Empathy: Important for hypnotherapists and their clients.
For therapists, empathy is incredibly important. It provides you with the means to show compassion and build a connection with your client. After all, the success of much therapy hinges on whether or not you can establish rapport.
Research also shows that therapists with empathy are often more successful and their clients also complete treatments and do not quit early[1].
In this blog article, learn more about empathy and its importance for therapists and for clients.
Empathy competence
Empathy is an important skill for therapists. When you have empathy, you can understand other people's feelings, thoughts and experiences and sympathize with the emotions that thoughts and experiences evoke.
It is important for therapists to build rapport with their client, and empathy is important for clients to build relationships with people in general.
Both professionally and privately, empathy is an important skill.
There is also a correlation between emotional intelligence and empathy[2].
Why is empathy important?
Empathy is important for therapists because it enables them to better help their clients. You can come up with better suggestions that truly help your clients solve their problems.
So it plays an important role in communicating with your client. In doing so, you can then better understand your client's perspective. This also strengthens your bond with your client, making them even more docile.
This also gives your client a sense of security, allowing them to express their problems and feelings even more effectively. In turn, it helps the therapist better interpret nonverbal communication (source 1)—something that plays a key role in hypnotherapy.
How to foster empathy
Encouraging empathy among healthcare professionals is an important task. In Greece, for example, they use "diversity dolls" so that future caregivers have more empathy for people from minority groups.
In addition, journaling, using role-playing, art and game simulations are increasingly popular to stimulate empathy (source 1).
So you then try to see a situation from another person's perspective. Role-playing can be very helpful with this, because you then have to "empathize" to play the "role" well.
Another way to encourage empathy is to repeat what the other person is saying, but in your own words. This shows the other person that you are doing your best to understand him or her, and suppose you are wrong, the other person can make that clear to you. Which in turn makes your empathy better.
Empathic listening
Another way to encourage empathy is through empathetic listening. This begins with active listening. You listen to your client without interrupting or responding immediately. This immediately forces yourself to let go of preconceptions or the "I already know," but to form a thought about the information only after you have all the information.
Then repeat what the other person has said in their own words.
You also try to sense your client’s feelings and emotions while you’re listening. You can show this by indicating that you understand how the other person feels and how you would feel in a similar situation.
In the process, your reflection is also supportive. Your body language is supportive, with nods, smiles and leaning forward. In doing so, you can also say things like "That sounds like a challenge."
Empathic listening is very important as a therapist and especially as a hypnotherapist, as people often use it as a "last resort." Previous experiences of misunderstanding and not feeling heard can cause them to already be more skeptical than necessary.
By correctly paraphrasing their words and by remembering details and doing something with them, you will make your client feel heard.
This supports the trust your client has in you as a therapist, which only benefits treatment[3].
Another aspect of empathetic listening is asking questions—for example, based on your client’s body language. This helps clients resolve conflicting goals and gain greater clarity about their thoughts. As a result, emotional problems are resolved[4].
Of course, you might quickly form an opinion based on someone’s story, or the solution might seem very simple to you, and then it can be hard to keep quiet. Mindfulness—being present in the here and now—helps you let your client finish speaking and keep thoughts about all kinds of solutions in your mental waiting room for a little while longer.
What's also good to keep in mind is that ultimately your client really does have to solve his or her own problems. As a hypnotherapist, you remain a professional and you cannot become friends with all your clients. So as long as the empathy is there to help your client move forward, you don't have to worry about developing too close a relationship with your client by being empathetic.
This way, you also avoid tangling with empathy yourself. Showing empathy is good, but you are not the solution, that is the client himself.
In the HIN's training, you will also receive instruction on how to build a professional relationship with your clients over the course of therapy.
Empathize with your client
In addition to needing empathy as a hypnotherapist to best help your clients, your client may also need to improve his or her empathy.
This is sometimes necessary during regression or other techniques. The fun part is that there’s also a technique where you switch roles for a moment: as the hypnotherapist, you play the client, and the client plays the therapist.
This has the following benefits:
- It improves your client's motivation.
- It improves the report.
- It improves hypnotizability and reduces resistance.
- It gives you insights about your client.
- It gives the client a "role model" in dealing with feelings, changes in awareness and self-control.
- It improves your client's self-confidence and ego.
- It improves your client's self-control skills[5].
Empathy during regression
The regression technique is one of the most important techniques for a hypnotherapist. With this technique, people are often taken back to their childhood, to a time when a problem arose.
It’s common for family members or classmates to have been present at that moment, and in such cases, you’ll often find yourself helping the inner child. In these situations, a conversation often takes place between the inner child and the other person who was present at that time.
When coaching someone with this, it is also quite common to have your client empathize with the other person. You then give them the suggestion that they are their mother, for example, and what the mother would actually want to say to the inner child.
This can be difficult for clients—especially if they’ve experienced trauma —to empathize with their mother. That’s why hypnosis is a useful tool, as it allows you to give them suggestions that improve their ability to empathize, such as:
"Your mother loves you, so somewhere there is a good intention behind it. What would that be?"
"Your mother is only human too and people make mistakes, what would she say about this mistake if she loves you?"
This type of suggestion can break through people's resistance and allow them to freely empathize with the other person's situation, who was there at the time.
This can foster understanding, which is often the first step toward forgiveness, allowing them to move past it.
This understanding does not mean that what the other person did is "right," but understanding can provide closure. Allowing people to move on again without difficulty.
Working with empathy
Every therapist works with empathy, and so it is with hypnotherapists. Want to learn more about how empathy and hypnotherapy work?
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