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  ...

Melodious, Harmonious Empathic Connections

I've been sitting reflecting between clients today on a changed sense of self I'm currently experiencing.  I'm recognising it as an opening up, an expansion, and also a reconnection to a vital part of myself that 've suppressed over the last few years.

In my teens and early twenties, music was a huge and vital part of my life; a huge and vital part of mySelf.  Back then, when I didn't have a strong sense of Self, music gave me an identity and a way of expressing myself. I played guitar, a little bit of piano, sang, and wrote songs; and I loved it.

Leading up to, and during, my counselling training, I began to develop and connect with a much stronger sense of Self as an individual. Self awareness, personal development, psychological theories and therapeutic ways of being enveloped me. I found other ways of expressing myself. I became a 'Counsellor,' a 'Clinical Supervisor.' I became a 'PhD Student,' an 'Eating Disorders Specialist.' I became a 'Clinical Hypnotherapist' and 'NLP Practitioner.

But somewhere along this path, I forgot that I was also a 'Musician,' and a 'Songwriter.'

Sitting here today, I can see how blinkered I'd become, how focused my vision had become onto the therapeutic and eating disorders worlds. I loved, and do still love, that therapeutic world. I love connecting therapeutically with clients, exploring my own, and others' subjectivities, sharing deep empathic understandings and connections, being part of, and observing, the growth and change processes of others.

But, I also love music. And I think I've forgotten that at times.

For me, the connection that happens in the therapy room when working at depth with clients, is a similar sense of connection I feel when connecting with other musicians in a music room. And it's only as I write this now that I'm understanding that parallel. For me, connection is so important. That sense of retaining my own unique individuality (sense of Self), whilst connecting at a deep empathic level with others, is vital, and as both a musician and a therapeutic practitioner I'm lucky to experience that.

If possible, at times, the musical connection can feel even deeper than the therapeutic one. Playing an instrument or singing a song with other musicians, and hearing and feeling part of a shared whole (the song) is incredible. One retains one's individuality as the musician, but it truly is an experience where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It truly is empathic connection at the deepest level; embodied, through Self, through instruments, and through the music.

Embodiment has been a significant part of my PhD research. And I'm now really appreciating just what an embodied experience music is; both when playing an instrument or listening to live / recorded music. Music isn't just heard. It's felt. The bass line or drum beat that resonates through one's body. The melody or song lyric that causes the hairs on the back of one's neck or arms, to stand on end. The rhythm that your foot just can't help tapping along to. And when playing an instrument, the musician and instrument seem to merge. Watch musicians play, and just see how their body moves with, and around, their instrument. Observe their facial expressions as they lose themselves in the sound and the act of creating that sound. And when playing an instrument it can, at those times of empathic connection with the music, feel that the instrument truly is an extension of one's bodily self.

It's no wonder that for some musicians, their instrument becomes so precious to them.

I'm excited about reconnecting with my Musical Self. It feels as if my sense of Self has expanded, has opened up. My world is suddenly a bigger, much more expansive, expressive place. I think the 3 recent entries on here, and the song I've just written, are proof of that! An opening of my mind, and an expansion of my creativity, which I hope will also help me re-engage with my therapeutic and academic work in a much more expansive and creatively expressive way too.

  

Melodious, harmonious empathic connections, musically, therapeutically and academically are hopefully mine now ...