This week on the podcast I want us to address an issue that often comes up when we speak about counseling: empathy and sympathy. Certainly in biblical counseling that’s not something we want to shy away from. In fact, we ought to demonstrate sympathy and empathy very naturally toward those we counsel. I get this question often from those who are learning to counsel and many who have been engaged in counseling, “How do I grow in empathy? How do I grow in sympathy toward a person? How do I grow in compassion toward a person?”
The secular understanding of empathy in counseling is an expression of the regard and respect the counselor holds for the client or the counselee, whose experiences may be quite different from that of the counselor. That’s certainly true. One of the things we think distinctly about as biblical counselors is that we may not have the exact same experiences as the people that we’re counseling, but one of the key tenets of biblical counseling is that when we walk into that room, we’re not very different than the person sitting across the table from us. In fact, we have very similar experiences.
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