ABSTRACT
Experienced counselors draw on their creativity in making empathic responses by using metaphors and analogies. The more specific the client’s descriptions, the more accurate the counselor can be in joining with the client’s experience and conveying empathic understanding. Counselors use their own inner experience of the client by attending to their own intuitive feelings – their gut reactions or hunches. Some clients may strongly deny that they are expressing a feeling at all whereas their affect indicates otherwise. The counselor helps the client gain awareness of an underlying emotion, accept it, and openly explore its meaning and significance. Remember that counselors must be aware of the probability of countertransference when working with their clients. Counselor self-disclosure is a skill in the moment. It addresses, not the there and then of the client’s experience or the counselor’s experience of the client. Counselors self-disclose how they experience their clients by responding to what has transpired between them.
