Again It Requires a Deep Understanding and Sense of Empathy With the Challenges and Dilemmas Faced

We normally think of empathy in counseling equally a chivalrous act in which the insightful counselor deeply understands the grateful client. Carl Rogers considered this empathic connection the centerpiece of a successful counseling human relationship. He offered the following metaphor of the imprisoned customer being emotionally liberated past the advisor:

One thing I have come to look upon as near universal is that when a person realizes he has been securely heard, there is a moistness in his optics. I think in some existent sense he is weeping for joy. It is every bit though he were saying, "Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it's like to be me." In such moments I accept had the fantasy of a prisoner in a dungeon, borer out twenty-four hour period after 24-hour interval a Morse code message, "Does anybody hear me?" And finally one day he hears some faint tappings which spell out "Yep." Past that i elementary response he is released from his loneliness, he has become a human being once more.

Such images of empathic connectedness have get mutual wisdom in the counseling profession. Nosotros strive for this empathic understanding of our clients to establish a warm and trusting relationship. But is it possible that instead of the client welcoming this level of closeness and understanding, he or she might regard the counselor's power to "see the whole person" every bit an intrusion? Instead of wishing to be fully known by the counselor, might the client regard empathic understanding equally a penetration into protected areas of the self, stimulating feelings of exposure, anxiety and shame? Therapeutic empathy creates a paradox. The client wishes to be seen, understood and validated only does not necessarily want be completely known, fifty-fifty to himself or herself, because such deep empathy evokes the client's deepest wounds. In such cases, empathy hurts!

Taking evasive action

The idea that empathy can be hurtful is counterintuitive for about of u.s.a.. After all, we assume that emotional attunement, sincere regard and agreement of the customer's sufferings are qualities that raise the client's ability to become more integrated. We strive to help the client contact and reintegrate those aspects of self that have become lost, cut off or disowned.

But this is where it gets tricky. Those cut off pieces, whether they are sure emotions, ideas, potentialities or ways of being, are sectioned off for a good reason. The reason is because important others in the customer's life did not offer the validating attunement necessary for those pieces to emerge and flourish. In other words, these are the aspects of the client'due south being that were never affirmed every bit legitimate, and the emergence of these potentialities is associated with interpersonal hurting, disappointment, rejection and shame.

The customer's increasing contact with "forbidden" thoughts and feelings through the counselor'due south empathic efforts tin can also evoke an anxious sense of vulnerability. The counselor is becoming important to the client as a new attachment effigy, and the client fears that the advisor volition in some way reject, punish or abandon the client as others take washed in the past. Some clients may even fright that the expression of their prohibited and "dangerous" affects or thoughts volition injure the advisor. Caught between his or her longing for validation and the fear of rejection or interpersonal injury, the client sometimes takes evasive measures before these new traumas tin happen. The counselor is naturally dislocated when, in response to the counselor'south sensitive attunement, the customer suddenly begins creating conflict, criticizing the counseling procedure as unproductive, assigning to the advisor feelings and thoughts that confirm the client's expectations of rejection, or refusing to let the counselor to become an of import attachment figure. When these dynamics happen, the counselor may conclude that the client is being "resistant."

The thought is not new. Freud idea that such clients wished to avoid unconscious conflicts or impulses and became resistant to intervention due to this material bubbling up from within. Simply Freud got it only half right. Clients wish to avoid not merely intrapersonal anxiety and conflict only as well whatsoever reenactment in the relationship with the counselor of interpersonal traumas and developmental disappointments. When counselors recognize that empathy hurts, they pay attention not only to how the client'southward conflicts make sense in terms of past disappointments and injuries, merely also to how these conflicts continue to play out both in the therapeutic human relationship and, more of import, throughout the client's life. To finer piece of work with the emergence of the client's painful conflicts and the reenactment of these conflicts with the counselor requires that nosotros see these disruptions equally opportunities to place and reclaim lost parts of the self and, ultimately, as therapeutic consequences of deep empathy.

Every person "grows a self" in endless encounters with important others, developing self-awareness and acquiring a language for integrated emotions, thoughts and other aspects of internal life. A lack of sufficient and accurate empathy early on in life means that a person not just is disconnected from others but besides, over time, becomes disconnected from his or her ain internal experiences, which can emerge subsequently simply in conflicted and clashing expressions. Another issue of bereft mirroring is that the person sees unvalidated aspects of self as potentially harmful to important attachment relationships. Any offending emotions, thoughts and self-expressions that threaten primary attachments must be cutting off, repressed or otherwise disowned to keep these relationships stable. The personality forms effectually the obstruction in the aforementioned way a tree trunk grows and scars around the strands of a barbwire fence, incorporating what would otherwise sever it. The reemergence of the unvalidated and repudiated potentialities in response to the counselor'due south empathy is oftentimes attended by a profound sense of shame.

When someone experiences shame, the person is evaluating his or her own behaviors in terms of some external standard, such every bit the reaction of an important attachment figure. In shame, a person has a heightened sense of cocky-consciousness. Humiliated, the person feels a loss of control that brings about the want to hide because he or she feels unworthy. Such evaluations are oft first conveyed past others and then become internalized as aspects of the self. Expressions of disgust or contempt on the confront of another person requite ascent to feelings of shame. Another'due south withdrawal of love also creates a sense of failure, worthlessness and humiliation.

Some theorists accept suggested that shame brings about depression due to the lowering of self-esteem as a outcome of failure to run across i's own egotistic aspirations. Narcissistic aspirations are simply the desire to feel special and to be successful in attaining one'due south goals. We all have such aspirations, and when nosotros believe that our failure to realize these ambitions is because of our own basic flaws, we feel aback. The deep-downwardly injury that accompanies shame is the egotistic wound that sometimes festers for years. Information technology is the belief that something is fundamentally incorrect with united states that may not be remediable. Even more than disturbing is the fright that the counselor might view with revulsion these profoundly flawed parts of the client'due south self. When the customer "feels felt" past the counselor and believes that the advisor fully understands his or her implicit and guarded world, then empathy can be a threat.

Case case

One of the authors of this article worked with a female person client who was raised in a fundamentalist religious environment. Her imposing uncle, who was her main caregiver, squelched any impulse that he did non consider to be "Christian." Anger, pride, assertiveness and sexual feelings were all treated every bit damning defects in a little daughter. Whatsoever expression of these legitimate self-experiences acquired disruption in the client'due south primary relationships. She learned early on on to dissociate or repress the shameful inner thoughts and feelings.

By the time she came to counseling, this client had developed an obsessive personality style that greatly constricted her ability to form intimate relationships with others. The disowning of her shameful sexual impulses caused the client to persistently assign her own thoughts and fantasies to a succession of male authorization figures whose conventional expressions of regard she interpreted as ploys to seduce her. Non surprisingly, equally the counselor became an important attachment figure, the advisor's expressions of positive regard were similarly interpreted.

Above all, the client carried an unmet longing to feel valued and special to someone. Paradoxically, she experienced her longing for credence as a threat, and anytime she felt prized past the counselor, she felt compelled to withdraw. Her shame, associated with all denied aspects of herself, would rise to a level of urgency, and she felt the pain of exposure. "It'south not that you don't understand," she remarked in i emotionally charged session. "Information technology's that y'all understand too much!" The emergence and reclamation of her legitimate and natural emotions in counseling was, she said, "an act of disobedience. … It feels like killing off people who are already dead simply who alive in my head."

Iii types of empathy

Equally counselors, we are committed to helping others, and we often shy abroad from causing pain. Equally a result, many counselors confuse empathy with being warm and sympathetic. Thus, a number of counselors who hope to exist empathic wind upwardly only existence nice instead. But clients do not change simply because someone has been relentlessly squeamish to them. Rather, true empathy involves not but emotional resonance but also "getting" the customer from within the frames of reference that organize his or her subjective life.

Every bit Simon Businesswoman-Cohen observed in his summary of three types of empathy, a sympathetic impulse is ane component of empathy and involves feeling an emotion in response to someone else'south distress that moves us to desire to alleviate another's suffering. This is a natural human response and part of our normal reaction to clients' suffering, only it cannot be immune to be the primary guide to our interventions as counselors.

A second component of empathy is the affective component, which involves feeling an emotional attunement that Irvin Yalom called "looking out the client's window." It is this affective resonance that allows clients to become deeply into their hurting with the participation of the counselor as a sensitive companion and compassionate guide. The counselor must not go either overactivated or underactivated by the client's distress considering so the client will undo and reenact by disappointments. The counselor must empathically be in melody with what Daniel Siegel chosen the client'due south "window of tolerance." When a counselor is not sufficiently responsive, clients conclude that the counselor does non care. More commonly, when the counselor loses the empathic opinion and overidentifies with the client's hurting, the client concludes that the expression of certain affects or sectioned-off parts of self has the power to hurt or damage the caregiver. The advisor must help to hold the client'southward hurting without succumbing to the customer's grief.

The third, or cognitive, component of empathy allows counselors to understand, validate and illuminate the client'due south inner world of meanings. This "perspective taking" allows the advisor to use accumulated knowledge of how the customer is likely to answer to certain empathic interpretations and interventions. The art comes in the balance of challenge and support.

All of these levels of empathic connectedness give reassurance to clients that the counselor understands and accepts them. However, if such deep understanding makes visible the aspects of the client'due south self that have been partitioned or disowned due to a lack of validating attunement from important others, the client may feel exposed, and the experience of existence "found out" might emerge instead.

Practical strategies

Realizing that empathy sometimes hurts, what can counselors exercise when their empathy seems to exist getting in the manner of progress? This is where the combination of empathy as an investigating attitude and affective attunement to the present human relationship really comes into play.

First, counselors need to recognize and give voice to the sometimes subtle disruptions in the interpersonal process between counselor and client. Shining a light on "what is happening" when the advisor senses such a disturbance or shift toward disengagement invites the customer to limited the conflicted thoughts and emotions about existence so thoroughly "seen." The idea is that the therapeutic chat must shift from whatsoever issue the client was discussing to a focus on the immediate feel of engaging with the advisor as conflicted and shame-eliciting fabric emerges. Nigh often, the customer will need considerable encouragement to practise this because it is the expression of this material with other important zipper figures that previously caused interpersonal disruption and trauma.

We also recognize that the client might not be the only one in the relationship who is tempted to avoid such participation. This strategy is an overture for a deeper, more authentic encounter in the here and at present that may as well thrust the advisor out of his or her comfort zone into full engagement and immediacy with the client. "How are you experiencing me correct now?" is more difficult for the counselor to enquire than, "How was it for you lot when yous were experiencing your (male parent, roommate, young man, wife) back then?"

The point of this approach is that the counselor invites the customer to explore the interpersonal consequences, in the current relationship, of expressing formerly forbidden aspects of cocky. This strategy involves following upwards this invitation with process comments such every bit:

• "Yous said before that I really seem to sympathise you lot but that it scares you. What might I call back of you if you permit me to see this role of you that you lot have kept hidden?"
• "Information technology seems just then as if y'all needed to shy away when you lot felt I really understood you lot, every bit if that could be dangerous."
• "Your giving words to that part of yourself seemed to brand y'all feel the need to retreat, and you suddenly wondered why I would care."
• "I wonder what you lot saw or heard in me but then that suddenly meant to you that I disapproved of you."

These are only a few examples of highly empathic process comments that bring the customer's subjective inner conflicts and resultant "resistance" to light and into the ongoing intersubjective relationship where they can be addressed in the present, not merely as artifacts of past interpersonal disappointments. Notice that in the last annotate, the counselor does not challenge the client's sense that the counselor disapproves just instead wonders how the counselor'due south words or actions were interpreted by the client and how they signaled to the client that danger was imminent. In all of these exchanges, the accent is not directly on solving the client's expressed trouble but rather on illuminating the processes by which the client's inner world becomes structuralized in the world of interpersonal participation. These practical strategies transform the pain caused by empathy into an opportunity for therapeutic growth.

Attunement to subtle changes in the therapeutic run into allows u.s.a. to sense when our clients are feeling likewise exposed by empathic responses — when they are ashamed of being known too well. The empathic counselor invites the client to realize aspects of self that were dissociated and denied as a result of conditions of worth. It is a sensitive process for the client to let aspects of self into awareness that formerly were idea to exist lacking or dangerous. When this finally happens, the client can say, as Rogers stated, "Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what information technology's like to be me." Furthermore, the client will be able to say, "And I am, in spite of my faults, prized past my advisor and owned by myself."

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Eric W. Cowan is a professor in the Section of Graduate Psychology and Counseling at James Madison University (JMU). He is the by director of Counseling and Psychological Services, JMU'south outpatient dispensary, and is the author of Ariadne's Thread: Instance Studies in the Therapeutic Human relationship.

Jack Presbury is a licensed professional counselor and professor in the Department of Graduate Psychology and Counseling at JMU. He is the writer of Mechanizing Minds and Humanizing Machines.

Lennis 1000. Echterling is a professor and coordinator of the counseling program in the Section of Graduate Psychology and Counseling at JMU. He is the atomic number 82 author of Thriving!: A Transmission for Students in the Helping Professions.

Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to cowanwe@jmu.edu.

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Source: https://ct.counseling.org/2013/02/the-paradox-of-empathy-when-empathy-hurts/

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