LISTENING AND EMPATHIC RESPONDING (2) EMPATHIC RESPONDING

table of contents

2. Introduction
3. Empathy: is feeling or experiencing affectively with another. It is a neutral process. This means there is no judgment or evaluation of the person or feelings involved. It has been defined as an objective identification with the affective state of an individual.
4. Sympathy: is not neutral. It is feeling sorry for another. To better understand empathy, several concepts must be understood: identification, imitation, and affective communication.
5. Empathic response and state experience
6. Empathy and Imitation
7. Empathic process
8. Second caution about empathy
9. Being empathic without responding empathically
10. Is being empathic always lead to an empathic response?

LISTENING AND EMPATHIC RESPONDING (2) EMPATHIC RESPONDING

Introduction

The word empathy is derived from the German word Einfuhlung. This word means that we can actually share the experience of another.

Empathy is different from sympathy. 

Empathy: is feeling or experiencing affectively with another. It is a neutral process. This means there is no judgment or evaluation of the person or feelings involved. It has been defined as an objective identification with the affective state of an individual.

Sympathy: is not neutral. It is feeling sorry for another. To better understand empathy, several concepts must be understood: identification, imitation, and affective communication.

Empathic response and state experience

Before an empathic response can be made, one must experience the affective state of the other.

• Empathy involves identification with the affective experience of the other. It does not involve identifying with the other person in total, nor does it mean that you have shared the same experience in actuality. It is not necessary to have experienced the loss of a loved one to experience the grief that the person standing before you are experiencing.

• Too often people believe that one must have had the same experience to be empathic. But this can simply get in the way, because a subjective component is now added: your experience of a similar event. This may interfere with your capacity to identify with the unique affective state of the other.

• Empathy takes courage, because it means you must be open to the affective experience of another. Often this experience is painful. (Of course, we should also be empathic with the joy and happiness of others.)

There is a tendency to avoid the experience rather than be with the experience and be truly useful and available to the other.

Empathy and Imitation

Imitation is also part of the empathic process. Often, without realizing it, we imitate or mimic the facial expressions or body posture of the other, particularly when a painful experience is recounted.

This is a form of identification with the affective state and signals some empathic understanding. This is affective communication.

This form of Communication cannot be accomplished if one is distracted or interrupted-a key reason why giving total attention is important. 

Empathic process

The empathic process always results in the acquisition of knowledge both parties in coming to know one another.

• It does not involve like dislike, good or bad, but is a neutral process. Behavior is not prescribed, and the other's feelings are not evaluated. You simply come to know more fully how this other person relates to a problem or a situation,

• Reflecting this understanding back to the other is always transforming or growth producing.

• If it is not, then we are not dealing with the process of empathy.

A few cautions are in order here. First, although empathic understanding is always transforming, it is not always soothing. It may, in fact, be painful at times. 

Second caution about empathy

Empathy does not mean giving in or giving up. Empathy is with a person's affective state or situation, not with the person's demands.

For example, a company sales representative enters a pharmacy and asks the owner to purchase some of his company's products. The owner does not carry that line of products and has no desire to start doing so.

The company representative states sincerely, "This would really help me out. I'm having a tough month and could use the business. My boss is pushing me about meeting quotas. How about a small order?

"The owner responds, "You sound worried. I really hope you make your quota, but I don't carry your product line and don't want to at this time." The owner responds empathically to the concern of the salesperson but does not give in to the request.

It should be noted that empathy cannot be conveyed in a clichéd manner. If the owner had said what he did without sincerity or caring, his response would not be empathic.

Being empathic without responding empathically

One last distinction needs to be made. One can be empathic without responding empathically.

It is possible for me to experience the internal affective state of another without responding in a manner that reflects that understanding. (Identifying with the affective state of the other means being able to sense the actual emotions the other is experiencing.)

It is through the empathic response that the other feels understood. Therefore, the way we respond is very important and often difficult. Sometimes, the best is to simply listen, nod one's head, and say nothing.

Is being empathic always lead to an empathic response?

Here is an example, adapted from an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry, of how being empathic does not always lead to an empathic response.

• A patient is explaining to the pharmacist how she! When she learned that she had diabetes. She said, "I’m just shocked. I don't believe it. Now I have to start using insulin. 
• I just...," and pharmacist interrupted with, “You just feel overwhelmed and don't know what you're going to do?" The patient said, rather despondently, "Yeah, I guess." 
• She no longer wanted to talk about this situation. She paid for her medication and left the pharmacy.

What happened here? Clearly, the pharmacist accurately reflected her affective state. However, the patient did not perceive the interruption as understanding.

1. Either she felt exposed by the pharmacist's response and was therefore uncomfortable in continuing, or she truly wanted to struggle with her experience and perceived the pharmacist's interruption as interfering.
2. Understanding the patient's internal affective experience did not produce an empathic response. Was the pharmacist wrong in his response? The question is not one of right or wrong, but of whether the response benefited the patient.
3. As much as we may want to, we cannot respond perfectly. We can, however, be sensitive and caring enough to observe what happens after we respond, and adjust our responses accordingly.

In this case, it would have been appropriate to not push the patient any farther and to apologize for the interruption.

Health care providers sometimes express concern about the use of empathy. The concern is that being empathic will make the relationship with the patient too personal.

Often, the solution is to remain aloof or emotionally distant. Gadow states that "a solution to the personal/professional dichotomy can be proposed in the following way.

• Professional involvement is not an alternative to other kinds of involvement, such as emotional, esthetic, physical, or intellectual.

• It is a deliberate synthesis of all of these, a participation of the entire self, using every dimension of the person as resource in the professional relation.

In fact, anything less than this reduces the patient to an object. As stated by Rogers, “To withhold one's self as a person and to deal with the other person as an object does not have a high probability of being helpful."

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