Grin Lord
is a board certified, licensed clinical psychologist who provides
psychotherapy for children, adolescents, parents and families. Grin is
co-Founder of Empathy Rocks, and is an AI researcher. We discuss
the foundational importance of empathic listening for nurturing a more
empathic way of being and world.
"I learned that reflections were incredibly powerful
conversational tools. Good Motivational Interviewing therapists are
supposed to provide a minimum ratio of two reflections to every question,
but ideally four or more per question.
I loved reflections. I thought
reflections were so great, that I designed years of therapy training and
eventually an entire company around teaching people to provide them."
Join us for a
conversation with Dr. Grin Lord, a board certified, licensed
psychologist who innovates AI mental health interventions. She's the CEO
and Co-Founder of Empathy Rocks, on a mission to build human connection
through empathic AI.
The father of
humanistic psychotherapy was appalled by the word “reflections”
As
a training therapist, there was a magical reverence for Carl Rogers- the
father of humanistic psychotherapy. He is credited for having defined
what are now taken-for-granted ingredients in good therapy, like
alliance and unconditional positive regard. His dedication to empathy
and conflict resolution was so expansive that Rogers was nominated for
the Nobel Prize in 1987. He lost to Mother Teresa.
Unhelpful
empathy
by Grin Lord
Well-trained therapists fail even while doing all the “right” things.
When the doors close in the therapy room only the patient and therapist
are privy to what’s happening inside. There are a few exceptions where
this black box is opened: when a therapist is training, doing
court-mandated work, or conducting research. That’s where I come in — my
specialty is listening to therapists perform therapy. I’ve had the
unique privilege to listen to thousands of hours of therapy sessions
over the past ten years to assess the quality of the therapeutic
interaction.
