poisonous relationships, happy marriages, jealousy, gossip and love – Skylight brings together the joys and grief of ordinary people. One of his earliest novels, it provides an entry into Saramago’s universe but was lost for decades and published, as per his wishes, after his death.

Skylight is reportedly one of Saramago’s first novels which he wrote in his 30s and was never published until after his death. It is about the tenants of an apartment building in Lisbon, Portugal, in the late 1940s. Each of the families is quite different although they live together and their lives are interconnected. 

Along with the gossip and intrigue are philosophical reflections on the meaning of life manifested in their behavior and in their conversations. A student of human behavior and emotional life will find the characters and their daily struggles familiar, understandable, and perhaps imitable or not.

Some of the characters are happy, some confused, some perturbed. 

Skylight is a good book for a discussion group. It would be interesting to see what characters people identify with and why. Skylight also describes many interactions and interpersonal dynamics that are ripe for description and understanding. How might situations have been handled differently to bring about better results?

Skylight is recommended to people interested in human nature and what makes people tick. The characters are ordinary people living ordinary lives but each filled with drama of their own making. The degree of self awareness is variable among the characters with Sylvestre, the cobbler, seeming to be the most mature of them all.

Managing one’s own death anxieties to support others.

This book presents a point of view based on my observations of those who have come to me for help. But because the observer always influences what is observed, served, I turn in Chapter Six to an examination of the observer and offer a memoir of my personal experiences with death and my attitudes about mortality. I, too, grapple with mortality and, as a professional who has been working with death anxiety for my entire career and as a man for whom death looms closer and closer, I want to be candid and clear about my experience with death anxiety.

Irvin D. Yalom. Staring at the Sun (Kindle Locations 104-106). Kindle Edition. 

Beyond the symptoms, difficulties in functioning, interpersonal conflicts lurks the fundamental question of mortality. For the psychotherapist, countertransference arises in working with clients who struggle with the existential question of their own mortality and death. All psychotherapists encounter these questions which usually get framed as management of grief and trauma. And yet little attention is paid to how therapists manage their fear of their own death.

At times like this, one does not need a psychotherapist as much as a philosopher.

Why did you kill these people? Because nobody stopped me. The Good Nurse - The movie

 Do police detectives sometimes do good work and save lives by getting to the bottom of criminal activity in spite of obstacles and deliberate attempts to cover up wrong doing? Yes.

Are there good people who struggle with personal hardships to do the right thing? Yes.

There are many lessons that viewers of The Good Nurse, a movie on Netflix, can take away from this movie based on real life events where a nurse killed as many as 400 patients in 9 or more hospitals.

Rather than investigate Charles Cullen's murderous behavior, hospital after hospital, minimizing their risk exposure to liability for their employee's engagement in activities that led to patient's deaths while under their care, these hospitals just quietly terminated nurse Cullen's employment and he moving on to continue the activity in another hospital.

At the end of the movie when nurse Cullen is asked why he killed these patients he simply says, "because nobody stopped me."