What is empathy? How will you be an empathic counselor?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

?Empathy enables you to see the world through your client’s eyes; it is metaphorically about walking in your client’s shoes for a while. This requires the ability both to intellectually understand the world from the other’s perspective and to know how that world feels to the other.
?Allport (1961) called empathy the “imaginative transposing of oneself into the thinking, feeling, and acting of another”.
?Honing your ability to be empathic with your clients is a central task in learning how to be an effective counselor. This includes learning how to suspend your own opinions, judgments, and values when you are with a client so that you can effectively identify with and experience her world. This is particularly true when your client’s cultural worldview is very different from your own.
?Life experience, as well as counseling training programs which help to foster this empathic capacity, will serve you well in this kind of empathy education.
?Empathy, of course, is not sympathy. It is not feeling sorry for your client or simply being sad about his circumstances. Sympathy can immobilize effective responding, whereas empathy prepares you for constructive action. Sometimes empathy provides the context for direct, difficult, tough challenges; it is not a soft or “mushy” approach to working with people.