The Balance Between Empathy and Compassion in Therapy

In this episode, I talk with trauma specialist Dr. Frank Anderson about his book Transcending Trauma: Healing Complex PTSD with Internal Family Systems. We discuss:

- What is complex post traumatic stress disorder?

- How widespread some kind of trauma or overwhelming experience is

- The usefulness of empathy vs compassion, especially in clinical settings

- The importance and non-importance of distance between client and clinician

- The difference between IFS and other modalities with regard to the clinician’s mental capacities, or “therapist parts”

- The multiplicity hypothesis of internal family systems 

- The difference between grasping the tools of IFS while learning the model and grasping the core message