Customer Reviews

The Heart of Being Helpful: Empathy and the Creation of a Healing Presence

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Dr Breggin dedicates his book to those who wish to respond to others in a spirit of caring and empathy. He is capturing something of the essence underlying all successful psychotherapy; something that almost eludes description. Clients who have benefited from it know when they have received it. Fellow professionals who have met psychotherapists who convey it know they have been in its presence. But, what is "it"?

"To create healing presence, we fine-tune our inner experience to the inner state of the other person. We transform ourselves in response to the basic needs of the person we are trying to heal and help. Ultimately, we find within ourselves the psychological and spiritual resources required to nourish and empower the other human being" (p.5)

He describes the healing presence as a "way of being, rather than doing, that meets the psychological, social or spiritual needs of (the client)" (p.9)

This requires, first, that we find within ourselves that which is necessary to create a healing presence. We need to pay attention to how people respond to us, not just focus on what we have to offer them.

If your reaction to this so far is, as mine was on reading the initial chapter, "This is great stuff. I know it when I find it, but how do I do it?" Dr Breggin does not disappoint. The book goes on to describe, in the context of empathy and love, how to:

-accept and deal with our own inadequacies and vulnerabilities without trying to pretend that we don't have any.
-address the need to love and be loved.
-take care of, understand and transform ourselves that we may better care for, understand and transform others.
-be spiritually uplifted through empathy, rather than being burdened or overwhelmed.
-be open and responsive without being vulnerable to manipulation, hostility or conflict.
-calmly respond to emotions, even in extreme cases.
-base family and couple therapy around the clients' concept of and basic need for love.
-bridge cultural and racial barriers to help people different from us, through assumptions of common shared human experience.
-help a client come to terms with their childhood, including any abuse, and bring out anger and guilt in a way that leads to understanding and forgiveness.

Continuing throughout this book are themes from Dr Breggin's earlier books and reform work. He has been described as the conscience of psychiatry, speaking out against bio-psychiatry's use of drugs, electric-shock treatment and involuntary institutionalisation. He gives practical empathetic alternatives to helping children "diagnosed" with "deficiencies" or "disorders" without putting them at the mercy of drug regimes.

There is a humility in Dr Breggin's writing that is rare. We discover the reason for this in his chapter on gratitude. Being able to help others is a gift - whether it is one that is innate or one that we have learned - and we can only be grateful for such a gift. When a client can sense that we are grateful for having the opportunity to help them, it breaks down further the barrier created by our "professional" aura, leaving room for our empathetic, healing presence.

Is love enough? No, of course not. Therapists need training, information, skills and wisdom. But without empathy and love to underscore our other professional resources there will be no healing or spiritual growth.

In academic terms, Dr Breggin is following in the school of thought developed by Carl Rogers and Eric Fromm. Whether you sympathise with this approach, are eclectic in your approach, or use another approach entirely, you will still get a great deal from this book because it captures so much of the soul of psychotherapy. Build other skills and techniques on this base and they will be much more likely succeed. Therapists of however many years' practise could get a lot from this book. Students of psychotherapy and counselling should add it to their list of essential reading

This book is a pleasant, upbeat, well-written and thought-provoking discussion of the importance of developing a therapeutic bond -- what the author calls "healing presence" -- between helping professionals and their clients. Although he isn't mentioned in the book, I was reminded over and over of Carl Rogers, by statements like "being genuinely helpful has more to do with a certain way of being than with doing a certain thing"(p. 5) and "In creating healing presence, we don't change the other person as much as we transform ourselves in response to the other person. We find within ourselves the inner resources that speak directly to the other person's psychological and spiritual needs. (p. 5)." Very client-centered. The major downside of the book is that neo-Rogerian concepts and prose are bound to be off putting to some readers.

The author's warnings about a predisposition to rely solely on "miracle meds" to the exclusion of in-depth assessment and treatment of underlying causes probably needs to be repeated, particularly in these times of "evidence-based outcomes assessments" that may soon dictate all third-party reimbursements.

Several of the book's essays -- for that is what each chapter offers -- plunged me into a reassessment and a soul searching of my own practice. Am I creating and fostering a "healing presence" with each client? Am I respectful and sensitive to my own vulnerabilities so that I can sense and respect the vulnerabilities of my clients? Do I falsely allow my clients to think that I am adequate to every challenge I face and thus disempower them to become more adequate when facing their own challenges? Do I really understand the sine qua non of empathy? And, yes, am I too quick to discuss and recommend pharmacotherapy and leave it at that? Twenty-five years as a practitioner enhances rather than diminishes the need for periodic self-evaluation. The essays in this book are fine catalyst for doing so.

I see two audiences benefiting from this brief but meaty book. One is salty, chronologically gifted practitioners like myself, with many years and clients behind us and hopefully many more ahead, who can profit from the periodic review of the basics and the frequent self-evaluation we were trained to conduct. The essays in this book facilitate that. The second audience is therapists-in-training, those who may not have read On Becoming a Person (Rogers, 1961). For that reason, I've ordered a copy of this book and sent it to my daughter, a graduate student in clinical community counseling at Johns Hopkins, where Breggin once taught.

*This is a condensed version of my review of the book in PsycCRITIQUES--Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 51 (47), 2006.

I am a client and reader of Dr Breggin..This book is all him. The book and Petter are great!

This is refreshingly true. I am a Christian and wish the people in the churches would read this. Several years ago when in a Bible study and concerned about family members, one who was being "treated" for mental illness with nothing but medication, I was crying and didn't talk about it in detail because it was confidential. I was crying tears of joy and relief thinking they cared when one of them told me I needed to go to the hospital for psychitric treatment. They took me there against my protests. This was not caring. I have forgiving them but see in this book written by a Jewish psychiatric real caring and I am thankful to God for that. After this experience I looked up on the Internet for anyone who thinks you can be mentally healthy after being diagnosed mentally ill without psychiatric drugs and was happy to find out about these books.