Several years ago I read a 1997 booklet called ‘Empathic Listening for Use with Traumatised Clients’ and thought it was full of ideas that deserved to be more widely read. I was delighted when the below note which I developed from the booklet was published by Guideline Magazine in March 2021. From September I will be offering CPD workshops to the branches of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors on the ideas presented in this post. It represents a small departure for my blog but I am so pleased to be part of disseminating these ideas to a wider audience.

Empathic Listening Skills: For Clients Who Have Experienced Trauma

Support work is a difficult task and this note aims to offer some guidance on how to handle a complex listening situation should it arise.  This note is not about counselling or questioning a person, it is simply about listening. 

Traumatised people are ordinary people who have been exposed to extraordinary situations.  Their feelings are also ordinary – but have been given the power to overwhelm and so seem extraordinary.

Listening in an Ordinary Situation

Essentially, listening is a decision made by one person to give another person their undivided attention so as to make them feel at home.  The first person decides to take their attention off their own concerns, thoughts and feelings for a while and to put it onto another person.

Listening is a difficult task since it is based on a total appreciation of the other person’s situation.  The more you move towards acceptance of another person’s point of view, the better you are becoming as a listener.

We use two methods to communicate that we are listening:

1.      Attentive Body Language

Your body language signals whether you are paying attention and willing to listen.

2.      The Listening Process

Observe: Notice non-verbal behaviour

 Focus: Don’t do anything else while listening

 Acknowledge: Acknowledge the message, even if you don’t agree with it

Respect: Let the speaker finish

Listening in an Extraordinary Situation

Shock or trauma is associated with situations that could be described as extraordinary.  Equally, the feelings which accompany trauma are extraordinary in that they tend to overwhelm the person so exposed.

The feelings which overwhelm at the core of psychological trauma are aloneness and helplessness.  These two emotions are the opposite of identity; people who feel alone and helpless begin to wonder who they are.

The presence of such powerful emotions require a form of listening known as empathic listening.

Empathic listening involves hearing and speaking

To be a good listener is to be a good student.  It makes sense to view the speaker as the teacher – and to stop thinking that you have something important to tell them.  Teaching and directing have their place, but not when you are supposed to be the listener.

Do not tell someone that you understand them.  Rather, ask them if you are understanding them – and they will tell you.  Understanding is an award, not a right. 

Empathy as an attitude

An empathic attitude can be similar to role play or drama. It’s not just a matter of mirroring or echoing the speaker, it requires the ability to get into the character of the other person.   To think as if you were them.  To try to see the world through their eyes.

Listen for the images the person uses, or the metaphors they use.  By reflecting these metaphors back to them, they will begin to show you the world as they see it.

As you seek understanding, the speaker will sense this and see themselves in you, and begin to feel less alone and helpless in the world.  This is empathic listening.

How to listen empathically

When someone begins to talk to you, there are two basic questions to ask yourself.

 1.      What is this person feeling?

 It is important to focus on how they are being/ feeling rather than what they are doing/ thinking.  The number of feelings listed can be used as a rule-of-thumb guide as to the number of issues involved.

 The classic formula is as follows: You feel (state the emotion) because (describe what they are thinking).  “You feel upset because of what happened.”

 If you find yourself saying “You feel THAT…”, then you are describing an opinion or a thought, not an emotion.  Avoid using “that” and instead put a feeling word. “You feel sad.”

2.      How does this person see the world?

People tend to see things in terms of doubles which represent opposites in conflict.  While the core conflict is probably “good vs evil”, this tends to appear as “us vs them”, “men vs women”, “old vs young”, “person vs person” etc.

A useful rule of thumb is the more negatives, the longer the process will be. This can help you to decide whether you are the right person to act as support.

If someone uses “but” in the middle or towards the end of a sentence, they are presenting opposition to what they have just said.  The words after the “but” are more important than the words before it but the speaker is not focusing on them. If you can reverse these statements, you may help them to connect their feelings (message from their body) with their thoughts (message from their head).  This may lead to insight. 

They say: “I feel upset at what happened but I think it is important to forgive.”

You say: “You think it is important to forgive but you feel upset at what happened.”

They say: “I do still feel upset.” (Insight)   

Your Task

A good listener does not explore the items in the client’s story, start asking questions or go after facts that they do not need to know.  Don’t be drawn into other people’s feelings who might appear in the story and don’t pass judgment.

This means:

• Never agree or disagree with what is said

• Never add a diagnosis or analysis to what is said

• Never exaggerate or minimise what is said

• Simply review what was said to the person’s satisfaction

If you don’t, you will be resisted by the client.  This resistance will appear as:

“Yes, but…. “

“I suppose you’re right”

“Well, not exactly”

“No!  That’s not what I mean!”

If the person senses that you are not “following” them, they will not feel listened to and your efforts will be classified as “not helpful”.

Trauma and the Power to Overwhelm

This brings us back to the idea that traumatised people are ordinary people who have been exposed to extraordinary situations. The “power to overwhelm” appears whenever a person is faced with the unknown  and experiences a gap in their knowledge.  They fill that gap with demons.  The person does not have words to put on what they experience and so they think in pictures.

This seems to be precisely what happens in cases of shock; the person is exposed to something extraordinary and words fail them.  The person tends to think in terms of pictures instead of words.

Helping a Traumatised Client

If someone discloses trauma to you, do not ask the person to be specific about the actual traumatic incident.  They might feel that they are losing control and traumatised people need to feel in control of themselves and their environment.

Rather, you can acknowledge what they have said and ask them to be concrete and specific about their life before and after the event, but not the event itself.

 All the person wants from you is that you listen to them.

Projections

As empathy is a way of being with people, projecting could be described as a way of not being with people.  When you project onto the unknown, you create the illusion that you now know it and can control it.

In all of this, there is a danger that your creation of the person is no more than a projection of you, not an accurate image of the person. 

It is essential that you continually check with the person as to the accuracy of your understandings, and that you evaluate yourself to ensure that you are empathising properly.

 A person is projecting (not empathising) when:

• one experiences very strong feelings about the other

• one is convinced that the other is the source of one’s emotions      

• one is obsessed with someone or something

• one feels chained or tied to the other

• one feels isolated from the other

• the other begins to look strange or shady

• one’s feelings about the other become divided or mixed

• one becomes fascinated by an “-ism”

If this is happening, it is essential for your well-being that you ask for supervision or external help.

Be Self Aware

Please keep in mind that to listen to the traumatised is to risk becoming traumatised in turn.

The danger for those who care is that they can become addicted to helping with little awareness of what is happening.  And helpers can become angry or depressed when their efforts to control (or help) do not seem to work.

Because of this danger it is of the utmost importance that helpers, in turn, make use of a supervisor, if for no other reason than to ensure they are not becoming addicted to helping, and thus feeding from the people whom they set out to help in the first place.

Take care, and go gently with yourself.

Source: McCreave, E. (1997) Empathic Listening: For Use with Traumatised Clients. Belfast NI: A Twin Spires Publication.

Published in Guideline Magazine, a publication of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors, March 2021