The empathy seminar: Building a strong foundation for caregiving competency

Abstract

After a brief review of the variety of methods used in medical professions to teach empathic communication, we will describe one institution’s experience of including empathy teaching in the training curriculum. Baylor Psychiatry Residency Program’s Empathy Seminar has been delivered over the past 30 years to facilitate residents’ expression of their natural empathic abilities in clinical encounters. The seminar uses graded experiences to help residents—to identify and enhance their basic empathic abilities. Among these experiences are depictions of empathic and unempathic exchanges and their consequences, graded exposure to auditory and visual stimuli, and creating written and verbal responses to such stimuli, and exposure to a fellow resident’s taped interview of a patient with the goal of understanding the patient’s emotional experience and then communicating that understanding to the patient. The seminar’s focus on achieving an empathic understanding of the patient rather than a diagnosis is reinforced by readings about empathy and the transference, boundaries of self-disclosure, and benefits of psychotherapy.