*Trigger warning:  About midway through this interview, we spend about 3 minutes discussing a client mentioned in the book that was not nice to animals. I give the verbal trigger warning along with a gong sound at RT 24:10. If you like, you can then fast forward to RT 29:00.

Dr. Douglas Flemons, author of “Empathetic Engagement in Clinical Practice” as well as six other books, joins us on the podcast to talk about empathy and how to develop more of it. We talk about:

  • Empathy vs Sympathy
  • Empathy as a choice
  • What happens when empathy breaks down in our relationships
  • How to increase empathetic ability while holding onto your own values and self-identity
  • Hypnosis as an empathetic experience

Dr. Douglas Flemons is a psychotherapist, emeritus professor, and author of books on writing, hypnosis and therapy, psychotherapy and Eastern philosophy, and suicide assessment. His new book on empathy, Empathic Engagement in Clinical Practice, draws on the insights of researchers, philosophers, and artists, along with his own forty years of clinical practice and thirty years of teaching and supervising.

Purchase the book at https://contextconsultants.com/our-books/

See more about Dr. Flemons if you would like to work with him or consult with him at https://contextconsultants.com

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Do you have Chronic Insomnia? Find out more about Dr. Liz’s Better Sleep Program at https://bit.ly/sleepbetterfeelbetter

Search episodes at the Podcast Page http://bit.ly/HM-podcast

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About Dr. Liz

Interested in hypnosis with Dr. Liz? Schedule your free consultation at https://www.drlizhypnosis.com

Winner of numerous awards including Top 100 Moms in Business, Dr. Liz provides psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and hypnosis to people wanting a fast, easy way to transform all around the world. She has a PhD in Clinical Psychology, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) and has special certification in Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy. Specialty areas include Anxiety, Insomnia, and Deeper Emotional Healing.

A problem shared is a problem halved. In person and online hypnosis and CBT for healing and transformation.

Listened to in over 140 countries, Hypnotize Me is the podcast about hypnosis, transformation, and healing. Certified hypnotherapist and Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Dr. Liz Bonet, discusses hypnosis and interviews professionals doing transformational work.

Thank you for tuning in!

Transcript

Dr. Liz 0:00
Hi everyone. Dr Liz here. You can possibly hear the jets flying overhead as I record this.That’s the Navy jets during their practice rounds. I talk about it later in the interview. So just happened to by coincidence, happen when I’m recording this, I have been sick for weeks, actually, like a month. So the podcast is publishing a little bit off schedule, because the fatigue has been wiping me out, honestly, but I am finally headed into the end of this cold, I hope, and my voice is a little bit more back to normal. So my interview is with Dr Douglas Flemings about his new book on empathy. And let me say right here, I highly recommend this book, even if you are not a clinician. It is written for clinicians, but I just found it so so informative. When I was reading it, thinking about all the different relationships in my life, clinical, in terms of my clients, as well as my marriage,

My husband and I really had a rough year last year in 2025 this is airing in 2026

and he popped out sometime during the year that he has very little empathy. And my therapist asked, Well, is he willing to work on it? Because empathy is learned, and we train it out of men of his age. He’s at his 50s, when when they were little, we often trained it out of them in that age range. But right around that time, Dr Fleming’s book came across my email inbox. Let’s just call that the universe working in my favor there.

And so I was reading it going along, and he states, “empathy is not a state of being, but a choice to engage a compassionate commitment to bring interpersonal curiosity and body assisted knowing into your relationship with clients.” And I would sub out with clients, with people with loved ones, with spouses, partners, children, ex spouses. That’s a hard one for a lot of people, but I was just really struck by how he explored it and how he defined it and and then the rest of the book, where he talks about how to develop it really so I don’t want to talk too long here. I hope you’re healthy and safe. Peace.

Hi. Dr Flemings, welcome to the hypnotize me podcast.

Dr. Flemons 2:45
Thank you so much. I’m delighted to be here.

Dr. Liz 2:47
Yes, I was really excited to see the book come across my inbox. I get lots of pitches, actually, for books, and they don’t all make it onto the podcast. But I was quite impressed with yours, and I think it’s pretty timely as well.

Dr. Flemons 3:05
Great. Well, I look forward to chatting with you about it. Yes, yeah. So it is all about empathy.

Dr. Liz 3:13
Yes, all in and for the audience, it is really written for clinicians who are training, but I found it very useful. I’ve been in practice. Well, I had a gap there of about 10 years after I graduated, but I graduated from grad school in 1990 is it 98 or 97 one of the two. And I found it very useful, even as like an advanced practitioner in private practice, I found it useful,

yeah, but it is really written for clinicians trying to figure out, yes, how to navigate empathy, professionally in the therapeutic relationship, how

Dr. Flemons 3:56
to navigate it, how to safely engage with it. Because, as as you know, clinicians get concerned about burnout, and some people think that if they’re empathic, it puts them at risk of connecting too much with their clients, and therefore suffering alongside them, and then having to protect themselves from that. And I was offering a way to be able to engage empathically that doesn’t result in burnout.

Dr. Liz 4:23
I was quite impressed with the in the first, I think it was two chapters into the third, where you really define like, what is it like? Yeah, I think sometimes this country is struggling with that. There’s been a recent

I don’t know what to call it accusation maybe that empathy doesn’t exist. It’s sort of this made up term, and your book proves quite the opposite. Well, in fact, so it is a made up term. It didn’t emerge into the language in the same way that the words.

Dr. Flemons 5:00
Sympathy and compassion did it was coined in 1908 by a psychologist, Titchener, but he coined it as a way of translating a German word einforeng, which was itself coined in 1873 by Robert bischer, who was wanting to make sense of how it is that when we look at some piece of art that we get emotionally moved by it? So he invented this term einfelhng, which means to feel into an object of beauty, or any object. So psychologists were interested in that in Germany as it applied to relationships between people. And then the idea was, how do we bring that notion into English? And Titchener, who had a nice background in Etymology In Greek and Latin and so on, coined the term empathy that was piggybacked on sympathy. Sympathy means to feel with simple it means the with Empathy means to feel or to suffer. Empathy means to feel into just like einfull. And so the idea was to feel into something rather than or feel into, to feel into another person’s suffering, rather than to feel with it. And so it was invented in that sense, way to convey a particular idea about knowing,

Dr. Liz 6:28
okay, got it Yes. And so you do different, differentiate between the three, compassion, sympathy and empathy.

Dr. Flemons 6:37
Really Yes. And the interesting thing is, you said, you started off saying, yes, there’s a lot of confusion in the country. There’s a lot of confusion everywhere about empathy, and it’s been the case since the get go. You have different people defining it differently, and then they argue with each other about whether he has value or not, but they’re really across. They’re talking past each other because they’re not necessarily talking about the same idea. My hope was to to couch the discussion in a grounding of understanding that would allow us, if we’re going to disagree about it, let’s disagree about the same, same idea. At least

Dr. Liz 7:15
Yes, yeah. So you end up defining it, I would say in the book of like, I’m going to quote from the book, empathy is not a state of being, but a choice to engage, a compassionate commitment, to bring interpersonal curiosity, embody assisted knowing into your relationship with clients, and I would say, into your relationship with anyone that you’re choosing to engage with empathetically.

Dr. Flemons 7:45
Absolutely, you’re right. I wrote the book for clinicians, but it broadly applicable. I work with couples, and I would say a big core of my work with couples is helping them discover how to be empathically curious about their partner and develop it as a skill. So it’s not something that comes to us sympathy. We’re wired for sympathetic resonance. If you have a particular kind of affective experience and I’m in your presence and I don’t consider you other, if I consider you like one of my tribe, one of my people, then I am going to automatically physiologically resonate with your emotional experience. It’s just a fact. Yeah, empathy is quite something different. It’s not something that I just automatically come to it’s something I choose to engage in.

Dr. Liz 8:41
Yeah, well, that’s part I was really impressed with, is that it’s a choice. You define it as a choice. And definitely, I’ve, I’ve saw couples for many, many years. And for sure, it’s like when the relationship starts to break down, sometimes people actually don’t make that choice like they start to see the partner as other versus tribe? Absolutely, yeah. And so then all kinds of stuff breaks down from there, is what I believe in our relationships. If we’re choosing not to be empathetic, then we choose all kinds of other stuff as well. As a result of that, like being unhelpful or not being kind, or, you know, things like that, from the practical to the more emotional. Yeah, 100%

Dr. Flemons 9:32
what tends to happen when people are angry with each other and they’re trying to resolve a situation, they both have this idea, if only you will agree with me that you’re wrong, we’ll be able to resolve this and get along. And since they’re each coming from that position, you have an ongoing argument about who’s right. And there’s the idea, and it’s not just between couples, within couples, that are upset with each other, but we all have this sense that I. Our view of whatever is not just a personal perspective, it’s somehow objectively true, and empathy is a nice way to get outside of that mistaken conception that with empathy, My desire is to better grasp your position, grasp your commitment to your position, grasp all the reasons for your choices and everything by making sense of it inside of the logic of your world, not from over here, my outside or perspective of casting aspersions on it, but if You’re going to do it, if you’re going to hold your opinion or make the choices that you’ve made, it makes sense to you. So my way of appreciating you is to make sense of it alongside you, inside you, in a sense, inside your world. That’s what I’m attempting to do with them.

Dr. Liz 10:59
Yes, yeah. So what happens when someone’s just refusing to do that?

Dr. Flemons 11:06
Well, people often refuse to do it out of a place of integrity. If I think that you’re morally bankrupt, okay, then, then I can take the position, the judgmental position I don’t want to have anything to do with you. And somehow, if I find my curiosity projecting inside of your world, I’m somehow putting at risk my integrity, like so if I write you off, not just as other, but as alien, disgust. You say, then, then I am protecting my worldview by refusing to to grant you any sort of integrity by getting curious about it. And I think that’s really characterizes what’s going on in the world these days is people wanting to make sure that they aren’t undermined. They’re they’re feeling their world, their their beliefs aren’t undermined. By reaching out and understanding how somebody else could have such a divergent perspective.

Dr. Liz 12:15
Yes, there was some study that I read around. What they did is they had meetings in person of two. Actually, it was around gun control, two very divergent views, people who were totally against gun ownership and and then people who are pro for it. And they had, I actually, I want to back up on that. I think it was zoom meetings, where they invited them to be part of this study, where they really the intention was to understand the other viewpoint at a deeper level. That was an original intention. And then once that Zoom portion ended, and they went just in a Facebook group where you can’t see the other person. Actually, it tended to devolve again into, you know, we have our Opposing Viewpoints, and that’s that, like we’re not going to even see the other person’s viewpoint or try to do that. I find that really interesting, because so much of our world right now is faceless when we’re interacting with people.

Dr. Flemons 13:28
Yeah, there has been lots of research that the opinions that are perpetrated on social media are are so divergent and so out there, because we’re not in person. We’re not face to face with the person with whom we’re communicating. So it’s easy to trash when you’re not looking into the eyes of the person that you’re trashing.

Dr. Liz 13:52
Yes, yes. And I think therapy remains. I see it as a protected space where even if we’re doing online therapy, it’s still almost always we’re actually seeing the person. I mean, sometimes there is telephone therapy that happens as well, where you can get an empathetic sense of the person, absolutely through the telephone.

Dr. Flemons 14:20
No, you’re getting moved by the by the tonality of their voice, the effect that you can pick up going on.

Dr. Liz 14:27
Yes, you know, people are all worried about AI replacing therapy. And I tend to think it is an empathetic experience that I think people crave, that people want, that. They want the protected space to where, you know, cell phones are not coming in. For most therapists, cell phones are not coming in and and this, and it’s like this confidential space, even where I think that empathetic or sympathetic. Experience is still present in our society.

Dr. Flemons 15:04
It is absolutely possible you talked a moment ago about accruing, acquiring a deeper understanding of the other person, and the only way to do that is to cross that boundary between self and other and and appreciate the complexity and the intricacy the nuances of their of their world from inside of the logic of it.

Dr. Liz 15:32
That is often the task of the therapist. Let me understand your world and work within

Dr. Flemons 15:38
the task of any human really, if Uncle Ned at the holiday party is or holiday dinner is pissing you off, then you can either retreat in judgment, or you can get curious.

Dr. Liz 15:54
Yes, so how would someone let’s say raise Let me see how I phrase this. Raise their tolerance for curiosity. Let’s say because you’re right, like you can retreat in judgment and be like, I’m just not interested at all, like I’m not even going there. And you’re saying sometimes that is coming from a place of protecting someone’s integrity, like I can’t even discuss it. I see it often, though, as, like, emotional regulation too. So not necessarily integrity, but like they’re, they’re getting more dysregulated, right? Like more angry or sad even, or I, you know, I’m not in a place to even have a curious conversation. So how, what would you recommend for people who actually do want to understand more, but feel like I get in this situation and then I just can’t

Dr. Flemons 16:50
much of what happens in conversations with family members with whom we’re at odds and with Friends, or maybe former friends with whom are at odds is the idea that if we engage in the conversation that successfully, I will have successfully converted you to my perspective. And if that’s not possible, then why even bother and and I think maybe that’s not an explicitly held commitment. It’s sort of implicit. If we’re going to have an argument, whole notion of debate is somebody’s going to win. If somebody wins, somebody loses, and and you’re trying to propose the correct view and trying others to have others judge yes, you’re you won the debate because you had a more coherent message to send, and that, if I’m successful, I will have converted you to my perspective. Well, that’s a way of engaging in conversations that is a zero sum game means that in order for me to win, you have to lose. And if that’s what’s happening at the at the dinner party, you have to read, and you don’t want to have an escalation of unpleasantness, then there’s either you retreat, you refuse, because you don’t want to, you don’t want to encourage the other person to get bombastic or whatever, or you just you don’t care anymore, because it’s too hurtful, it’s too hard to listen to them Go on, etc, etc. But if you think my job isn’t here, my goal here isn’t to transform your understanding, but it’s to make sense of it, then it can become safe to be curious. Okay, how does it? How does it make sense for this person that you have felt close to in the past, to be holding a view that you find abhorrent, even can you find your way into being curious how it makes sense for them without thinking that, that if you can appreciate how and why they hold their view, that you’ll somehow, by virtue of doing that, lose your own, but it’s quite possible to hold on to your values and so on and still be curious about how someone that you, in this case, someone that you care about, could have such a divergent view

Dr. Liz 19:34
the in the research you’ve done around it, do people have different capacities for that?

Dr. Flemons 19:39
People definitely come differently wired for levels of sympathy, so that automatic resonance, if I’m in your presence and your suffering. Then then we’re all wired to some degree for that. But there are people that that have been deemed. In public discourse as empaths, which I think is a is a misnomer. They should be deemed sympaths Because they’re coordinating their their emotional response is in coordination with the person that they’re around. They’re very sensitive. Yes, physiologically, yes, yeah. So some people are very sensitive. Some people are more oblivious. So we come wired differently for the degree to which we might be moved by someone else’s suffering. It also changes depending on how much we care for someone. So if they, if you consider them part of your group, if they’re part of your family, certainly if they’re part of your, your some sort of identified group, and they’re hurt in some way. It’s, it’s the research demonstrates that you have a sympathetic response that’s stronger than if you think that they’re they’re other, they’re the enemy, or they’re just no interest to you. You’re not going to get moved in the same way. So there, there are differences in terms of that automatic calling up of an emotional response. However, everyone can learn the skill of projecting their imagination into the experience of the other person, and regardless of what’s prompting them to get there, it might be, oh my gosh, I feel so bad for you. I want to better appreciate what it is that’s what your experience is. So I’m not just feeling bad for but I understand it in some way. So that might be the prompt, or it might just be intellectual curiosity. How on earth could you hold that view that just makes absolutely no sense to me. That’s a difficult starting point, because incredulity is in there. How on earth could you believe that that’s a big gap to cross? But you can let me let go of my incredulity and just then be inspired by my curiosity. How is it that you are positioning yourself in the world in the world in the way that you are that’s interesting. Let me explore. And then exploration takes me into and this is a real important part of empathy, an embodied understanding of your experience, not an intellectual, distant, cool understanding, but a warm and pulsing understanding from within your world.

Dr. Liz 22:23
TRIGGER WARNING: Dr. Flemons and I discuss a case from the book that involves animal cruelty. If you would like to skip this discussion, please fast forward to RT 29:00.

You give the example in the book about the young man who’s cruel to cats, yes, yeah, and how the clinician and training really found they couldn’t work with them.

Dr. Flemons 22:39
Yeah, that was a position of personal safety. My student was disgusted by it, personally disgusted and incredibly upset. It hurt her soul to even contemplate talking to him. So the ability to work empathically requires a choice to do that, and she couldn’t make the choice to relate to him as a human being. She saw him as a monster, or couldn’t, and I respected that. It’s just that she couldn’t, then be a therapist with for him. I as a supervisor, then took over the case and allowed her to watch, along with my team, from behind a one way mirror, as I worked with him, I was also, you know, on a human to human basis, disgusted by what he was doing. But when I went into clinician mode, my my personal feelings became irrelevant to my commitment to see if I could be helpful with him, for him, as a result of the work that we did, he stopped torturing the cats. He went back to na which he had gone to a few years earlier. He got back sober. He started taking care of himself. Things turned around, but that would be impossible if I continued to hold him at arm’s length as some kind of disgusting monster had to get to get into being able to recognize that he was human,

Dr. Liz 24:12
and he was coming in for help with that, like he recognized it as

Dr. Flemons 24:16
absolutely being imposed on him. He was reaching out saying, I am finding myself compelled to do this thing, and I want to stop.

Dr. Liz 24:30
So it interesting to me. It’s like your commitment to help superseded any personal feelings you had about it, about what he was actually doing Yes.

Dr. Flemons 24:42
So my personal feelings are important, and when I end a session, I can go back home and contemplate what he does, and still feel my stomach feeling cold nausea at the thought when I’m doing the work with him. My job is to leave my personal perspective and beliefs and everything at the door and to project my selfless imagination into his world, so that we’re both hanging out in inside of the choices that he makes when he’s coming home from work, and he’s, as he would say, he was described getting cottonmouth as he anticipated going home where he would then hurt the cats. This was a solution for for a lot of stuff that was going on. For him, it was a horrific solution from an outside perspective, but for him, it was solving a dilemma that we won’t have time to go into, but but making sense of it as him reaching for some way of treating this turmoil inside of him. Hurting cats was one way we ended up finding other ways so that birding the cats wasn’t necessary and it was possible to get there without then me, forgetting me, that’s irrelevant from from his worldview. How did arriving at this solution make sense? And then that opened up the possibility of arriving at a different solution to the turmoil that he was going through.

Dr. Liz 26:19
Got it and so for I mean, I remember as a beginning clinician, sometimes that is very difficult. So I was originally trained as a child specialist, and I’m working in community mental health. Then abuse cases would come in children who have been abused. You know, I found over the years, you I had more capacity, let’s say, or let’s say that choice to be helpful became like you say it superseded everything else. And I, I felt that develop over the years.

Dr. Flemons 26:55
Yes, it is a skill development. Yeah, because we do think, how could a parent ever do that to a child? Therefore I can’t, I can’t even consider them to be human. And it feels safe to us to be able to say there’s humans and then there’s these monsters that would do the unthinkable anything to do with them. I don’t want to let them into my my worldview, because it’s just too disgusting. That’s a way that so many of us manage in such a difficult world. It’s a skill building to be able to say I can safely hold on to my values, my integrity, my ethics, and venture into their world so that I give them the legitimacy of being a human that’s suffering and is making really horrible choices inside suffering.

Dr. Liz 27:48
Well, I also found that, you know, later, after I was done with grad school, I had my own children, and as a parent, I was like, Oh, I understand how abuse happens now. Like, get it completely like, there’s, there are choice points you make

Dr. Flemons 28:07
choice points. And there’s, and there’s resourcefulness, and there’s the loss of resourcefulness from lack of sleep and lack of support from the community, and yes, and all kinds of stuff, yes, simple levels and everything where people can’t access their strength, right?

Dr. Liz 28:26
Yes, yeah. So I think sometimes that life experience too, of just going through different trials in your own life, I would say, increases our capacity for compassion. And you’re saying sympathy is a natural reaction that we have, but definitely the empathy and the compassion for the different circumstances that people find themselves in and the choices they make around it.

Dr. Flemons 28:54
Yeah, it really arrives you at this place where you say, even a reasonable person can end up doing unreasonable things, yes, and they don’t have full access to their strength and resources at the moment.

Dr. Liz 29:09
Yes, yeah, yeah. So let me take a moment here. I had highlighted some other things in the book that I thought were really good. Let me just bring them up. Oh, I did want to ask you about hypnosis. This is an hypnotizing podcast. So often we talk about hypnosis, and you’re on the editorial board of the American Journal for clinical hypnosis, and got the Milton H Erickson award for scientific excellence and writing on clinical hypnosis, which is quite an honor. So how do you see hypnosis as as a pathway, I would say, a pathway into empathy. Or how do you see it in terms of that clinical work?

Dr. Flemons 29:58
I would actually turn it around. On and see empathy as a pathway into hypnosis? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So if it’s two person hypnosis, and if I’m going to invite you into hypnosis, then there’s a quality of that relationship, that invitation, where you and I get in sync. So I will time my the words that I use to accord with say, rhythm of your breath. I will make mention of what you’re doing automatically and acknowledge it and endorse it, which will then create a an in sync connection between what’s happening to you, say, an eye, blink, you blink, right and then so my words and what your body is doing get synced up. Yes, so there’s so there’s a resonance that happens by virtue of the movement into into hypnosis. Yes, he does something similar. If we’re in an empathic conversation, you tell me what you’re struggling with. I do my best to make sense of it. I distill it and I offer it back to you, my understanding back to you, hopefully characterizing it in a way that you can agree with you, agree with me. Tell me, yes, that’s right. That’s what’s going on. We’re now in what I a phrase that I used in the first book I wrote on hypnosis. We’re of one mind, which is just a term that we have in language. That means we’re in agreement. We’re of one mind, yes. So when we’re in agreement, we’re in sync. And that, that quality of being in sync makes it possible to take the next step into hypnosis, which is you, if I’m doing hypnosis with you, me my helping you get in sync with yourself. Yes, and and that getting in sync with yourself means there isn’t one part of you that’s trying to dictate what another part of you will do. But in fact, cool, non volitional stuff can happen because of this mind body connection, and I’m facilitating that mind body connection. So empathy is is a very important component of that development of the relationship between the hypnotist and the and the client such that they’re in accord, and the person can then become in accord with themselves.

Dr. Liz 32:47
Yes, I love that. Thank you. It’s wonderful to hear from like a academic expert on it, because sometimes I myself lack the language to explain it. Often I’ll get people that come to me and and they really, I try to set expectations as much as possible, not just on the podcast but in my inquiry calls, and even in the first session of like, I have to understand where you’re coming from first before we can really make the change. Like, you can’t just come in and lay down on the couch and I wave a magic wand and, boom, you’re changed, right? Like we there is a talking portion of the session where I am trying to understand, Okay, how did this develop? What do you want to replace it with? What purpose is it serving in your life? If it’s a habit we’re changing, or for trauma, that’s much deeper work, even of like, okay, let’s see what happens. And we do become of one mind, and then the hypnosis itself is awesome. Often a creative process, and sort of collaborative process, collaborative and creative, yes, but often afterwards, someone will say to me, how did you do that? Like they felt so understood, immersed, freer. I had one client say it was like a backpack of bricks being lifted off of her back afterwards, yes, and sometimes I say, I’m really not sure, like, really not sure how I did that, but it is this resonance that happens, and that’s true in person and online, that has happened for me,

Dr. Flemons 34:31
for sure, and it’s and it’s profoundly collaborative. It’s not you that did it, it’s y’all that did it absolutely and not not two people kind of figuring it out, but also body minds collaborating as well, so that a change can emerge. Yes, it’s difficult to find the language to describe that, because we’re really at that. Point inside of creative sparks. Yeah, you ask a jazz musician, how did you come up with that solo? They’re not going to be able to describe in words, while I played the B flat after the G, because that’s a minor. That’s not going to get you anything. They feel moved, and something emerges from that, because they’re in a flow state, and creativity can can spark at that point. And so you’re creating the conditions for creativity to spark

Dr. Liz 35:33
absolutely and I often say, Well, you showed up to do the work like you’re doing your part of the work. I’m really just the facilitator here, but it is a flow state. When I moved to Jacksonville, there’s three naval bases here, and then there’s a marine base and a National Guard very close. Anyway, I didn’t realize when I decided to rent this house that I was in the flight pattern of the Navy jets that fly over. But when I’m in session, and particularly when I’m doing hypnosis, I don’t hear them at all, zero like, and that’s more of a flow state, right? Like everything else drops away when you’re really resonating in that flow state with the client,

Dr. Flemons 36:26
yeah, there. There ends up being really no outside, right? And, and what you’re developing with empathy is the person who’s doing the empathic engagement is not an outsider for the client, or if it’s two members of a couple or two people in a family who are at odds, if absorption happens between the two of them and it becomes an engaging conversation, then outside irrelevances fade away, and you’re just inside the unfolding of the of the fascinating conversation. That’s what you’re certainly doing in hypnosis. So that then when you offer an idea, you offer in a suggestion, you’re floating a suggestion, an idea for how something might change. And if you too are at odds, if you’re at odds with your client, they look askance at that suggestion. I couldn’t do that. What are you talking about? That sounds crazy, that’s impossible, or or they’re concerned about what it is that you’re suggesting. So they’re evaluating, evaluating it. They’re scrutinizing it. But when you’re in a hypnotic relationship, which is the empathy being this importantly, fundamental stepping stone, your suggestions feel like that. They’re coming from inside the relationship, not from outside. Lose the outside. So from inside, anything seems possible, yes, and they’re not having to evaluate it with judgment. So judgment disappears there as well, and then you just have exploration and discover, right?

Dr. Liz 38:10
Yes, and I think that, um, that often comes during that discovery phase. Sometimes when we are talking and I say, I I need your language to put into the suggestions, not my. Mine is irrelevant, you know. And so when you’re using someone else’s language as well, even for the positive suggestions, like, we work on it together collaboratively. Like, what do you think would be an acceptable suggestion to you? And how, how do you phrase that like, what makes sense to you there is that I would the empathetic resonance right of like, okay, we’re using your language, which makes it more acceptable for you to accept

Dr. Flemons 38:53
we’re not. We’re not asking you to accept mine. My job is to get inside of yours?

Dr. Liz 39:01
Exactly, yes, yeah, which takes quite a bit of empathy,

Dr. Flemons 39:08
empathic imagination, for sure,

Dr. Liz 39:10
and intellectual curiosity, as you put it, to like a very much a curiosity of what’s what’s going to work for this person and where. Again, you know, tracing it back, where does it come from? What is it serving and and what do we want to do for the future? How do we want to function in the future? What would be better? Yes, exactly. And sometimes that’s a shorter process for the listeners, and sometimes that’s a longer process, depending on what we’re working on.

Dr. Flemons 39:38
That’s right, yeah, impossible, really, to determine ahead of time what the timeframe will be, just as inside of hypnosis you’re so aware of time tends to disappear. Yes, so the time for resolutions to develop and manifest can vary depending on. So many different factors.

Dr. Liz 40:01
Yes, well, we are coming to the end of our time unfortunately for the interview, because it’s been really fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. It’s been really fun. Good. Can you please let people know how to find the book and also how to contact you if they’d like to work with you, sure.

Dr. Flemons 40:23
So the books on Amazon, empathic engagement and clinical practice. It’s also at APA. It’s being published by APA. So you can find it on the APA site, and or you can find it on my website, context consultants.com and then on there are a bunch of other things that I’ve written, bunch of articles can be downloaded for free, and a number of other books, two of which are about hypnosis. So if people are interested in that, they can find them their context consultants, wonderful.

Dr. Liz 40:55
And if they want to work with you privately, is that the same website? Yes, yeah,

Dr. Flemons 40:59
they can access me, access me through that. I’m licensed in Florida and in North Carolina, so if people live in one of those two places, that’s possible.

Dr. Liz 41:09
Okay, wonderful. And you do couples? Do you do individual work as well?

Dr. Flemons 41:14
Because I do a lot of hypnosis, I do see a lot of individuals, and I see couples, yep.

Dr. Liz 41:20
Okay, wonderful. Well, thank you again for being on the podcast.

Dr. Flemons 41:24
Thank you so much for having me. This is delightful, and I appreciate the close reading of the book.

Dr. Liz 41:29
Oh, it’s fascinating to me. I, you know, wouldn’t say right here, I highly recommend the book. I’ll say that in the intro, Intro to even if you’re not a clinician, I highly recommend the book, yes,

Dr. Flemons 41:42
thank you so much. Elizabeth.