TPC Journal V8, Issue 4- FULL ISSUE

350 The Professional Counselor | Volume 8, Issue 4 One might hypothesize that students in helping professions (especially in professions in which individuals have direct contact with clients or patients, such as counseling) would have significantly higher levels of empathy. However, counseling programs may not attract individuals who possess greater levels of trait empathy, or training programs might not be as effective in training their students as previously thought. Although microskills are taught in counselor preparation programs (e.g., reflection of content, reflection of feeling), microskill training might not overlap with material that is taught as part of an empathy training or enhance such training. Thus, microskill training might not be any more impactful for CITs’ development of empathy and sympathy than material included in training programs of other academic disciplines (e.g., athletic training, nursing). Another potential reason for the lack of recorded differences between CITs and their non- counseling peers could be that counseling students are inherently anxious, skill-focused, self-focused, or have limited self-other awareness (Stoltenberg, 1981; Stoltenberg & McNeill, 2010). We wonder if CITs might not be focused on utilizing relationship-building approaches as much as they are on doing work that promotes introspection and reflection. Another inquiry for consideration is whether CITs potentially possess a greater understanding of empathy as a construct that inadvertently leads CITs to rate themselves lower in empathy than their non-counseling peers. Further, it is possible that CITs potentially minimize their own levels of empathy in an effort to demonstrate modesty, a phenomenon related to altruism and understood as the modesty bias (McGuire, 2003). Future research would be helpful to better understand various mitigating factors. Nevertheless, we suggest that counseling programs might be able to do more to foster empathy-facilitating experiences in counselors by being more proactive and effective in promoting empathy development in CITs. Through a review of the literature, we found support that empathy training is possible, and we wonder if there is a missed opportunity to effectively train counselors if counselor education programs do not intentionally facilitate empathy development in their CITs. Counselor training programs are not charged to develop empathy in CITs; however, given the importance of empathy in the formation and maintenance of a therapeutic relationship, we propose that counseling training programs consider ways in which empathy is or is not being developed in their specific program. As such, we urge counselor educators to consider strategies to emphasize empathy development in their CITs. For example, reviewing developmental aspects of empathy in children, adolescents, and adults might fit well in a human development course, and the subject can be used to facilitate a conversation with CITs regarding their experiences of empathy development. Similarly, because empathy consists of cognitive and affective components, CITs might benefit from work that assists them in gaining insight into areas of strengths and limitations in regard to both cognitive and affective aspects of empathy. Students who appear stronger in one area of empathy might benefit from practicing skills related to the other aspect of empathy. For example, if a student has a strong awareness of a client’s experience (i.e., cognitive empathy) but appears to have limitations in their felt sense of a client’s experience (i.e., affective empathy), a counselor educator might utilize live supervision opportunities to assist the student in recognizing present emotions or sensations in their body when working with the client or in a role play. Alternatively, to assist a student with developing a greater intellectual understanding of their client’s experience, a counselor educator might employ interpersonal process recall when reviewing their clinical work to help the student identify what their client might be experiencing as a result of their lived experience. To echo recommendations made by Bayne and Jangha (2016), we encourage counselor educators to move away from an exclusive focus on microskills for teaching empathy and to provide opportunities to teach CITs how to foster a connecting experience through creative means (e.g., improvisational skills).