Empathy & feeling the pain of others ...

I love this quote from the Dalai Lama.  For me, it  nicely sums up my role as a counsellor ...

'There is a phenomenological difference in experiencing pain yourself and sharing someone else’s pain and suffering. 
Your own pain is involuntary; you feel overwhelmed and have no control. 
When feeling the pain of others, there is an element of discomfort, but there also is a level of stability because you are voluntarily accepting pain. 
It gives you a sense of confidence.'

                                                                                                                                                                                              Dalai Lama

In the counselling room with clients, I aim to create an accepting and empathic space where they can share their pain, distress, confusions, discomfort etc., ... & also their joys and laughter.

It is one of the greatest privileges of my life that clients develop a sense of trust and safety with me so that they do feel able to share and experience the true level of their feelings whilst in the therapeutic relationship with me.

Providing a successfully empathic relationship to my clients means that as a counsellor, I do feel their pain.  I do experience their feelings within my own body and soul.  But as in the above quote, I am always aware that it is the pain of my clients that I am feeling, and not my own.  And it is this distinction that allows me to sit with this pain, to simply be in this pain alongside my clients, enabling them to truly experience, and hence begin to resolve or let go of, their pain.

This is one of the most powerful elements of counselling.  Counsellors are not afraid of the pains of their clients.  They will encourage and enable their clients to accept and experience the true depths of their pain ... and sit alongside them in it.  Unlike friends and family, who, understandably, don't like seeing their loved ones in pain and just want to make them feel better.  Who will dry their friends' tears instead of just allowing them to fall.  Who will tell them that 'everything will be okay,' when maybe it won't be.

Counsellors allow and empower people to truly accept and experience their feelings.  To accept that sometimes, things won't be okay ... but that the client will be in time; that they will find a way to live with things not being okay.

For me, it is a great privilege to sit alongside clients in their pain, and whilst they're in the counselling room with me, that pain is very real for me.  But to enable me to step into other peoples' pain, I have to be very self aware.  I need to know where I stop and where my clients begin; what is their 'stuff' and what's mine.

 And this comes from the ongoing process of self awareness and personal development that counsellors are encouraged to engage in.  If I took my client's pain out of the counselling room and allowed it to impact on me personally, I'd soon burn out and not be able to engage in my work. 

 I need to have a very strong sense of who I am so that I can freely enter my client's world, knowing that once that client leaves me, I am free to step fully back into my own  ...