The Empathy Quick-Reference Guide
Everything on this page, distilled into one guide – Rogers, Bozarth and the BACP framework, plus skills and development pointers.
Empathy in Counselling
Contents
- Empathy in Counselling Explained
- Difference between Empathy and Sympathy
- Levels of Empathy
- The Importance of Personal Development
- The Importance of Not 'Rescuing'
- Using Idiosyncratic Empathy in Counselling
- Using Questions in Counselling
- Empathic Feeling Words
- Using Idiosyncratic Empathy in Counselling
- Links and Resources
Empathy in counselling is about the counsellor seeing the client’s world as they see it.
Empathy is to respectfully perceive what the client is bringing from their frame of reference and to communicate that back in a way that makes the client feel they’ve been understood.
The empathic circle is only complete when the counsellor is able to communicate her understanding back, in such a way that the client feels they have been heard and understood.
Difference between Empathy and Sympathy
Sympathy is different from empathy.
Sympathy means we feel sorry for someone and empathy means we try to fully understand how it feels for that person.
Feeling sorry for a person is not therapeuticaly useful, but empathy is as it shows the person we truly understand what they are going through.
Empathy is perception. For empathy in counselling to be effective, we need to perceive what it is that the client is bringing, and to communicate that back in a way that makes the client feel they’ve been understood.
Perception without being able to communicate back your understanding is ineffective and does not build an empathic connection.
For example, you might be reading a book or watching a movie that is emotional, and you become very involved in a character and feel a really strong bond with them.
You are able to perceive that, but you are not able to communicate back to the actor or the person in the book. So the empathy cycle is not complete within that transaction.
“We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.”
Carl Ransom Rogers
Rory Lees-Oakes: Empathy is one of the three attitudes later commonly referred to as the core conditions in person-centred counselling. But empathy is much more than simply understanding another person. It’s about helping the client feel truly heard and understood. In this video, we’ll explore what empathy is, why it matters so much, and how you can develop it in your own counselling practice.
By the end, you’ll be able to define empathy from a person-centred perspective, understand why empathy is fundamental to the therapeutic relationship, and apply empathy more intentionally in your counselling sessions.
Before we begin, we’ve created a free handout that summarises the key learning from this video. You can download it using the link below and keep it as a handy study guide or reference for your practice.
Let’s begin with what empathy actually is. Empathy is often confused with sympathy, but they’re very different. Sympathy comes from our own frame of reference. We hear someone’s story and respond based on how we feel about what they’ve told us.
We might say, ” That must be awful,” or, “I feel so sorry for you.” Although those responses are well-intentioned, they’re rooted in our own experience. Empathy is different. Empathy is our attempt to understand the client’s experience from their frame of reference. In other words, we try to understand the world as they experience it, along with the feelings that come with that experience.
Carl Rogers described empathy as perceiving another person’s internal frame of reference accurately with the emotional meanings that belong to it, as if you were that person, but without ever losing the as if quality. That final phrase is important. We’re not becoming the client. We’re not taking on their emotions as our own.
Instead, we’re entering their world with curiosity, respect, and care while remaining grounded in our own. A simple metaphor that many counselling students find helpful is this: empathy is like walking in the client’s shoes, but keeping your socks on. It’s a memorable way of reminding ourselves that we enter the client’s world without losing ourselves in it.
You can imagine stepping into another room. You spend time there carefully. You notice what’s around you. You experience it as respectfully as you can. But when the session ends, you need to be able to find the door back to your own room. If we struggle to do that, it’s something important to reflect on in supervision.
So why is empathy so important? In 1957, Carl Rogers described six necessary and sufficient conditions for therapeutic personality change. Empathy is one of those six conditions. Today, empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard are commonly referred to as the core conditions. Although Rogers himself didn’t use that term.
For Rogers, empathy wasn’t simply something happening inside the counsellor. The client also needs to experience that they have been understood. You might think about watching an emotional film. You may laugh with a character, you may cry with them, you may feel deeply connected to their story. That’s an empathic response, but the character never knows you’ve understood them, and the empathy remains entirely within your own experience.
Counselling is different. The empathic circle is only complete when we communicate our understanding in such a way that the client feels heard and understood. When that happens, clients often say things like, “Yes, that’s exactly it,” or, “You understand.”
Carl Rogers captured this beautifully when he wrote, ” When a person realises he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, ‘Thank God somebody heard me. Someone knows what it’s like to be me.’” Those words remind us that feeling deeply understood can be profoundly therapeutic.
If you’re enjoying the video so far, don’t forget to download the free handout linked below. It summarises these key concepts and makes a useful companion to your counselling studies.
So how do we communicate empathy? One of the most important things to understand is that empathy isn’t really a counselling skill in itself. Within the person-centred tradition, it’s better thought of as a way of being.
The counselling skills we learn, attending, silence, reflection, paraphrasing, and our non-verbal communication only become genuinely therapeutic when they’re grounded in empathy. Everything begins with attending. The client needs to experience that our attention is fully with them. That means listening carefully, being present, showing through our posture, facial expression, and body language that we’re engaged with what they’re bringing.
Sometimes the most empathic response is silence. Silence gives clients space to think, space to feel, and space to discover their own meaning without interruption. From there, reflection and paraphrasing help us communicate our understanding. Reflection focuses primarily on the client’s emotional experience.
Paraphrasing helps us condense and reflect back the meaning of what they’ve shared. Imagine a client says, “Whenever he does that, I get so angry because it keeps happening again and again.” The facts are important, but the emotional heart of what they’re saying may be, “You feel really angry.” Reflecting that feeling back can help the client feel genuinely heard.
Often you’ll hear the response, “Yes, that’s exactly it.” Those moments tell us we’re getting close to the client’s frame of reference. Of course, we won’t always get it exactly right. Sometimes the client will respond, “No, uh, it’s not quite like that.” That isn’t failure. It’s part of the empathic process. It gives us another opportunity to understand more accurately what the client is experiencing.
One way you could bring this into your counselling room is by becoming comfortable with not always getting it right the first time. Empathy is a process of discovery, not perfection. It’s equally important to recognise what can get in the way of empathy. One common trap is rescuing the client. Imagine someone says, “When I look in the mirror, I just see an ugly, overweight person.”
Our natural instinct may be to reassure them. Perhaps we say, “I don’t see that at all. I think you’re beautiful.” It’s kind, it’s caring, but it’s coming from our frame of reference. We’ve unintentionally left the client’s world. An empathic response might sound more like, “That sounds incredibly painful that when you look at yourself, that’s what you see.”
Notice the difference. We’re not agreeing with the client’s belief, neither are we arguing against it. We’re acknowledging the reality of their experience. That’s empathy. Questions can also move us away from empathy.
Within the person-centred approach, we generally ask questions only when they help clarify our understanding of the client’s frame of reference.
If our questions are driven by our own curiosity or by a desire to move the conversation somewhere we think it should go, we’ve probably stepped back into our own frame of reference. A useful question to ask yourself is, “Am I trying to understand this client more deeply, or am I trying to direct the conversation?”
That simple moment of reflection can help us stay alongside the client. Can empathy be developed? The encouraging answer is yes. Carl Rogers believed empathy isn’t simply something we’re born with. It can be learned, it can be strengthened, and it develops most readily in an empathic environment. One of the most valuable ways of developing empathy is through personal development.
The more aware we become of our own beliefs, values, and assumptions, the easier it becomes to recognise when they’re influencing our understanding of the client. Developing empathy also means expanding our emotional vocabulary. Many of us use only a handful of feeling words: happy, sad, angry. But human emotions are far more nuanced than that.
Is someone disappointed, frustrated, ashamed, deflated, overwhelmed, furious? The richer our emotional language becomes, the more accurately we can reflect the client’s experience. You can also practice empathy in everyday life. Pay attention to people’s tone of voice, their body language, their pace, their facial expressions.
Ask yourself, “What might this experience be like for them?” Journaling can also be a valuable reflective practice. It helps us process our own emotional experiences and develop language that may later help us connect more accurately with clients. And whenever you’re uncertain about your empathic responses, supervision remains an invaluable place to reflect, learn, and grow.
Before we finish, don’t forget to download your free empathy handout using the link below. It’s designed to reinforce today’s learning and gives you something practical to return to whenever you need a refresher.
Let’s bring everything together. Empathy is our attempt to understand the client’s world from their frame of reference.
It differs from sympathy because it doesn’t begin with our own perspective. Within person-centred counselling, empathy is one of the six necessary and sufficient conditions Carl Rogers described for therapeutic personality change, and one of the three attitudes later commonly referred to as the core conditions.
Empathy isn’t simply something we feel. It becomes therapeutic when the client experiences that they have been heard and understood. Attending, silence, reflection, and paraphrasing all become meaningful when they’re rooted in genuine empathic understanding. And perhaps most encouraging of all, empathy isn’t fixed.
It’s something we continue developing through personal development, reflective practice, everyday experience, and supervision. I’d like to leave you with one final quotation from Carl Rogers: ” We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy, yet listening of this very special kind is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.”
Thank you for watching. If you found this video helpful, you’ll find many more videos here on our YouTube channel covering counselling theory, skills, and professional practice. You can also explore hundreds of articles, study guides, handouts, and resources at counsellingtutor.com
Levels of Empathy
Counsellors measure the levels of empathy in the counselling relationship by using the Carkhuff and Traux rating scales. (Download your copy of the Empathy in Counselling PDF Rating Scales)
The benefits of empathy are apparent when the client feels, ‘Yes, this person gets me‘. An empathic connection has been formed that deepens the client-counsellor relationship.
Today, there is an increasing recognition that empathy in the therapeutic relationship are vital to effective therapy.
The BACP ethical framework recognises empathy as one of the key personal qualities to which members and registrants are strongly encouraged to aspire.
Empathy is not a counselling skill as such; it is more a way of being. It is very important because it underpins the skills that we might bring to a session.
Counselling skills – reflection, paraphrasing, nonverbal communication etc. – are all worthless unless we have empathy running through them.
Carl Rogers, in developing the person-centred approach to counselling, recognised empathy as being necessary within the therapeutic relationship to bring about psychological contact.
But it doesn’t matter which approach or model of counselling you look to. Empathy must be present even in the more psychodynamic, psychoanalytical forms of therapy.
Advanced Empathy
Idiosyncratic empathy is empathy at an advanced state.
‘Idiosyncratic’ is defined as relating to the individual.
Idiosyncratic empathy means that empathy will be different depending on the person you are working with and can almost be described as “types of empathy in counselling”.
If you are in the client’s frame of reference, if you’re really seeing things how they do, then empathy is going to be individual for each and every client.
The term ‘idiosyncratic empathy’ was first coined by Jerold Bozarth. He recognised that empathy in counselling needed to be different depending on what the client was bringing, who they were, and what their frame of reference was.
Thus with one client, you may find yourself laughing, with the tears rolling down your cheeks. That’s fine if that’s where the client is and what they are bringing on that day – you were with that client as they were full of joy, laughter and fun.
With the next client, you may find yourself in a very different place.
The Empathy Quick-Reference Guide
Everything on this page, distilled into one guide – Rogers, Bozarth and the BACP framework, plus skills and development pointers.
Recognising Our Self-Concept
Empathy is not about you, as the counsellor, getting it right or wrong.
It’s about trying to be in the client’s frame of reference and trying to get it right: almost melting yourself into that client’s world and being there with them.
In order to do this, we need to look at our own self-concept and know who we are as individuals, recognising that we bring our self-concept into the counselling relationship.
So what is our self-concept?
It’s the truths that we hold in life. It’s everything that we believe. It’s rooted in our culture, childhood, belief structure, race and sexuality.
All these things form the way that we look at the world. We project this self-structure out onto everything that we look at.
The Importance of Personal Development
It is for this reason that counselling training is personal development (PD); it requires looking within.
You may be familiar with the Johari window exercise.
Certain things are unseen by us, but they may be visible to others.
And part of the counselling journey, specifically in PD groups, is about encouraging those elements of our personality that are invisible to us – perhaps not-for-growth elements of ourselves – to come into our awareness, challenging us to look at them.
“It is most encouraging to know that this subtle, elusive quality, of utmost importance in therapy, is not something one is ‘born with’, but can be learned, and learned most rapidly in an empathic climate.”
Carl R. Rogers
It’s about us examining our self-concept and what we believe is true and readjusting that so we can be there fully with the client, looking at their material, not through our own eyes but trying to do so through theirs.
The Importance of Not ‘Rescuing’
For example, suppose a client says, ‘I’m devastated. I’m so disgusted with myself. I’m so terribly overweight. When I look in the mirror, I just see this ugly, fat person.’
That’s tough material. That’s a hurt person who’s in a really difficult place. Hearing that, how would you respond in an empathic way, being in that client’s frame of reference?
You may be tempted to say, ‘Well, I hear what you’re saying but that’s not what I see. I see a beautiful individual in front of me.’
That would be 100% in your own frame of reference.
You are basically saying to that client, ‘No, you’re wrong. What you’re perceiving and what you’re seeing is not right. Let me tell you what I see here.’
And that is really not empathic. That is not being in the client’s frame of reference and that client will certainly not feel heard.
They may feel rescued – like you’ve thrown them a life-jacket – but they’re not going to feel heard or validated.
Using Idiosyncratic Empathy in Counselling
Idiosyncratic empathy is about reflecting back in a way that allows the client to feel heard.
So maybe the empathic response in the situation described above might be something along the lines of, ‘Wow, that sounds so terribly destroying for you that when you look in the mirror, you just see this fat person that you basically can’t stand, and recognise that that is you.’
This is certainly not rescuing the client. It’s empathic and in their frame of reference. We’re not trying to rescue them from the pain of what they feel towards their own self; we’re understanding it.
That’s what empathy in counselling is all about.
Using Questions in Counselling
As soon as we find ourselves asking questions for any reason other than to clarify our full understanding of the client’s frame of reference, we’re in our frame of reference and we break empathy.
We’re now saying to the client, “Hey, well, what happens if you do this, and what about that, and what about the next thing? Yeah, but have you tried this?” That is not within the client’s frame of reference and it is certainly not empathic.
If we are operating as person-centred counsellors, we avoid asking any questions other than to clarify our understanding.
The cycle is complete with what the client brings, how we perceive that, and how we understand that.
It’s not about us being right, but rather about:
- being fully integrated within the client’s frame of reference
- putting aside our own self-concept
- being truly with the client just for that moment
- reflecting back our understanding in such a way that the client thinks, ‘Yes, you hear me.’
Examples of Advanced Empathy
Part of being empathic is having a vocabulary to be able to describe what we perceive a client to be bringing.
So if we’re empathically connected to a client, how can we put that in words to feed this connection back to them?
It’s interesting that there are so many different ways to say things.
For example, apparently, there are many Inuit words for snow. But human beings often have very few words for their emotions. We can say ‘happy’, ‘sad’ or ‘angry’, but these seem very basic words for the underlying emotions.
Part of being reflective is looking within – looking at our own emotions and pinpointing words to describe them.
Processing your day and maybe journaling is the best way to do this.
As you journal, think what word really fits with this – because if we can find words to describe our emotions and feelings, maybe we can use those words within a counselling relationship to reflect back our understanding of what a client is bringing.
We may find that when we use a certain word, this really resonates with the client, and they go, ‘Wow, yeah. Wow, that’s the word. That’s exactly it.’
Empathic Feeling Words
For instance, a client might say, ‘They laid me off from my job.’
You notice that their fists and teeth are clenched as they speak to you. You see the muscles in their neck tensing up.
Would ‘angry’ be the right word for that? Or might ‘furious’ more accurately capture the strength of their feeling?
It’s about having a vocabulary that kind of turns the dial from mildly irritated right through to absolutely fuming.
As you’re saying the word that you feel to the client, how do you intonate it?
Do you sit there calmly and say, ‘You know, you look absolutely furious’?
Or do you mirror their body language and say, ‘Wow, you’re furious!’
The latter helps to put the feeling of what you’re perceiving from the client into the words that you feed back to them.
This is idiosyncratic empathy; it’s empathy is in motion. It’s happening right there and then within those moments.
It really is vital to develop your vocabulary, so you can interpret what the client is bringing and add words to unnamed feelings.
Next Steps in Using Idiosyncratic Empathy in Counselling
- Take idiosyncratic empathy into your next simulated counselling skills session and see how it is ever-changing and liquid – as individual as the clients that you will have the privilege of being with on their journey.
- If you work first with one of your peers and then with another, how different is that empathy within those two relationships?
- If you’re merely reflecting back the words the client gave, is that really an empathic connection?
- Are you looking at the individual person? Are you recognising their body language – for example, where are they looking and what are they doing with their hands?
- What type of tone are they using when they speak? We must look way beyond the words, to the person that is there bringing those words.
- Have a chat with your peers about what empathy in counselling means to them. Explain what it means to you. Get their differing opinions.
Links and Resources
Counselling Tutor Facebook group
Counselling Tutor Handouts Vault
Basic Counselling Skills: A Student Guide
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