Counselors understand the importance of empathy, but they sometimes find it challenging to fully integrate into practice.
Tag: empathy
By remaining clinically objective, do counselors inadvertently sacrifice the client’s humanity?
Counselors who enter private practice often find themselves confronting the push and pull between their desire to provide empathic, client-focused care and the need to turn a profit.
Counselors and other helping professionals who are regularly exposed to others’ trauma almost invariably find themselves confronting symptoms of compassion fatigue at some point during their careers.
Because highly sensitive people process more deeply, counselors with this trait may have difficulty leaving work at work.
Empathy allows for the full and complete exploration of thoughts, feelings and behaviors, with no intent to short-circuit the process simply because we cannot tolerate someone else’s pain.
Kellie Collins, a licensed professional counselor (LPC) who runs a group private practice in Lake Oswego, Oregon, experienced her first panic attack when she was 14. She remembers suddenly feeling cold, losing sensation in her hands and her heart beating so rapidly that it felt like it was going to
One of Cyndi Matthews’ most vivid memories of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian church was watching the minister point at her brother’s best friend during a service and say, “You don’t belong here. Get out.” The reason? The boy was gay. Matthews, a licensed professional counselor supervisor (LPC-S), says
Having kids and young adults train rescue dogs isn’t technically animal assisted therapy, but for the kids—and dogs—involved in the Teacher’s Pet program, the result has definitely been therapeutic. The youth —with the help of professional animal trainers— use positive reward-based training to increase local rescue dogs’ chances of being
A few years ago, while teaching a course in family therapy, a particularly bright and insightful student named Maria lingered after class one day and asked, “Isn’t differentiation of self similar to mindfulness?” I hadn’t quite thought of it like that before, but it certainly seemed plausible. “Let’s set aside