How to listen like a therapist- 4 secret skills.mp4

I'm going to show you the four secret skills therapists use to listen and teach you how you can start using the skills to improve your relationships today. Hi, I'm clinical psychologist Dr. Alan Mattu. I've been doing therapy for almost 15 years now. And the skills I'm going to show you are the skills I learned in my early training. And they're the skills I use every single time I sit down with a patient. They're not rocket science. They're pretty simple, but they're skills that most people outside of the mental health and counseling fields don't really learn because you never really see them in action. We're not really taught how to do them. And I want you to have these skills because they are so helpful when you're talking to someone who's going through a difficult experience, like a friend or a family member. They're also really helpful when you're in a tough conversation in a business setting in a negotiation type of setting. While they're simple, they're very hard to do. They go against a lot of your natural urges to jump in in a conversation or to talk about yourself or to offer advice. They go against all of those urges. So while they're simple, remember, they're going to take a lot of practice to learn how to do well. Skill number one is to reflect back, to just listen to what the other person is saying to you, to follow the sequence of events they're describing, and then to reflect it back to say it back. So for example, I might say, so this happened to you, and then you experienced this and then you did this as a result, and that was the reaction. Does that sound right? Number one, it shows the other person that you're actually listening. You really care about what they're saying. Number two, it forces you to turn down the part of your brain that wants to interrupt or offer advice, and it forces you to turn up the part of your brain that is about empathy and understanding and compassion. And number three, it gives you a chance to check in to see if you're actually hearing things right, and it helps to clarify what the person is actually experiencing. I so often do this in therapy, and I am completely wrong. Like I've reflected things back as I've heard them, and I have missed out on important details, or what I thought was important is not actually important to my patient. And it's this other thing that I just completely didn't realize. So through the process of reflecting, you show that you care, you have to care just to be able to reflect. And also you get to a shared understanding, and you get to overcome barriers in understanding. It's the most important skill that everything else that I talk about in this video is built upon. You can't do everything else until you are able to reflect back. Skill number two is to ask the person, what is this like for you? The stereotype about therapists is we often ask, how does that make you feel? I hate that question because it's a stupid question. Most of the times people who are coming to me have a hard time understanding what they feel, or they might be so overwhelmed that they don't even know what they feel because they're feeling so many different things. Or what is usually the case is people have a hard time putting words to emotions. That's part of why they're coming into treatment. So I don't like that question. It's a dumb question in most situations. It's not a dumb question if you and someone else have been working for a while and you kind of built up a understanding of emotions, how the person experiences them, stuff like that. But that comes later. Before all of that, you want to check in with the other person. Once they've described this thing that's going on for them is to ask them, how are they experiencing this? What's going on in your body right now as you're describing this? What's it like for you to go through that situation? When you describe this stuff, what was popping up in your head? Was anything going on inside? Those are the kind of questions I want to ask because I want to get to a place where I understand how is this person experiencing this event. Some people might experience something and they feel just really sad, really bummed. They feel a sense of loss. They feel shut down. Other people might go through the exact same experience and get angry, get upset, want to hit something, want to break something. And other people might not feel anything in their body, but they're experiencing all these thoughts and maybe they they are having a hard time shutting those thoughts off. I'm not a mind reader. I wish I was like Professor X, that would make my job a lot easier, but I'm not. The best I can do is ask this question, how, how are you experiencing that? What was that like for you as you describe this? What's going on for you? That gets me the closest I can get to actually knowing what what is going on for this person. Skill number three is validation. Helping the person to understand that what they're going through, what they're experiencing makes sense given the situation that they have been in. So this is now building upon reflection and understanding how the person is experiencing this event. And you're kind of starting to put those two things together. So it's something like if I had gone through all of this, I would have definitely been feeling this too, or saying, gosh, it makes so much sense that you're so upset about this. It's because X, Y and Z happened to you. I don't care who the person is, what your relationship to them is, what emotions they're going through. You can always find a way to validate the experience of another person, their emotions are real, whether or not they make sense to you. It is what the other person is experiencing. It's their authentic experience. And if you can find a way to validate that, you go so far to releasing more of that tension, that difficulty, the struggle, the pain that the other person is going through. Sometimes just validation in itself is enough to help the person overcome the problem they're going through. And it can be very hard for us to validate the experience of others, especially if you're a parent trying to validate the experience of your teenager because it doesn't make any sense to you. But I will push you there. There's always, always a reason why someone's experiencing something, even if it doesn't make sense to you. It is the authentic experience of the other person. So find a way to validate that. If you are able to do that, you have shown that you have empathy and compassion for the other person. And validation is not the same thing as supporting or approving the behavior or the experiences of the other person. No, it's not saying that, like, I think it's really great that you got angry and punched that wall in your room. Like, good job. No, it's not that. You're not saying that this is a good thing. What you're saying is, I get it. I get it. You were really upset and you went through a lot of difficult things and this happened. I think if I was that upset, I might have hit something myself. That's validation. It's not approving, but it's helping the other person to make sense of what they have gone through. Skill number four is to understand the ambivalence. So what does that word mean? Ambivalence is a word that gets tossed around and I think it's sort of lost its original meaning. What ambivalence really means, it's about being honestly torn between two different paths, two different decisions. Usually in therapy, what it means is you want to make this change and at the same time, you're struggling to make that change because of important reasons. So what I want to do is in situations where someone wants to maybe change a habit like smoking or drinking, eating, physical activity, stuff like that, usually there's a lot of ambivalence that's coming up and what most people want to do is they want to jump in and give advice. Oh, have you tried this? Have you tried that? But none of that really works because you haven't really understood the ambivalence first. You haven't understood why the person is torn between wanting to make a change and not wanting to change what's going on. So the important question to ask is, what is that doing for you? How is that helping you? What do you like about that? So for example, someone struggling with smoking, what do you like about smoking? How does smoking help you? What do you enjoy about smoking? What does it do for you? And you will be so surprised at the reasons. Sometimes people say, well, it helps me to connect with other people or it helps me to deal with stress or it just, you know, it really feels good or, um, I forget why I started doing this, but the reason why I do it now is it's, I'm just kind of stuck in this pattern, but I like, I really like that feeling of holding this thing. Like there could be so many different reasons and again, different people have different reasons why, but you ask a person, how is this helping you? And then you ask, what do you like about it less or what, what are things that you don't enjoy about it? What are things that you dislike about it? We also ask a person zero to 10, how ready are you to make a change, uh, or to change this, the situation. And if someone says zero or someone says five or someone says 10, that gives you really important information. Then you can ask, Oh, what makes it zero? What makes it five? What makes it 10? Sometimes you can also ask zero to 10, where were you a month ago? Oh, you were, you're a five now, but you were a zero before. What changed? Or you can find out that, Oh, you're a zero right now and you're a five before. Um, how did it go down? These are the four skills I use before I even get to a place of trying to help someone make a change in their life. And again, they sound simple, but they're very hard to do in practice because so many strong emotions will be coming up for you when you're listening to someone else. And you might start to judge the experience that they're going through, or you might want to immediately jump in and give the other person advice, but pause when that happens. Remember this video and just practice using one of these skills with the other person. I promise you over time, it's going to get easier and you'll start to see the benefits of this approach. If you want to learn more behind the scenes secrets of being a therapist, check out this playlist that I made for you. It's all about that stuff. There's one video in particular, which is the most common question I get. It's about how psychologists analyze their patients. I tell you all the ways in which I do that. So check that out for more. It's time for this week's Gekbu challenge, which I'm also combining with this week's comment of the week. And this week's comment of the week comes from Julie Herrick, who says, I understand that getting comfortable being uncomfortable is a technique for moving through anxiety. At the same time, I have experienced situations in which that sentiment sentiment has been used to manipulate me to do things that I was genuinely uncomfortable with for good reason and later regretted doing. And it concluded that I should have listened to my gut after all. Any advice on how to distinguish between discomfort that's worth pushing through versus discomfort that's a legitimate signal to stop doing a thing? This is such a good question and such a great comment. So thank you, Julie, for this comment. Gekbu isn't about always doing the tough thing. It's not about ignoring the things that your body is telling you to do. It's not about just biting your lip and get getting through a situation. So I really hope that's not the message I have gotten across. And if it is, I am sorry, I'm going to clarify what I mean exactly by Gekbu right now. Gekbu, it's about when you are experiencing discomfort related to a situation that's getting in the way of your life. And it's consistent with your values to overcome this and it's going to actually help you with your own goals in your life to overcome the situation. That's when I want you to get comfortable being uncomfortable. It's when it makes sense. It's going to help you. It's consistent with your values as a person. That's when I want you to practice all the things that we talked about in these videos. There's two videos I made that go into more detail about this. The first is about how to deal with emotions in a healthy way. The second is about how to overcome anxiety. How am I going to practice Gekbu this week? The big thing for me is it's it's the holidays. I've got a lot of family stuff coming up this week. So much more than I've ever had in a long time. I just moved back to California from New York and I have a ton of family here. I had like no family in New York. So a lot of family meetings, a lot of interacting with people who might be very different places than me in lots of different beliefs, ideas, perspectives, politics. So for me, it's about practicing these skills in this video this week with all of my relatives and extended family and all of that sort of stuff. And if I the specific challenge I'm going to do is not only listen, but ask this question. If I get into tough discussions with people about politics, I'm going to ask the person this question. Why do you think this issue is so important to me? Because it kind of forces the person to use some of these listening skills that are that I talk about in this video. And I can also do another version of this, which is why is this issue so important to you? Which is a way that I can better understand these things and practice these skills. This is my last video for 2019. And I just want to take a moment and thank you, everyone in the Mighty Psyche for being so supportive of everything I'm doing this year and for being a part of this community. I am so excited for all the stuff I'm working for in 2020. I'm so excited to be full time on YouTube and to do so much more stuff. I got a lot of cool stuff in the cooker for you. So if you want to learn more about the stuff I'm working on, I've got a 2020 goals video that I just released on my Patreon so you can check that out. And also just want to take a quick moment to thank all my new patrons. There's a lot of new people who have joined recently. Thank you, Emily, Troy, Alexander, Jose, Julie, Rebecca, Mariana, Carl, Cecily, Greg, Christy, Bob, Sam, Lena. Hope you all have a good holiday break and I will see you in 2020.