It’s also possible to take the gradual approach even if you only have one opportunity to give them feedback, though it is a little outside the bounds of how people normally interact and takes a bit of skill.
Basically, instead of “I need you to have already demonstrated [...] so I can’t give you feedback”, you can say “I need you to demonstrate [...] before I give you feedback”, and then not taking away their opportunity to do so on the spot, if they wish.
There is a difference in experience between saying things that you want to believe/portray vs things that are honest reports of actual simulated experience. The former not only sounds different, but you can often see the emotional response yourself, if you look.
Suppose you ask someone “how would you respond if I told you that your mom died”. They might look at it from the outside and make all sorts of guesses and statements about how they might respond. These generally don’t mean much, because they rely on the persons self-model, which is often not that good even if they aren’t swayed by motivations to pain themselves in a good light. However, another possible way to answer the question is to put yourself in that situation, and let yourself see first hand what kinds of thoughts/feelings/emotions come up. This isn’t always foolproof either, since they might be imagining the stimulus a bit differently than it is going to turn out in real life, but at least their responses will be genuine.
Often, people will try to give you the first type of answer (“Words can’t hurt me! Sticks and stones! Crockers rules!”), and you’re going to need to nudge them towards giving the second type of answer before you can trust what they’re saying. The way you do this is by leaning on the potential for it to be a real situation, which they need to actually be prepared for, but without spilling the secret about whether or not it’s actually real, so that you can keep it as a (realistically simulated) hypothetical. It’s a bit of a balancing act.
While they are too far on the side of “make believe”, you can work things towards “real situation” by holding the frame that you can’t believe/trust their declarations, or by painting an increasingly detailed and vivid picture and speaking more and more as if it’s actually a real thing. If they start to fall too far on the side of “unprepared response to a harsh reality”, you can start to remind them that you haven’t actually confirmed that it is indeed reality yet, and start to bring them back to the perspective of seeing it as a hypothetical—at which point it becomes pretty clear that they weren’t ready to hear that kind of thing and make you feel comfortable telling them, if it were to be true. Of course, in order to be able to do this second step, you have to be able to credibly say that the fact that you’re inquiring about their response to this hypothetical doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true. For example, “It’s impossible to hurt my feelings” might be tested with “Really? Even if everyone you’ve ever known and loved told you that they were putting up with you because they didn’t think you could handle seeing how they really saw you?”, even if the reality is just that you personally think they’re pretty cool, but sometimes a little annoying.
In short, what you want to avoid is taking self-statements without confirmation as truth and then jumping all the way from complete make believe to complete truth, without ever stopping to see how they actually deal with things as they traverse from “totally untrue” to “potentially true” to “truth”.
Slow it down, and traverse that ground in a controlled fashion, while always allowing a comfortable way out.
It’s also possible to take the gradual approach even if you only have one opportunity to give them feedback, though it is a little outside the bounds of how people normally interact and takes a bit of skill.
Basically, instead of “I need you to have already demonstrated [...] so I can’t give you feedback”, you can say “I need you to demonstrate [...] before I give you feedback”, and then not taking away their opportunity to do so on the spot, if they wish.
There is a difference in experience between saying things that you want to believe/portray vs things that are honest reports of actual simulated experience. The former not only sounds different, but you can often see the emotional response yourself, if you look.
Suppose you ask someone “how would you respond if I told you that your mom died”. They might look at it from the outside and make all sorts of guesses and statements about how they might respond. These generally don’t mean much, because they rely on the persons self-model, which is often not that good even if they aren’t swayed by motivations to pain themselves in a good light. However, another possible way to answer the question is to put yourself in that situation, and let yourself see first hand what kinds of thoughts/feelings/emotions come up. This isn’t always foolproof either, since they might be imagining the stimulus a bit differently than it is going to turn out in real life, but at least their responses will be genuine.
Often, people will try to give you the first type of answer (“Words can’t hurt me! Sticks and stones! Crockers rules!”), and you’re going to need to nudge them towards giving the second type of answer before you can trust what they’re saying. The way you do this is by leaning on the potential for it to be a real situation, which they need to actually be prepared for, but without spilling the secret about whether or not it’s actually real, so that you can keep it as a (realistically simulated) hypothetical. It’s a bit of a balancing act.
While they are too far on the side of “make believe”, you can work things towards “real situation” by holding the frame that you can’t believe/trust their declarations, or by painting an increasingly detailed and vivid picture and speaking more and more as if it’s actually a real thing. If they start to fall too far on the side of “unprepared response to a harsh reality”, you can start to remind them that you haven’t actually confirmed that it is indeed reality yet, and start to bring them back to the perspective of seeing it as a hypothetical—at which point it becomes pretty clear that they weren’t ready to hear that kind of thing and make you feel comfortable telling them, if it were to be true. Of course, in order to be able to do this second step, you have to be able to credibly say that the fact that you’re inquiring about their response to this hypothetical doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true. For example, “It’s impossible to hurt my feelings” might be tested with “Really? Even if everyone you’ve ever known and loved told you that they were putting up with you because they didn’t think you could handle seeing how they really saw you?”, even if the reality is just that you personally think they’re pretty cool, but sometimes a little annoying.
In short, what you want to avoid is taking self-statements without confirmation as truth and then jumping all the way from complete make believe to complete truth, without ever stopping to see how they actually deal with things as they traverse from “totally untrue” to “potentially true” to “truth”.
Slow it down, and traverse that ground in a controlled fashion, while always allowing a comfortable way out.