eiseEducation

Empathy and therapy are two incredibly important realities for mental health care. Does counselling psychotherapy need empathy to be successful? The webinar will argue that empathy often plays a vital role in counselling & psychotherapy understood as the relief of human suffering. But oddly, there may be therapeutic settings where it may be less influential or needs to be re-imagined. The webinar will address current views on what might count as empathy. What are its proposed functions and how does it work? Like many other vital human phenomena, such realms are rarely straight forward but an up to date empirically and critically informed picture would seem a requirement for therapists. [A brief review of evidence for mirror neurons will also support a less ‘hyped’ more accurate perspective.] With this snapshot in place, the webinar turns to an assessment of specifics of empathy across a few unique therapeutic settings: broadly defined general work, in the context of client trauma histories and with a few more serious psychiatric conditions. A couple of case illustrations will be employed to tease out important nuances and practical applications. Finally,  the webinar concludes with a Q&A where empathy-therapy matters be discussed in more detail. The webinar also identifies a few resources for further exploration and further study.