“Reflective listening” without necessarily “empathic understanding”

I shared some listening practice sessions with a therapist trained in the orthodox person-centered approach (PCA) that Carl Rogers and his successors established. After a session where I was the listener, she commented, “I think Focusing people reflect ‘particular words or phrases,’ and I don’t think that happens much in PCA.” It was very stimulating to have someone point out the characteristics of Focusing-oriented listening that I could not easily see.

In fact, I recalled that when I listened to a demonstration of listening by a colossal PCA figure, I had the opposite impression. This is only from a Focusing-oriented perspective, because her response did not seem to capture the crux of her client's statement in a straightforward manner. In other words, she was rarely observed assessing the words or phrases in her client’s statements that the client might be feeling and then reflecting only the crux to her client.

This rareness is almost always true even when reading the verbatim transcripts by Rogers himself. Rogers’ responses included, “Is this what you are talking about? You mean... [long description] ...” or” I don’t think I understand you yet. Through phrases such as “... [long description] ...is that what you mean?” He is often carefully communicating that “I don’t understand yet, but I want to understand what you are trying to say.”

Rogers would even make a hypothesis about the client’s private world or the phenomenal field (Rogers, 1951) and then ask the client to confirm his hypothesis, not infrequently taking several persistent turns. It is through such exchanges that empathic understanding is gradually achieved.

From my perspective, who has devoted myself to cultivating sensitivity by concentrating on the functions of words and felt sense, it seems that orthodox PCA listening tends more toward “interacting with the client on a person-to-person basis and accepting the whole of them.”

Of course, person-centered listening and Focusing-oriented listening are not entirely incompatible and have many aspects in common. However, there are some differences in the emphasis placed on listening.

Regarding “reflection,” Rogers recalled in his final years, “Although I am partially responsible for the use of this term to describe a certain type of therapist response, I have, over the years, become very unhappy with it.” (Rogers, 1987, p. 375).

On the other hand, Gendlin discusses “reflection” or “reflective listening” as follows:

I feature reflective listening much more centrally than Rogers did. Other ways of expressing empathy might fail to engender the inwardly arising therapeutic process. (Gendlin, 1996, p. 297)

Gendlin’s discussion shows that he sees “expressing empathy” and “engendering the inwardly arising therapeutic process” as not necessarily the same thing.

Focusing-oriented reflection indeed has the advantage of facilitating the speaker’s process without fully communicating empathic understanding. As a somewhat exaggerated example, let us assume the following Focusing session:

Focuser 1: When I think back to what happened in the classroom, I have a kind of thump in the pit of my stomach.
Listener 1: Ha, you have a kind of thump in it.
Focuser 2: Oh, it's not a thump, it's more like a throb.
Listener 2: Huh, more like a throb.
Focuser 3: (...silence...) My stomach feels better.
Listener 3: I see, it feels better now.

The bolded “thump,” “throb,” and “feels better” above are “particular words or phrases,” i.e., the handles for the Focuser’s felt sense. When the listener finds expressions that could be these handles and continues to pinpoint and reflect them to the Focuser, they are often left with no specifics about what happened to the Focuser in the classroom. Nevertheless, in the current example, the listener is at least following the meaning of the Focuser’s words or phrases regarding their feelings as the session progresses.

Here is an example of listening that is even more Focusing-specific than the above, which is Akira Ikemi’s recollection of a Focusing session with Eugene Gendlin. The session took place when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, so it must have been around 1979-80:

Sometimes, when I was a Focusing listener for Gene [Dr. Gendlin], he would use a handle in German. When I told him I did not understand the meaning, he would tell me that I did not need to understand it, but that I should imitate its pronunciation and reflect it back to him. That was very impressive for me. (Ikemi, 2021, p. 74)

In this case, the listener does not even understand the meaning of the handle presented by the Focuser. In asking his listener for this kind of reflection, Gendlin placed more emphasis on having his listener engender the inwardly arising therapeutic process than on having his listener express empathy.

A similar session segment and commentary is presented by Mia Leijssen.

C45: A kind of . . . hum . . ., a mixture of things I think. (T: Hmh.) Something to do with darkness and something to do with, hum . . . I can only . . . can I give you an image?
T45: Hmh. Please do.
C46: A sort of fog.
T46: A sort of fog.
C47: Mhm, a creeping fog. (T: Mhm.) That’s what I’m sort of picking up. (T: Mhm.) A creeping fog.
T47: A creeping fog. (C: Hm.) That’s, how it feels like . . .

... the therapist, not being a native English speaker, doesn’t understand the words ‘creeping fog’. Nevertheless she decides to wait to ask for some explanation and she reflects the keywords. (Leijssen, 1993, pp. 137–8)

It is cited and argued by Campbell Purton that “This second therapeutic function of reflection seems to be undervalued by Rogers.” (Purton, 2004, p. 50)

In these examples, it can be said that processes clearly different from empathetic understanding are occurring on the part of the listener.

What is the difference in their view of therapy that supports this difference in response? My hypothesis at this point is that there may be a difference in how much emphasis is placed on the sixth of Rogers’ necessary and sufficient conditions. Rogers argues that without some attitudinal conditions of the therapist, such as empathy, being communicated to the client, “the therapeutic process could not, by our hypothesis, be initiated.” (Rogers, 1957, p. 99). Conversely, Gendlin argues, "In many cases, the client can perceive positive therapist attitudes only after the concrete personality change process has already occurred” (Gendlin, 1964, p. 136). Gendlin’s view of therapy may have influenced, in no small measure, the idea that a Focusing session can be initiated even if the empathic understanding of the listener is not necessarily communicated to the speaker.

References

Gendlin, E.T. (1964). A theory of personality change. In P. Worchel & D. Byrne (eds.), Personality change (pp. 100-48). John Wiley & Sons.

Gendlin, E. T. (1996). Focusing-oriented psychotherapy: a manual of the experiential method. Guilford Press.

Ikemi, A. (2021). Finding focusing on the trail to becoming [in Japanese]. Human relations (Nanzan University), 20, 67-75.

Leijssen, M. (1993). Creating a workable distance to overwhelming images: comments on a session transcript. In D. Brazier (Ed.), Beyond Carl Rogers: towards a psychotherapy for the 21st century (pp. 129–48). Constable.

Purton, C. (2004). Person-centred therapy: the focusing-oriented approach. Palgrave Macmillan.

Rogers, C.R. (1951). A theory of personality and behavior. In Client-centered therapy: its current practice, implications, and theory (pp. 481–533). Houghton Mifflin.

Rogers, C.R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95-103.

Rogers, C.R. (1986). Reflection of feelings. Person-Centered Review, 1(4), 375-77.