The ideal of perfection, and everything being under the control of the individual, is certainly in harmony with contemporary western culture. This ideal of control over messy emotions, ageing, our own success, has unfortunately become linked to being thin. This gives form to the voice of anorexia, a seemingly safe way to a painless and perfect existence. Just get thin. Just don’t eat. Just don’t feel.
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 about sensing the client’s private world as if it were your own. Is this essential to therapy?
It’s official! Or at least one study, the Framingham Offspring Study ‘Marital status, marital strain, and risk of coronary heart disease or total mortality’, shows that women who bottled up their feelings during arguments with their spouse were four times as likely to die during the 10 year study period as those who told their husbands exactly how they felt.
Back in the February Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the first physiologic evidence of therapists and clients being measurably ‘on the same wavelength’ during live psychotherapy sessions. Clients and therapists had similar physiologic responses during moments of high positive emotion, and the more similar the responses were, the greater the level of therapist empathy experienced by clients.
According to an overview of thousands of psychology studies, men and women are psychologically very similar. So why are so many of us convinced that women are from Venus and men are from Mars?
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