Empathic Engagement in Clinical Practice

This guide for mental health professionals offers an insightful, conversational approach to mastering empathic communication with clients.
Douglas Flemons invites readers to join him in a dialogue that incorporates voices from clinical research and practice, philosophy (both Eastern and Western), neuroscience, and the arts.
He explains the nuts and bolts of empathy, and offers guidelines for how readers can make sense of the client’s thoughts, feelings, and choices from inside their worldview. He also shows how the clinician, with compassion, curiosity, and an empathic imagination, can create a heartfelt connection that allows the client to feel respected and understood and that opens the way for collaboration and therapeutic change.
Innovative strategies for therapist self-care are thoroughly explored. Practitioners learn how to effectively engage in and safely disengage from close empathic relationships, even with clients who are deeply suffering or who present complex emotional challenges.

Douglas Flemons, PhD, is professor emeritus at Nova Southeastern University (NSU). He is an American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy clinical fellow and approved supervisor. He directed a family therapy training clinic for 5 years and created and directed the NSU Student Counseling Center for another 6 years. Douglas has authored five other books, and 60 articles and book chapters that develop and illuminate systemic approaches to learning and practicing brief therapy, clinical hypnosis, supervision, suicide assessment, academic writing, and qualitative research. He and his wife, with whom he coedited a handbook on brief sex therapy, live in Asheville, NC.