Free sneak peek: Empathy, boundaries, and resilience
This is a sneak peak at a paywalled post, originally posted 2nd March. It's one I love, and it's a really good example of what you'll get every 2 weeks if you upgrade to a paid subscription
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.
What putting yourself in someone shoes should mean is putting yourself in the feelings that the person is feeling right now. Empathy is about being seen and being heard. A lot of the time that comes hand in hand with understanding, but sometimes it can’t. Sometimes you can’t even begin to fathom what someone has experienced, never mind how you would react, so to be empathetic is to feel their feelings with them. Whatever they’re feeling in that moment.
It’s that boundary that I think is important. You don’t want to bring your own feelings into a conversation necessarily. You want to share a connection with the person, but their feelings should be the guidance there (this is obviously different from a counselling skills point of view, where that distance can look different to a friendship, but I think the point still stands).
Empathy also requires resilience. While you’re feeling with other people, you need to try to not get entirely pulled in and overwhelmed. I used to want to manage people’s feelings for them, which was a trauma response from my youth. This means I’d get pulled in not only to someone’s feelings but also how to ‘fix’ them before they even fully noticed their own feelings. This is entirely unhelpful, both for myself and the other person. What’s more helpful is to acknowledge their feelings (when and if they share) and accept them. Help, if appropriate. But feel with them and be empathetic. It doesn’t require fixing or action outside of that.
In a counselling or therapeutic context it’s even more important to be empathetic but not do anything to ‘fix’ or change a situation. Depending on the type of therapy a lot of the time the goal is to hold space for the client for them to start to understand themselves. Sometimes that therapy comes with tools and practices to help (DBT, EMDR, etc). But still the autonomy and choices have to belong to the client, otherwise they won’t stick.
(There’s something here about challenging and using questions to get someone to dig deeper and start to figure out things that are at the edge of awareness, but that’s a newsletter for another day).
A lot of this has come from reading Person-Centred Counselling in Action, which really dives into concepts like empathy, and unconditional positive regard, and is a great read with solid examples.
I’d love to hear about your thoughts of empathy - it’s a surprisingly deep subject, with nuance, and every time I talk about it with someone I learn more.