Every vital development in language is a development of feeling as well.
T.S. Eliot
Primary Skill Objectives
• Understand and begin to effectively express empathy.
• Be able to explain the dos and don’ts, and nuances of expressing empathy.
• Anticipate the effects on your work from the common difficulties, pitfalls and dead ends in expressing empathy.
• Evaluate your strengths and difficulties in expressing empathy at this time, and how you may overcome your difficulties and develop your strengths.
• Be able to explain what expressing empathy looks, sounds and feels like to you when you are working effectively.
Focus Activity
Now it’s time to let yourself express the empathy you feel. Have a partner communicate to you about a topic that has emotional content for her or him.
Strive to feel what your speaker feels and to express what it is you feel with her/him. Your expression may take a variety of forms. Try not to worry about the form your expression takes. This worry would distract you from empathy.
For this exercise, you are adding one intention beyond experiencing empathy, which is expressing the empathy that you feel. An irony to work through will be that while you aim to express empathy, you can’t think too much about how to express your empathy because that will take your focus away from empathy. So, a useful way to think of it is to think of removing the restraints that we asked of you in the focus activity of the previous chapter;
freeing yourself to express what you feel with your partner.
You should also practice therapeutic listening with this activity. It would be hard not to, as much empathy will be expressed in the tone of your
reflections. However, don’t let yourself worry right now about things like reflecting. Rather, focus on freeing yourself to experience and express empathy.
A reasonable length of time for this practice can be 10–30 minutes.
Have a third partner observe and/or video. Use feedback from the speaker, observer, and video review to discern when your empathy was clearly expressed and when it was not, when you were connected best to your speaker and not.
Note that when you are in the role of speaker, you may be able to give your listener helpful feedback regarding her or his expression of empathy.
However, you really can’t focus on watching for your listener’s skills while speaking. Rather, it will be best if you purely focus on expressing whatever comes to your heart and mind. Then later, if you remember something of your listener’s skills it will be nice to tell her/him, but the most help you can be to your listener is to maintain your focus on you and what you wish to say.
Discuss with your partners, small group or class, and/or journal what you have learned from this exercise. Describe the ways of expressing empathy that seemed to work for you and the ways of expressing empathy that you hear or see in others’ work that may work for you. Remember that empathy is not sympathy or thinking of what others feel. Notice and describe when sympathy and thinking may have gotten in the way of empathy. Also describe any other challenges encountered in expressing empathy.
One final reminder with this exercise: Do not be discouraged if this work is difficult at first. If it is difficult for you, you are in good company.
Various Ways to Express Empathy
Probably the purest way to express empathy is through the emotion that is returned to your clients from you as you feel with them—the emotion they can feel from you as you feel with them. As you may have found in the practice activities for this and the previous chapter, overt expressions of empathy do occur when striving only to feel, without even an attempt to express it. Your work will be best, you will be most focused, and the process will be most natural when you are focused on feeling and allowing yourself to express empathy versus being focused on your expression.
Ways of expressing of empathy cross an array of modes, from involuntarily emitting the emotions, which your clients simply feel from you as you feel with them, to saying the words for what you feel with your clients. We don’t see any one method as necessarily better than others. Which is best may be determined by which comes naturally to you in each situation and can be determined by doing what feels natural to you in each moment, then observing if your clients seem to perceive your empathy. Next, we introduce a few ways of expressing empathy.
Matching the Client’s Tone
As you feel empathy, your tone of expression will match your client’s. Your voice will tend to rise and fall following your client’s. Your pace of speech will tend to quicken and slow following your client’s. In watching tapes of your sessions, you will be able to hear the quality of your client’s emotion in your spoken responses.
Facial Expression and Body Language
We discovered some time ago that neither of us has a “poker face.” Not having a poker face is an asset to counselors. What we are feeling can be obvious to our clients or to anyone watching. So, as we strive for empathy and succeed in feeling with clients, our empathy is expressed through our faces mirroring the emotions of our clients.
Empathy is at times expressed through hand gestures and other body language. For example, one client was explaining how her father would sound and move when he was about to come angrily after her and her siblings. When she made the sound and threatening move, both she and her counselor made a body gesture that suggested ducking one shoulder and head while starting to run. That gesture symbolized the fear-filled response that she and her siblings had. The counselor was not mimicking her client. It was a gesture she made while absorbed in listening and empathy, without thought of expressing empathy. Her client did not comment on the gesture but knew in that moment that her counselor was with her.
In other moments, we have watched counselors clasp their hands to express empathy when a client expressed a feeling of connectedness, or shift back and move their hands wide apart when their clients excitedly expressed that what they are saying is really big for them. We have seen counselors push their fists together and grimace when their client expressed dread over an impending conflict. We have seen counselors brush their hands against each other as if dusting off sand or fling them out lightly as if flinging the last drops of water off their hands into the sink when their clients expressed that they were done with a troubling situation. Importantly, each of these gestures was natural, not contrived; not thought of, but born of feeling with clients and allowing expression of empathy to flow.
The Most Overt Means—Words
Sometimes the gestures, facial expressions and tones that served to express empathy were also accompanied by words that named the feeling. Naming the feeling in words is what most people think of when thinking of expressing empathy. Using words to name feelings can make your empathy most overt.
It can make what you feel in empathy least subject to interpretation, at least for persons of similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds. However, expressing
empathy through feeling words also brings its problems. When you work at thinking of the word for the emotions, the thoughts take you away from empathy and listening.
Additionally, if you work hard at thinking of the word, your response often comes out sounding like an assessment, or the answer on a quiz show. When this happens, your client will tend to stop expressing and stop feeling. In these moments, it feels to clients as if that was somehow the end of the conversation or that you have made your diagnosis, so they wait for your prescription.
It will help you avoid this to remember that your task is not to identify feelings so much as it is to help your clients feel more fully and to be right there with them through it all. But saying the word for the feeling helps your clients know that you are right there with them, that you are OK with what they feel, not afraid to feel what they feel and go with them to their emotional places, that you are “a confident companion . . . in his or her inner world” (Rogers, 1980, p. 142).
Dos and Don’ts of Expressing Empathy
Empathy can be an esoteric concept. It is abstract, complex and subtle. Yet, we want to make it as concrete and observable as possible. So, with our previous explanations of the purpose of empathy and some varied ways in mind of expressing it, consider the following “dos” and “don’ts,” which allow us further discussion and which you may use to check your work in expressing empathy.
This Dos and Don’ts list is an extension of the dos and don’ts list for therapeutic listening. Experiencing and expressing empathy are listening at an even deeper level. Experiencing and expressing empathy in your meetings with clients are in addition to therapeutic listening. The balance of therapeutic listening with expressing empathy differs with each situation. You will learn to thoughtlessly balance responding to content in therapeutic listening and responding to experience by expressing empathy.
With these behaviors, you are communicating truths like “I understand what you feel and experience it with you,” “I understand your situation,”
“I sense what is important to you,” “I’m striving to feel as much as I can with you, to feel as if I were you,” and, ultimately, “Through experiencing with you, I’m coming to understand you.”
Do:
• focus your attention primarily on your client’s emotions, but also on thoughts, actions, and the connections of your client’s thoughts, emotions and actions;
• strive to feel what your client feels vs. attempting to think of what your client feels;
• feel what your client feels such that your expression of your client’s experience is expressed naturally through your words, tone, facial expressions and body language;
• reflect your client’s feelings with words for the emotions you feel with them, when natural, and with openness to a variety of ways of expressing empathy;
• state your empathy in declarative statements, when reasonably sure;
• when unsure, state your empathy as tentative, with more tentative declarations from your struggle to understand your client’s feelings and underlying thoughts;
• use reflections to restate client feelings and underlying thoughts more clearly and directly, precisely and concisely;
• reflect themes of personal meanings implied in client communication;
• reflect emerging communication, feelings and underlying thoughts that seem implied;
• reflect themes of personal meaning that seem to be implied in client communication;
• reflect your client’s experience that may be hard to hear (don’t be afraid to confront)—allow your client to be confronted by her/his experience;
• be prepared for and accept corrections of your empathy.
Don’t:
• let your words for what you feel with your client come out sounding like assessments;
• respond with a hidden agenda of what you believe your client should realize;
• do most of the talking;
• make “me too” or “must feel” statements;
• be afraid to reflect implied or emerging communication—that which is communicated in action, inaction, tone, facial expressions, body language, how or when things are said, and what is not said;
• be afraid to confront or be afraid to allow your clients to be con-fronted by contradictions in his/her experience, feelings, thoughts, words, and actions.
Explanations and Discussion from the Dos and Don’ts of Expressing Empathy
Much as we may try, the complex and subtle skill of expressing empathy can’t be truly captured in a dos and don’ts list. So, carefully consider the following explanations.
Focus Your Attention Primarily on Client Emotions, but also on Thoughts, Actions and the Connections of Thoughts, Emotions and Actions
Full empathy is a total connection with a person, in which you understand the person in ways that go beyond the information he tells you about himself to experiencing his world through his communication to you. Sometimes your expressions of empathy may reflect thoughts and actions. For example (with tone capturing your client’s anger, agitation), “You decided he’d crossed a line and you yelled at him for it!” Expressions of empathy can address both emotion and action, “You’re so mad about this you can hardly sit still.”
At other times, we have seen naturally occurring expressions of empathy focus on a client’s implied thoughts. A client was expressing exasperation and amazement with peer errors and his critical judgment of this. His counselor responded with the same exasperation and amazement in her tone, “So, you’re thinking like, ‘What are they thinking?! They must not be thinking!’” Still, while we hope for you to free yourself enough to respond with empathy to clients’ thoughts and actions, keep this secondary to your focus on and expression of empathy to emotions. Emotions lead most efficiently to a connection with each client’s core and experiencing each client’s world as that person does.
The work of cognitive behavior therapy and rational-emotive therapy (Beck & Beck, 2011; Ellis & Dryden, 2007) brings to our awareness the connections between a person’s thoughts, feelings and emotions. This aware -ness influences how we see clients and comes out in our reflections. A complex reflection may sound like “You felt hurt that your teacher said that; you saw it as wrong, unfair; when you saw it as unfair, you got mad and yelled back.”
We encourage you to risk such complex reflections. However, we also want you to know that more complex does not = better. While the complex reflection above might present your client with an opportunity to learn about his pattern; if it feels like teaching, it might get in the way of connecting.
Connecting is most important and should always be your primary goal. Com -municating shared emotional experience is the most powerful way to connect.
So, primarily your attention is to emotion. To that same upset youth in the complex reflection example above, depending on the context in time of your work together, the best reflection might simply be, “You were mad! And you felt hurt by that.”
Strive to Feel with Your Client
Remember that this is almost always your primary purpose and function. Aim not to get wrapped up in things like analytic thoughts, thoughts of what you’ll say next, or concern for your client’s satisfaction with your work. These things will be part of your work (we address them later), but the main part is feeling with your client. This is the core of your work.
Express Empathy Naturally through Your Words, Tone, Facial Expression and Body Language
Remember that these modes of expressing empathy can be as powerful and clear as using words to express your empathy. Sometimes these ways of expressing empathy catch more of clients’ subtle communication. In one session, a client was expressing her dread and frustration at her mom taking a former boyfriend, who had been abusive, back into her life. The client wanted to be OK with it and supportive of her mom but already saw her mother changing to allow him back, even changing house rules to fit his needs in ways that she would not have changed them for her daughter. When the client said this, her counselor uttered a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a growl. His client heard this, and while she didn’t stop to acknowledge it, she glanced at his eyes, grinned, and picked up her pace and the emotional intensity of her expression. She knew that her counselor felt her feelings that went along with both her dread of what she expected to follow from the situation and her wish to drive the ex-boyfriend off and protect her mom, her territory, and herself. Such unplanned expressions of empathy happen naturally, when you are feeling with your client and allowing your expression to flow.
Reflect Client Feelings with Words for the Emotions
Use words to express the emotions you feel with your clients. These can be feeling words, “You feel so mad about this!,” “Now you are really hurting.”
Or your words can convey feelings in tone without naming emotions, such as when addressing client thoughts and actions from sections above, as long as your tone contains the emotions you feel with your client:
• (Stated with tone capturing your client’s anger, agitation.) “You decided he’d crossed a line and you yelled at him for it!”
• “So, you’re thinking like, ‘What are they thinking?! They must not be thinking!’”
And words can convey what you feel with your client in metaphor. For example, “It’s like you’re slogging hard, through cold rain and snow, just to get through your day.”
State Your Empathy in Declarative Statements, and When Unsure, State with More Tentative Declarations
When your client’s emotion is strong and you are sure of what you feel with her, state it strongly. For example, “You’re tired of hurting with this. Now you’re mad and deciding not to take it anymore!” If you are less sure, you may make a more tentative statement: “Sounds like you feel confused and unsure of what to do next.”
If you are greatly unsure and think you may be too far out ahead of your client but still think it’s important to say, you can express your experience in an even more tentative phrasing, “I’m not sure, I know you’re exasperated with him, but as you talk, I get the feeling you are also hurt.” Each of these statements attempts to say what the counselor feels with her client. They also say, through behavior, that the counselor is striving to understand her client, and that while the counselor would like to be accurate in empathy, she is willing to risk being wrong in order to understand.
Note that no matter how tentative, these expressions of empathy remain declarative statements. They do not include a questioning tone. We find that asking a client what he feels elicits a thought response (i.e., an explanation of feeling or what the client thinks he is supposed to feel), rather than helping him feel more of his true feelings with you.
Use Reflections to Restate Client Feelings and Underlying
Use Reflections to Restate Client Feelings and Underlying