While reading the wonderful change therapy blog today, I stumbled upon the UN definition of wellness: “Wellness is not only the absence of illness but also the sense of total physical and mental well-being.” This makes me wonder…is this definition adequate, or relevant, and is a sense of wellness the end goal of therapy?

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?

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.

As the counselling room is a safe place for all those fears and emotions, including the not so pretty ones, to be, so eventually we learn that we ourselves are a safe place for them to be. We eventually, slowly, gain some experience in being separate from uncomfortable feelings, in being, in fact, bigger than they are.

It’s as if you live in an extremely cluttered room or in your own handbag. You can look at each object and work out where it comes from, who is associated with it, what it means to you and if it is of any use to you now — as in therapy. You can just throw it all away, but you are going to regret that! Or — you can make some kind of temporary space in there in which to work.

Looking around for some form of helping relationship can be quite overwhelming. There are so many treatments, methods, drugs, so many experts claiming to have the one true way. Has anyone formulated what it is which actually helps a person in need?

You understand your problem perfectly. You know when it happens, how it happens, and you can have a pretty good stab at why it’s happening. You even, theoretically, know what needs to change, for it to stop happening. But all this knowledge is absolutely useless to you when the problem arises. Nothing changes.