News Story Directive

Today I printed out some crime stories from a major newspaper and gave one to each of the members of my Empathy group. I asked them to read the story and choose a person in the story to empathize with, and create an image about that. This activity helps promote more victim empathy and also helps the client practice seeing a situation from someone else's perspective. It is interesting to observe who the client chooses to empathize with. In a following session, you could ask them to create an image about empathizing with a different person in the same news story. Or, I sometimes combine the two into the same session and after they talk about their image, I will ask them to empathize with the other people involved in the news story. Sometimes they will do this on their own. This directive can be a good way to address victim empathy without the client having to talk about his own victim. The above example was done by a colleague to a news story about a car crashing into a house. I used this directive with staff in a couple of my workshop-presentations about empathy.