Developing Empathy- Buber again - Person centered relationships - Empathy

Basic empathy enables the conductor to relate to the participant more completely, viewing the person as a whole. This more complete way of relating to the participant can be referred to as the I-Thou position (Buber, 1958). The incomplete experience of the self and other is known as the I-It attitude. As Brient and Freshwater (1998) comment: " The I-It attitude is one in which the other person is never viewed as a whole being. It can never be the basis for a holistic relationship". The I-It positio0n is one that has been found to exist widely within nursing. Menzies-Lyth (1970), in her research into social systems, found that nurses view patients as objects as a way of coping with the intense anxiety that such intimate relationships give rise to. The I-Thou approach to relationship is based on equality, with one individual in their totality relating to the other in their totality. Much of what takes place in CE can be related to the person centered approach: I-Thou. Person Centered relationships usually referred to as Rogerian counselling after its founder Carl Rogers, the person centered approach sits very much in the humanistic tradition. Rogers, influential as both as a psychologist and a counsellor, became convinced during his career that human beings are esentially positive, forward looking and realistic by nature, which he referred to as the actualising tendency. Rogers believed this was the motivating force driving all human beings to achive wholeness.

Empathy is a term that is employed variously in counselling, psichotherapy, nursing and across the helping professions. It is used to describe a particular characteristic that helpers should possess in relation to their clients. Here I am relating it to the skills of the conductor, who need to create a safe and enabling relationship to maximise the potential of the participants. In broad terms empathy is a state of being between two people, where one is entering the world of the other whiole maintaining an awareness oh his or her own world. It is the ability to see the world from the point of view of on other individual or group of individuals, through their frame of reference, which in turn describes the ability of the conductor to enter into the true feelings of the other person or group of people.

It is not an attempt to be that person, and try to envisage how it might feelto be them. It is the 'as if' quality that makes empathy different from sympathy. Sympathy, whilst concerned with feelings of pity, compassion and tenderness for the other person, involves collusion, whereas empathy requires much more effort, concentration and discipline. Empathy is expressed or communicated through a number 9of key skills, including active listening to both the words and feelings that are being conveyed by the participant.