E = Empathy
I train therapists in sophisticated empathy skills that are challenging to learn, because they require the death of the therapist’s ego. The idea is to see the world through the patient’s eyes, and to find the profound truth in what the patient is saying, even when the patient feels totally demoralized, angry or critical of the therapist. And although empathy alone will not be powerful enough to cure most patients, empathy and compassion are absolutely necessary to meaningful and effective treatment.
Research studies have revealed something fairly startling–namely, that therapists’ perception of how empathic and helpful they are can differ greatly from their patients’ perceptions. In fact, therapists’ perceptions of how their patients feel, and how their patients feel about the therapist, are usually less than 10% accurate. This means that a patient will often see his or her therapist very differently from the way the therapist sees himself or herself.
For example, the patient may not feel the therapist is particularly warm, understanding or helpful, but the therapist is simply not aware of this and thinks that he or she is exceptionally warm, understanding, and helpful. This disconnect contributes to slow recovery and even therapeutic failure.
To solve this problem, we require patients to rate the therapist in the waiting room at the end of every therapy session, using brief but exceptionally sensitive and accurate scales, and they leave these assessments for their therapists before going home. This information can be disturbing to the therapist, since most therapists initially receive failing grades from nearly every patient at nearly every therapy session. But those therapists who have the courage to use these assessments, and to review them with patients in a kindly way at the start of the next session, discover that their effectiveness can quickly soar.
|