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Writing yesterday about the concurrence of physiologic responses of counsellors and clients during moments when they experienced positive emotions, and the correlation of strong similarities in response with perceived empathy, it occurred to me that if therapists are in fact reproducing the physiologic state of the client in their own system, this might make therapy a dangerous pursuit — what about the negative emotions? Do therapists not risk exposing themselves in a direct way to the experience of, for example, depression with suicidal tendencies, or extreme anxiety? What good would this do to them and indeed to their clients?

Of course the study says nothing about ‘negative’ states, which is interesting in itself. Maybe some healthy protective mechanism shields the counsellor at those times.

At this point, though, it seems like a good idea to look at the nature of empathy. Empathy is not the act of getting lost in the state of the other. Otherwise, when a client is drowning, we would be pulled in and drown ourselves, which would be of little help to anyone. Rogers produced a sensible working definition of empathy when he wrote:

To sense the client’s private world as if it were your own, but without ever losing the ‘as if’ quality — this is empathy and this seems essential to therapy. To sense the clients’ anger, fear or confusion as if it were your own, yet without your own anger, fear or confusion getting bound up in it.

Sounds interesting for the therapist, you may say, but how does this help the client, beyond the positive feeling of being understood? Rogers goes on:

When the client’s world is clear to the therapist, and he moves about in it freely, then he can both communicate his understanding of what is clearly known to the client and can also voice meanings in the client’s experience of which the client is scarcely aware.

This is a way in which the client and counsellor can move forward, touching areas of experience which are there within the client, and have effects on their life, but for some reason, for instance fear, are not easily accessible, and therefore not open to scrutiny, understanding, acceptance or change.

It’s important to emphasise how in Person Centred Counselling as initiated by Rogers, the therapist would be exceedingly cautious about checking out, step by step, instant by instant, these intimated feelings with the client. The danger of spotting something in the client’s experience which is not actually there is an ever present one. If the empathic relationship, however, is strong, then offering tentatively and checking out works well as a safeguard. In this case the kind of ‘extended empathy’ a counsellor can offer to a client can be a very useful gift indeed.