- Blocks, inner emotional blocks can be opened up and released.
"When a person is perceptively understood, he finds himself coming in closer touch with a wider range of his experiencing. This gives him an expanded referent to which he can turn for guidance in understanding himself and in directing his behavior. If the empathy has been accurate and deep, he may also be able to unblock a flow of experiencing and permit it to run its uninhibited course.
What is meant by these statements? I believe they will be clearer if I present an excerpt from a recorded interview with a woman in the later stages of therapy. This is an excerpt I have used previously, but it is particularly appropriate here:"
"Here it is clear that empathic therapist responses encourage her in the wider exploration of, and closer acquaintance with, the visceral experiencing going on within. She is learning to listen to her guts, to use an inelegant term. She has expanded her knowledge of the flow of her experiencing.
Here, too, we see how this unverbalized visceral flow is used as a referent. How does she know that "guilt" is not the word to describe her feeling? By turning within, taking another look at this reality, this palpable process which is taking place, this experiencing. And so she can test the word "hurt" against this referent and finds it closer. Only when she tries on the phrase, "Oh you poor thing," does it really fit the inner felt meaning of compassion and sorrow for herself. In my judgment she has not only used this aspect of her experiencing as a referent, but has learned something about this process of checking with her total physiological being--a learning she can apply again and again. And empathy has helped to make it possible."