[bsrhng]

I think a very important step is acknowledging that the person standing in front of you has the capacity to feel whatever negative or positive emotion that you can feel.

(That is regardless of whether you can quote research to the contrary. That is, statements that some people in some cases given some environment in a given moment or period could not pass some bar that some researcher has set.)

Your goal is to discover the person standing in front of you by allowing yourself to see them as a fully capable and imaginative human.

The other thing is to acknowledge that everyone is at some stage in their life. They have realized some things and others not. You want to know how they see the world and how they interpret what happens to them. Usually here you'll discover that they make some rigid assumptions about the world whenever they are mentioning some issue. And usually that issue has something to do with their relationship with other people or with the way that they view themselves.

Within all this is of course you as the listener. If something is making you uncomfortable in this process you should be very honest with yourself what that is. There are of course cases where people are very deeply entangled in their own world and I don't think in those cases it is beneficial for either of you to participate in the conversation.

To add to the previous point, I think realizing that there is a lot to be learned by allowing people to share the way they think with you. I think you would be surprised by what people are willing to tell you if you allow them and the kind of deep relationships you can form that way. It's also very surprising to realize that most issues that people have beneath a very shallow surface of circumstances are really almost the same. And they mostly have to do with the way that they talk to themselves about what happens to them.