Empathy and Lived Experience (Part 1)

 I spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating the idea of Empathy and Lived Experience last week. Sharing my thoughts about these with a handful of trusted individuals, I took some time to reflect further before writing (although the urge was to just write there and then). Even this writing has taken several days - as thoughts continue to surface even as I am writing.

So anyway, these are my conclusions (for) NOW. And as always, I suspect there will be those who agree and there will be those who disagree. And that's perfectly ok with me. This is after all, a personal journey of discovery and I do not expect others to have to travel the same path or to reach identical perspectives.

Let's begin with two definitions (in relation to mental health/wellbeing).

"Lived experience refers to having first-hand experience with mental health or substance use challenges. The word “lived” is used to differentiate from others who may have experience of working with mental health and substance use conditions but have not personally lived through those challenges" (https://www.smchealth.org/article/lived-experience-expertise)

Check out "Reflecting on Lived Experiences in Mental Health" by Shuranjeet Singh, Founder at Taraki (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reflecting-lived-experiences-mental-health-shuranjeet-singh/)

"The term “empathy” is used to describe a wide range of experiences. Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people's emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling." (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/empathy/definition)

That out of the way, I would like to acknowledge that when I first started on this path of healing self and others (as a young counselor in the US), I was apt to say that one need not actually have experienced the exact pain of the client in order to be able to assist.  This is because of two factors: (1) the knowledge/education one has received while being trained to be a counselor/therapist allows one the understanding of how development occurs as well as how to make changes and adaptations, and (2) this thing called "empathy" - to relate to what is feeling even if our experience of that feeling is not 100% identical.

An example I used, even up to just recently, when training and/or supervising others in the helping profession is that one does not have to be a raped victim in order to provide counseling/therapy to a client who is a victim of such.  It seem ludicrous to say to a client who comes in seeking help to overcome their trauma of having been raped, "oh, please give me 30 minutes to go out and get raped because I have never experienced that and I can't readily help you if I do not have such an experience." Everyone should be able to see how ridiculous that claim would be.

Another situation where I was faced with this challenge of supposedly not being able to help a client unless I have walked in their shoes was when I worked in a substance abuse treatment facility within the Department of Corrections in the US.  The facility (program) was actually within a "prison" setting (what they called a correctional institution) for youthful offenders.

At this facility they desired to approach the treatment of substance use, dependence, and abuse from three primary approaches: from a psychosocial education perspective, a psychological/treatment perspective, and from a "user" (recovering addict) perspective. I was hired as one of the 3 counselors and my task was to aid in the recovery via counseling/therapy while another counselor was an educator with degree in education, and the third was a counselor who was a recovering addict using the approach of the AA movement. (Note the title of a counselor does not necessarily denote educational/academic training in psychology or counseling).

The contention of the 3rd counselor (from the AA approach) was that neither the educator not the therapist could ever relate to the experience of an addict unless they have gone through the experience of being an addict themselves. The position of the other two, on the other hand, was that the knowledge gained from education (learning) and exprience working with individuals were at least as significant as the personal experience of using, dependence, and abuse of mind altering / controlled substance. 

A key component to this as being able to help largely depended on an understanding of the process as well as the ability to "relate" (empathize) with the challenges faced by these individuals. Furthermore, an advantage (and perhaps also disadvantage) of not having been an addict/abuser/user afforded some objectivity when relating to the client. Conversely, subjectivity could also be argued as an advantage.

Not so much who is right or wrong. Rather, more importantly, I believe, is what is more useful/beneficial/adaptive for us. We each have to decide this for ourselves.

I am going to stop here for now although there is still much I want to say - but because this has taken more than a week (from when I started this topic) to complete, I am just going to post this first.

Stay tuned for more to come.

Peace.