Empathy, boundaries, and resilience
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This month I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy. I’m working on empathy for my counsellor training, and what that means to me.
I had to write my own definiton of empathy in 70 words. This is what I wrote:
Empathy is about feeling with a person. Feeling what they are feeling in that moment, and being with them. It’s about being able to connect with someone else, but controlling that connection. You’re not projecting your own feelings, and you’re not losing yourself in what they’re feeling. In session it’s being a presence who can help a helpee understand themselves and their own feelings, while being understood and supported.
The things about empathy for me is that you’re feeling with someone, not for someone. I think putting yourself in someone else’s shoes sometimes makes people think they should put themselves in that situation, and feel those feelings as if you were in the situation. The issue with that is that the way you might react to a situation vs how someone else does might be different. You might find an event easy to cope with - maybe you’ve already been through it and it wasn’t too bad - but the person in front of you is finding it more difficult.