Persons engaged in addictive and defiant behavior tend to treat parents, family, and others as objects. Many of my teen and adult clients struggle with understanding how others might feel in various situations. The main issue is that my clients are primarily focused on their needs and don’t often care how their actions impact those around them. This applies to substance and porn/sex addiction and other issues. Teaching empathy can be very helpful to clients.

Two exercises I use: 1. I ask clients to select a current news story in which someone is a victim. They have to “be” that victim and write about their experience during the event described. At first, they do a pretty awful job, just giving the facts, so usually have to redo their homework. Eg., someone wrote about being the mother of an infant who
died as a result of her mother using an infant holder that was recently in the news for causing infant death. I asked him to think about what it might have been like for the woman to have carried that baby inside her, to have shared her blood, her oxygen with it. To have lovingly patted her pregnant belly and talked to her baby before it was born, to
have held the baby to her breast and nurtured it. To think about how she loved the baby so much that she wanted to keep it close to her, to hear her heartbeat and smell her scent, and so purchased this baby holder to enhance the experience for her baby. And then the baby died as a result of her wanting to provide an ongoing love experience for the baby. Well, you get the picture.

2. This exercise is one where I hand everyone a sheet of pink copy paper and ask them to describe the qualities of the woman they love the most. Could be a sister, a wife, a mother, daughter. Then, after they have written all the qualities of that person on the paper, I have them wad it up into as tight and compact a ball as they can. They’re pretty
uncomfortable doing this part, by the way, which is a good sign. Then, when they can’t compress it into any smaller or tighter ball, I ask them to unroll it and straighten it out. To try and get all the wrinkles and creases out of the paper. Of course, they can’t get it completely flat again. The point is that when someone is sexually assaulted, it can
affect every aspect of their life and things can never, ever, really be quite the same.

Teaching empathy includes tailoring exercises for each client. As you might see, this is a very integral component of the counseling psychotherapy process.