holding onto your heart
Holding Onto Your Heart
Closely aligned with empathy in the art of counseling or relating to people is the ability to see that which is admirable or noble in an otherwise unattractive person, through his or her personal struggles. Such traits may include courage, and refusal to yield one's identity or who you "are" to the State or other outside influences.
Rollo May spoke recently of not allowing our hearts to "fall out" as we go through life. By this, he refered to holding onto vital traits of empathy and compassion. He also spoke of the importance of a counselors allowing themselves to fully experience and appreciate their own existence. Like the toy rabbit in the children's story The Velveteen Rabbit, a person must learn to experience real emotions before they can effectively counsel others.
A similar statement, attributed to Malcolm X, comes to mind: "Only those who have experienced a revolution within themselves can reach out effectively to help others."
Part of the human condition is that under certain circumstances we experience called anger, ranging on a continuum from mild annoyance to consuming rage. If not channeled properly, anger can lead to depression, bitterness and self-destruction. But anger can also serve as a constructive catalyst and motivation for healthy revolution or change; whether within the person, or in the external world.
At a recent conference, Dr. May (Rider College, 05-26-1988) said of his friend the late Carl Rogers: "One problem is he could never find his own anger. He found his sympathy, he found his intelligence, he found all the other aspects of a good therapist. But he could not find his anger.
Dr. May also spoke of Frieda Fromm-Reichman (author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden), whom he said was his personal therapist and teacher. Her book conveys some of the suffering she experienced, as well as the apprieciation of others' pain which she developed in the process. "Out of her own suffering, she became the most sensitive therapist I have ever known," Dr. May recalled.
Carl Rogers grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household where he experienced many advantages of life. This household was also apparently somewhat emotionally constricted. Dr. Fromm-Reichman, however, lived through tremendous personal hardship and pain. Among other things, this included a difficult divorce from her husband, Erich Fromm (another noted psychologist, author of The Art of Loving), and extended incarceration in a mental hospital. Undoubtedly, it was at least partially through this diversity of life experience that Fromme-Reichman developed her ability to empathize ("feel with") her clients. Viktor Frankl, Eldridge Cleaver, and Martin Luther King are other examples of people who have used their anger constructively to help others.
I don't know who it was who advised the unhappy to "turn your tears to rage and your rage to action," but this is largely what living, and a great part of counseling, are about.
By Tom Rue. From a handout distributed in a Humanistic Psychology class, Sullivan County Community College, Woodbourne and Sullivan state correctional facilities, © June 7, 1988. Permission to reprint is granted, provided credit is given.
