How to Use Big Empathy Drawings in Therapeutic Conversations

In this webinar you will learn how to use the big empathy drawing with children, teenagers and adults. It’s a key intervention to be used by trained emotionally available adults to help a child or teenager process painful life events in a safe, engaging, creative way. Mental health problems result from painful life experiences that haven’t been properly processed (felt, reflected on, put into words, made sense of).

The big empathy drawing, is a mode of is collaborative sense-making (see Psychological Formulation, British Psychological Society) to convey empathic understanding, visually and with images and metaphors. Without engaging in the meaning-making process of telling their story of painful life events to someone trained to listen and understand, too many children and young people will develop debilitating mental health symptoms.

By and large the big empathy drawing is an intervention to use when a child/teenager pours their heart out to you. There are many examples of this on the webinar. That said, there is also an example of how to use a b.e.d., with a child whose behaviour and learning have gone downhill due to disturbing incidents in their life but who doesn’t want to talk directly about it.