2022-11-21 Mon 15:28 PM ![[moses_a_woman_sitting_quietly_alone_subtle_energy_is_building_i_39ffaa3d-cdff-4491-be7e-5c912e821856.png]] From [[Ref. David Martin 2016 - Counseling and therapy skills (4th ed)]] > It has been my experience that beginning therapists feel they have only two options in responding to their clients. Some see "empathy'' as some kind of warm and supportive reflection of what the client has just said, and others think they need to gather evidence and give advice, reassurance, and clever interpretations. Neither of these approaches works very well, but they seem to be the only ones that life prepares us for. There is a third alternative, a skill that will not be easy to learn and that will feel awkward at first, but one you need to master if you want to be a good counselor or therapist. The most important goal of this book is to get you started toward this mastery. There seems to be no clear label for this skill, but I think Laura Rice's (1974/2001) **"evocative empathy"** comes closest. To say it plainly, this skill is the fundamental skill for doing therapy. There will be many other things you will have to do, and there will be many times when evocative empathy is not appropriate, but for any of the other things to work, you must first make your client feel deeply understood, especially at the emotional level. > > I am about to give you a formal definition of empathy that will sound pretty simplistic, but I will spend a couple of hundred pages expanding on that definition. **Empathy is "communicated understanding of the other person's intended message, especially the experiential/ emotional part."** Every word counts in this definition. It is not enough to understand what the person said; you must hear what she meant to say, the intended message. It is not enough to understand, even deeply; you must communicate that understanding somehow. It is absolutely essential that the other person feel understood-that the understanding be perceived (Barrett-Lennard, 1993, 1997, 2003). The part of the intended message that will be critical is the emotional or experiential part of the message; therapy involves both an intellectual/cognitive and an emotional/experiential part of the message; therapy is both an intel­ lectual/cognitive and an emotional process, and it is dealing with feel­ ings that will be the most trouble for your client (and maybe for you and me) (Greenberg, 2012). You will be listening for what your client is trying to say, and one way you will be doing this is to hear the feelings implicit in his message. > You might have been tempted to word your response as, "That kind of situation can certainly arouse feelings of being cheated." This is more effective than "There's no justice in a situation like that" but less effective than "I guess you're feeling cheated by that." The difference may be subtle, but it is crucial. In one case we are talking about feelings as things, objectively, as though they can be aroused. In the other, we are naming a particular person's particular reaction in the here and now. We are bringing an experience to life. > I guarantee you that the fastest way to get to your clients' truth, and to get there in a way that will help them, is by helping them face the leading edge of what they are trying to say but can't quite say. The critical guideline is the phrase "the intended message." > I hope it is becoming clear that there is a critical region where therapy takes place. If you lead too far, you will get off the track, take over the direction of therapy, threaten your clients into needing their defenses against you, and probably start giving lousy advice. If you just repeat your clients' words (or worse, are behind them and deaden the process) [it'll suck] > effective therapy requires that you concentrate on making the implicit explicit. > I can be empathic with a person whose presence I can barely stand, who disagrees with me, and for whom I feel no sympathy. It woul d be difficult , but it could be done, because empathy just says: "I think I understan d what you are trying to say and how you feel, and I woul d articulate it this way." > one older empathy rating scale uses more concrete language, which many beginning therapists find helpful for training purposes because it was designed to operationalize therapist empathy, and so we will discuss it more (Carkhuff, 1969). > Level 1 . The verbal and behavioral expressions of the first person either do not attend to or detract significantly from the verbal and behavioral expressions of the second person(s) in that they commu­ nicate significantly less of the second person's feelings than the sec­ ond person has communicated himself. . . . The first person may be bored or unint erested or simply operating from a preconceived frame of reference which totally excludes that of the other person(s). (p. 315) > Level 2. While the first person responds to the expressed feelings of the second person(s), he does so in such a way that subtracts noticeable affect from the communications of the second person. The first person may communicate some awareness of obvious surface feelings of the second person but his communications drain off a level of the affect and distort the level of meaning. The first person may communicate his own ideas of what may be going on but these are not congruent with the expressions of the second person. (p. 315) > Level 3. The expressions of the first person (therapist) in response to the expressed feelings of the second person(s) (client) are essen­ tially interchangeable with those of the second person in that they express essentially the same affect and meaning. (Carkhuff, 1969, p. 316) > Level 4. The responses of the first person add noticeably to the expressions of the second person(s) in such a way as to express feel­ ings a level deeper than the second person was able to express him­ self. (p. 316) > Level 5. The first person's responses add significantly to the feeling and meaning of the expressions of the second person(s) in such a way as to (1) accurately express feelings below what the person himself was able to express or (2) in the event of ongoing deep self­ exploration on the second person's part, to be fully with him in his deepest moments. (p. 317) > The differences between levels 4 and 5 are large ly differences in the degree to which the thera pist has a ccurately added to the client's mes­ sage; a "5" brings the message to vivid life, restating it with precision , deep feeling, and the unique nuances that are part of the client's experi­ ence. It is critical that level-5 responses must still be responses to the client's intended commu nication if they are to be defined as empathic. An exam ple of a level-5 response is almost impossibl e to give in print because so much depends on the client's deep exper iencing at the moment. If our client said, "When I left home, my mother didn't even say good-bye," the thera pist might say, '¼t that mome nt, it was like you never had a mother." This is well beyond what the client said, but if it accurately captures her meaning, it would be very powerful. > Let me explain my thinking as the therapist here. There are two steps I went through: > 1. First, I had to understand what was meant, and so I was naming to myself several possibili­ties, such as feeling anger, hurt, and cheated. I tried to get a sense of which of these possible feelings the person wanted me to hear. > 2. Second, I had to find the most effective words to let him know that I understood. > [[Ref. David Martin 2016 - Counseling and therapy skills (4th ed)]] ![[Pasted image 20230707185235.png]]