Empathy “Empathy is the act of perceiving, understanding, experiencing and responding to the emotional state of another person”. In simple terms it may be defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person” (Barker cited in Gerdes, 2011). Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else shoes, to understand how they feel or how you relate to their feelings. In social care empathy is based on the core principles of social care practice which are respect for the dignity of a client, social justice and empowerment of clients (Lalor, 2013).
The history of empathy can be traced back a century ago when it was used by Lipps and Titchener and was derived from a German word Einfuhlung meaning “feeling into”. Before then Smith (1759) had used it interchangeably with sympathy which he
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Empathy helps us perceive and understand emotions and motives of other people, it teaches us to listen and understand others without judging them. In the process it helps us build a therapeutic and trustful relationship beneficial to both the client and the therapist consequently leading to job satisfaction and a reduction in fatigue for the social care worker (Halpern, 2003).
More often than not, empathy has always been confused with sympathy and or interchanged to imply the same thing. However, many authors now argue that the two words do not mean the same though somewhat similar. Darwell, (1997) maintains that sympathy is an emotional response evoked by concern for some evident threat to an individual’s well being. To emphasise this fact, Darwell cites a famous remark by Mencious: “No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others: Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be moved to