The Importance of Empathy and Non-Judgment in Therapeutic Spaces

How important is it to be truly nonjudgmental and empathetic? Extremely important. If a client were to walk into your office, or into your “sacred space” as I like to call it, and feel judgment, criticism, or bias, they would immediately sense a power differential between you and them. This dynamic places you, the therapist, above them, subjugating them to a lesser position. While this power differential may work for some clients who see themselves as broken and you as the fixer of their neurosis or pathology—perhaps coming with a victim mentality of “fix me” and you as the expert—others seek a more equally distributed power dynamic.

Clients who are looking for a collaborative process that acknowledges their own self-worth, delicacy of insecurities, questionings, yearnings, and longings for deeper fulfillment, seek a guide to hold the metaphorical mirror back to them. This is where empathy becomes extremely vital.

Empathy is not merely an intellectual exercise but an act of attunement. This concept, especially highlighted in therapeutic work like Emotion-Focused Therapy, involves empathic attunement, which is crucial in trauma care. It means truly understanding and feeling the emotional progression of a client, from maladaptive emotions to more adaptive ones.

If you are too intellectual in your own pursuit of treating and not feeling enough, you will get stuck. You must revert from the intellectual center back to the emotional center to meet the client exactly where they are. This is a vital process: to understand, to empathize, and to allow them the opportunity to respond differently to life through your empathetic presence. Without this, neuroses become self-fulfilling prophecies, further acting out what everyone says they are no good for or only capable of.

i.e. If a person tells themselves enough times, “I am annoying and no one likes me,” they will behave in ways that align with this belief, making it their reality.

Empathy is everything. It’s not about what you know. Clients may not remember everything you said, but they will surely remember how you made them feel. Feelings are held onto as memories, embedded within the senses of open wounds.

(c)2024 John Piedrahita