Counselling Skills for Social Workers by Hilda Loughran

Author:Hilda Loughran [Loughran, Hilda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138504202
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

Empathy or identifying with someone

There is also the question of whether it is actually possible or even desirable to fully understand someone else’s experiences or feelings. Even two people who go through the same experience do not necessarily have the same experience. So, for example, two people who experience having their children in care may have had very different experiences of that and very different feelings about it. In addition, the social worker, whatever their level of skill in being empathic, can never fully know what it is like to ‘be in the same shoes’ as either of the service users. As Miller (2018, p. 5) highlights, ‘empathy involves not only attention to and also connecting with other people, an active interest in understanding what he she is experiencing … It is not the same as identifying with a person’. He goes on to clarify that empathic understanding does not need such identification or shared experiences. In fact ‘identifying with somebody because of similarity with you can interfere with accurate empathy: what they are expressing lies to close to home for you to understand how it may differ from your own experience’ (Miller 2018, p. 5).

Defining empathy as part of social work, Compton and Galaway (1999) clarify that ‘empathy is the capacity to enter into the feelings and experiences of another – knowing what the other appeals and experiences – without losing oneself in the process. The helping person makes an active effort to enter into the reception frame of the other person without losing personal perspective’.

Neukrug et al. (2013) propose building on basic empathy by adding the ability to: reflect deeper feelings, point to discrepancies (e.g. feeling two different ways about something), use visual aids, analogies and metaphors to demonstrate understanding and to use targeted self-disclosure.

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