Empathy and Race: Bridging the Divide

The challenge put forth in this Workshop is for the participant to discover why this course is important!

Course Overview

(Live In-Person, 6 CEUs)

  • Theoretical Presentation (10-12:00/2 hr. session)
    • Deconstructing Empathy: Correcting misconceptions of what it is and how it works
  • Lunch (1 hour)
  • Case Studies (1:00-3:00/2 hr. session)
    • Real examples of where empathy and enlightened leadership healed disparate groups.
  • Break (:15)
  • Experiential Group Discussion (3:15-5:15/2 hr. session)
    • Personal stories involving race and what they can teach us as clinicians

Course Detail

  1. Review Adlerian understanding of the psychology of inferiority and superiority
    1. A natural unconscious developmental phenomenon
    2. Consequences of this natural process
  2. Introduce the sociology and psychology of competition to be the “dominant group”
    1. Our fundamental social/group nature
    2. Natural tendency to establish hierarchies within groups
  3. How this tendency produces “Dominant Group” dynamics in any society
    1. Examples from various global regions and time periods
    2. How membership in the “Dominant Group” conflates with the psychology of inferiority/superiority
  4. Deconstructing Empathy
    1. Definition by comparison to other pro-social behavior
    2. Hard-Wired Components of Empathy
    3. Mirror Neurons
    4. Embodied Simulation
  5. Cognitive Components of Empathy
    1. Theory of Mind
    2. Perspective Taking
  6. Relational Dynamics 
    1. Mutual Impact Dynamic Concept
    2. “WE Space” Concept
  7. Empathic Flow (Creating the “WE Space”)
    1. Why we can’t always put ourselves in the other person’s shoes
    2. Discovering personal biases (positive and negative)