Carl Rogers on Empathic Listening
The video material is based on Distinguished Contributors to Counseling Film Series by American Personnel and Guidance Association, but the paper presented here by Carl Rogers is also available in his book “A way of being”. I am trying to contribute to and transform the full-length material by creating shorter, well-structured videos with clear titles, with the intention to make this work more accessible and clear to an online audience. That being said, this channel has a new focus, where I upload new videos of myself and guests, see: • How a daily gratitude exercise can contrib...
Listen to Carl Rogers explaining his work on Empathic Listening. This work was the foundation that inspired Marshall Rosenberg when developing Nonviolent Communication (NVC), and there are many similarities apparent between Carl Roger’s work and NVC. Understanding Carl Roger’s work is therefore relevant for understanding the history of NVC. Specifically in this video:
Caricature
Reflecting back the other persons thoughts and feelings
Using recordings to improve as a helping person
Gestalt therapy, psychodrama, primal therapy, bioenergetics, rational-emotive therapy, and transactional analysis…. behavior therapy,
Power with instead of power over
Power with the patient, not with the therapist
Example, guessing the feelings of the other person
Definition of empathy
Self-directed change and improvement
Empathy is a process rather than a state
A way of being
Two other growth-promoting concepts: Positive regard and Therapist congruence
Research evidence for empathy to promote change and learning
"The whole approach came, in a few years, to be known as a technique. "Nondirective therapy," it was said, ''is the technique of reflecting the client's feelings." Or an even worse caricature was simply that ''in nondirective therapy you repeat the last words the client has said." I was so shocked by these complete distortions of our approach that for a number of years I said almost nothing about empathic listening, and when I did it was to stress an empathic attitude, with little comment as to how this might be implemented in the relationship."
"I'm grateful that I was able to study and work with Professor Carl Rogers at a time when he was researching the components of a helping relationship. The results of this research played a key role in the evolution of the process of communication that I will be describing in this book." Marshall Rosenberg in Nonviolent Communication, A Language for Life.
Carl Ransom Rogers (1902 – 1987) was an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (or client-centered approach) to psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his pioneering research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1956. The person-centered approach, his own unique approach to understanding personality and human relationships, found wide application in various domains such as psychotherapy and counseling (client-centered therapy), education (student-centered learning), organizations, and other group settings. For his professional work he was bestowed the Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Psychology by the APA in 1972. In a study by Haggbloom et al. (2002) using six criteria such as citations and recognition, Rogers was found to be the sixth most eminent psychologist of the 20th century and second, among clinicians, only to Sigmund Freud.