Roles and Relationships

Essay 1: Counselor Roles and Relationships

Teneatha Riley

CP6600 Professional Orientation and Ethics

Troy University

Essay 1: Counselor Roles and Relationships

In counseling it is essential to empathize with a patient. Empathy can be defined as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner” (Merriam-Webster, 2011). This ability to understand how the patient is feeling and thinking enables the counselor to identify issues that the patient needs to deal with or work their way through in order to find an emotional resolution to their problem.

Accurate empathy is a clinical form of empathy that attempts to engage with the patient empathically in order to either give the patient clarity about their feelings and experiences or to give the counselor clarity and perspective of the patient’s experience (Brown & Srebalus, 2003). The first level of accurate empathy is the primary level of accurate empathy. At this level the counselor is only interested in the explicit expressions of the patient. This means that they are only interested in what the patient is saying (Wicks & Parsons, 2003). They reflect what the patient is saying back to them so that the patient can hear their own words restated and so that they can objectively view their experience. The second level of accurate empathy is advanced accurate empathy which incorporates both what the patient is explicitly saying as well as what they are implicitly expressing (Wicks & Parsons, 2003). This means that the counselor is interested in “what” the patient is saying as well as “how” they are saying it.

During a crisis situation the three principle components of worker, patient and ecological-cultural determinants interact with one another. This means that...