01-Carl Rogers on Empathy

Many years ago I realized how powerful it was to listen to a person and in recent months I have been working on an article trying to take a new look at the power of listening, the power of an empathetic way of being and that is what What I want to talk to you about, we should reexamine and reevaluate that special way of being with another person that we call empathic. I think we tend to give too little importance and consideration to an element that is extremely important in understanding personality dynamics and effecting changes in personality and behavior.

I think it's one of the most delicate and powerful tools we have and I'm amazed at how little we see it in real life situations in its full form. I guess I'll start my story a little hesitantly on this topic. Very early in my work as a therapist I discovered that simply listening to my client very carefully was an important way to help, so when I had doubts about what to do. do in some active way I just listened and found it surprising that such a passive type of interaction could be so helpful and a little later, a social worker I hired who had experience in rakion training was really a big help to me.

It helped me learn that the most effective response, the most effective listening, was to listen to the feelings and emotions that were behind the words that were a little hidden and where you could discern a pattern of feeling behind what was being said and I think that She was the first to suggest that the best response was to reflect these feelings to the client and reflect is a word that later made me cringe, but at the time it really was very helpful to me in my work as a therapist and I was very grateful to her.

I felt like I learned a lot from her. She learned very little from me. Then came my transition to a full-time university position where, with the help of students, I was finally able to get the equipment to record our interviews. a dream I had had for several years and I cannot overstate the excitement of our learnings as we crowded around the machine that allowed us to listen to ourselves play over and over some baffling point in the interview where something clearly went wrong or focus on those moments where there seemed to be an answer that helped make significant progress in the interview.

I guess I still consider that listening to the recorded interviews is perhaps the best way to improve yourself as a helping person. Among the many lessons learned from listening to these recordings, we realized that listening to feelings and reflecting on them was a complex, enormously complex experience. We found that we could identify the therapist's response where there was significant forward movement, where perhaps the client was speaking in a different tone. in a vague and disjointed way and a therapist's response would allow you to really start moving and also the answers could be identified for a nice moving process that was stopped by a particular response, so in such a learning context it became quite natural.

That we focused on the content of the therapist's response rather than on the empathic quality of listening and no longer particularly apologized for it, was probably a necessary step in our learning, up to this point we became very aware of the techniques that the therapist used. The counselor or therapist I was using we became really adept at analyzing in detail. I remember sitting with students and breaking down sentences into particular phrases and words and we benefited a lot from that very microscopic study of the interview process. I think we gained a lot from it, but this tendency to focus on the therapist's responses had consequences that horrified me.

I encountered considerable hostility regarding my point of view and that didn't really seem to bother me, but this kind of thing. It bothered me because the whole approach came within a few years to be known as a non-directive therapy technique. It was said to be the technique of reflecting the client's feelings, so then you are dealing with non-directive therapy or even worse. Well, an even worse caricature was simply that in non-directive therapy you simply say the last word, the last words that the client said, and I was really so shocked and horrified by that complete distortion of our approach that for several years I said almost nothing about the empathetic listening and when I did it it was to emphasize an empathetic attitude with very little comment on how that attitude could be implemented in that relationship.

I just got scared of the distortion. I preferred to discuss the qualities of positive regard. and the congruence of the therapist, which he had come to posit as two other conditions that promoted growth in a relationship and those concepts were also often misinterpreted, but never came to be caricatured in the same way that he opposed empathic listening. However, over the years, research evidence continues to accumulate to the conclusion that a high degree of

empathy

in a relationship is possibly the most powerful factor and certainly one of the most powerful factors in achieving change and learning, so I think it's time for me to forget the caricatures and misrepresentations of the past and take a fresh look at

empathy

.

For yet another reason, it seems appropriate to do this. In the United States, over the past decade, many new approaches to therapy have taken center stage in Gestalt therapy. psychodrama primary therapy bioenergetics rational emotive therapy transactional analysis are some of the best known, but there are more and part of their appeal seems to me to lie in the fact that in most cases the therapist is clearly the expert who actively manipulates the situation, often in dramatic ways for the clients benefit, but if I read the signs correctly, I think there is some decrease in fascination with that experience when guiding people with another approach that is based on experience, however, therapy behavioral.

I think there's no doubt about the fascination with that. This approach is on the rise and I think I can really understand that I think a technological society has been delighted to find a technology by which man's behavior can be shaped, even without his knowledge or approval, towards goals that the therapist chooses or that have been set. chosen by society and yet even here many questions are being raised by thoughtful people as the philosophical and political implications of such an approach become more clearly visible, so I have seen a willingness on the part of many to throw out Another look at ways of being with people evokes self-directed change and places the power in the person, not the therapist, and this leads me again to carefully examine what we mean by empathy and what we have come to know about it to formulate a current description.

Jean Jinlun briefly formulates the concept of experience: his opinion is that at all times a flow of experience occurs in the human organism x' to which the individual can turn again and again as a reference for discovery. the meaning of what he is experiencing, he considers empathy to sensitively target the felt meaning that the client is experiencing at this particular moment to help him focus on that meaning and bring it further to its fullness and disinhibition. Experiencing an example may make clearer both the concept and its relationship to empathy. A man in an encounter group is making some vaguely negative statements about his father and the facilitator says it sounds like you might be angry with your father.

No, I don't think so. you are so dissatisfied with him hmm maybe disappointed with him, yes, yes, that's all. I'm disappointed in him. I have been disappointed in him since I was a child because he is not a strong person. I think that kind of example illuminates the concept of gentleness in this way against What is the man who reviews these various terms angrily? No, no, he is not dissatisfied? Well, he is closer to disappointed. Ah, that matches the flow of visceral experience that is happening within and a person has a very secure knowledge of that flow and can actually tell it.

When you speak to him in other words, the right word touches the right label or the right phrase often touches the exact meaning of the flow that is happening within him that he himself has not been able to label or understand. It allows him to become aware of the real meaning of what happens inside him, so with that conceptual background I would like to attempt a description of empathy that would seem satisfactory to me today. I would no longer call it a state of empathy that it was in my previous definition because I believed that it was a process rather than a state and perhaps I can capture that quality: the way of being with another person that is called empathic in several facets: it means entering into the private perceptual world of the other and becoming completely at home involves having sensitivity, being sensitive moment by moment to the changing meanings that flow in this other person to fear, anger, tenderness, confusion or whatever he or she is experiencing. , means living temporarily in your life by moving through it delicately without making judgments, feeling meanings of which you are barely aware, but without trying to discover feelings of which you are not fully aware, as this would be too threatening, includes communicating that you are feeling their world while you look with fresh and hostile eyes. elements he fears means checking frequently with him the accuracy of his sensations and being guided by his responses.

You are a safe companion for him in his world by pointing out possible meanings in the flow of his experience. . Help you focus on this useful type of referent to experience the meanings of it more fully and advance your experience of it.