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68 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Responding to others in a spirit of caring and empathy, July 10, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Heart of Being Helpful: Empathy and the Creation of a Healing Presence (Hardcover)

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

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Valuing the basics, August 6, 2007

By

A. Cheney (Denver) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Heart of Being Helpful: Empathy and the Creation of a Healing Presence (Paperback)

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.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars understanding and affection, July 4, 2006

By

lookn good "reader" (Freeville, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Heart of Being Helpful: Empathy and the Creation of a Healing Presence (Paperback)

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

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5.0 out of 5 stars hopeful, really caring about people
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... Read more

Published on April 24, 2007 by reader

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Inside This Book (learn more)
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
healing aura, principled living, emotional helplessness, joyful awareness, induced suffering

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Heart of Being Helpful, Extreme Emotional Crises, Creation of Healing Aura, Nurturing of Human Nature, African Americans, Does Empathy Make Us Too Vulnerable, Helping People Very Different, Someone Else's Presence, Creation of Healing Presence, Grateful Healer, Toxic Psychiatry, Big Joe, Finding Ourselves Through Principled Living, Code Blue, Healing Presence

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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!