Chapter 17: Additive Empathy, Interpretation, and Confrontation

4 elements of effectiveness

1. Expression of concern 2. Description of the client's purported goal, belief, or commitment 3. The behavior that is inconsistent with the goal, belief, or commitment 4. The probable negative outcomes of the discrepant behavior

Guidelines for Employing Interpretation and Additive Empathy

1. Use additive empathy sparingly until a sound working relationship has evolved 2. Employ these responses only when clients are engaged in self-exploration or have shown that they are ready to do so 3. Pitch these response to the edge of clients' self-awareness and avoid attempting to foster awareness that is remote from clients' current awareness or experiences 4. Avoid making several additive empathic responses in succession 5. Phrase interpretive responses in tentative terms 6. To determine the accuracy of an interpretive response, carefully note clients' reactions after offering the interpretation 7. If the client responds negatively to an interpretative response, acknowledge your probable error, respond empathically to the client's reaction, and continue your discussion of the topic under consideration 8. When providing an interpretation to a client who is culturally different from the social worker, recognize that the client may not readily understand the message the way it was intended

Guidlines for employing confrontation

1. When a violation of the law or imminent danger to self or others is involved, a confronation must occur no matter how early in the working relationship 2. Whenever possible, avoid until an effective working relationship has been established 3. Use it sparingly 4. Deliver in an atmosphere of warmth, caring, and concern 5. Whenever possible, encourage self-confrontation 6. Follow confrontation with empathic responsiveness 7. Expect that clients will respond to confrontation with a certain degree of anxiety 8. Do not expect immediate change after confrontation

Indications for assertive confrontation

1. When violations of the law or imminent threats to welfare and safety of self or others are involved 2. When discrepancies, inconsistencies, and dysfunctional behaviors block progress or create difficulties 3. Efforts at self-confrontation and inductive questioning have been ineffective in fostering clients' awareness of these behaviors or attempts to make corresponding changes 4. Cognitive/perceptual discrepancies 5. Affective Discrepancies 6. Behavioral discrepancies

Components of empathy

1. affective sharing 2. self-awareness 3. mental flexibility

Assertive confrontation

Connection between troubling thoughts, plans, values, and beliefs is stated in declarative form, connecting them explicitly for the client

Affective Discrepancies

Denying or minimizing actual feelings, being out of touch with painful emotions, expressing feelings that are contrary to purported feelings

Confrontation

Involves facing clients with some aspect of their thoughts, feelings, or behavior that is contributing to or maintaining their difficulties

Behavioral discrepancies

Irresponsible behaviors, reacted actions, manipulative behavior, dysfunctional communication, and resistance to change

Cognitive/perceptual discrepancie

Product of inaccurate, erroneous, or incomplete information, and confrontation

Emotional empathy

ability to be affected by a client's emotions

Action-oriented phase

additive levels of empathy serve to expand client's self-awareness, to cushion the impact of confrontations, and to explore and resolve relational reactions and other obstacles to change

Inductive questioning

ask questions that lead the client to consider potential discrepancies between thoughts, values, beliefs, and actions

Self awareness

awareness of various forces operating in the present

Semantic interpretations

describing clients' experiences according to the social worker's conceptual vocab

Deeper feelings

emotional reactions involve multiple emotions but clients may experience only the surface feelings - additive empathy responses assist client to become awareness of feelings

In the middle phase

employ confrontation to assist clients to achieve awareness of the forces blocking their progress toward growth and goal attainment and to enhance their motivation to implement efforts toward change

Effective confrontation comes from

extension of empathic communication - comes from a deep understanding of clients' feelings, experiences, and behaviors

Interpretation

identification of patterns, goals, and wishes that clients imply but don't directly state

Propositional interpretations

involves the social worker's notions or explanations that assert causal relationships among factors involved in clients' problem situations

Additive empathic responses

moderately interpretive, interpret forces operating to produce feelings, cognitions, reactions, and behavioral patterns

Empathy

perceiving, understanding, experiencing, and responding to the emotional state of another person

Self-confrontation

reflect on the relationship between their behaviors and their own values

mental flexibility

requiring skills in both turning on receptivity and turning it off

Discrepant viewpoint

sufficiently broad to encompass many change-oriented techniques, identified in different theories

Expressed/cognitive empathy

translation of such feelings into words