On 29 September of this year, Dr. Greet Vanaerschot, University of Antwerp, was honored with a special event celebrating her many achievements and awarding her professor emerita status. The folks who organized the event asked me to write something, which turned out to be a poem. (For more information: https://9b22cb4ae65947bbaf62f74d456d4286.marketingusercontent.com/m/view/IGqtSNLy4dO08KVt3mCglxxmRfxdYYxN842f8F3tuL0x#msdynttrid=i9DLTaQv5-q7J7E55YoZkgLPS-UFpHU5AVdY9A2CpE4)
1. What is Empathy?
What is empathy? Asked Greet.
And answered,
Letting go, tuning in, taking hold,
Letting go again.
These movements, like the children’s nursery rhyme,
Tiny spiders crawling up water spouts,
Found empathy in simple body movements,
Etched indelibly in our memories.
Letting go, tuning in, taking hold:
These images caught my metaphor-fevered
Imagination, opening up the embodied
Phenomenology of empathy for me,
Elaborated to this day as:
Letting go of our load of empathic baggage,
Entering the child’s playhouse of the person’s experience,
Tuning into what in us answers them,
Sifting through the many facets that are there,
Taking hold of what feels most important
… And letting go again.
Empathy must start here,
In this embodied place.
If not, then therapist response modes are empty,
Skill training a waste of effort,
Evidence-based treatments
so much clanging of gongs.
All else is nonsense!
2. Complementarity Is Not Just for Physicists
During my time in Leuven in 1990
While I watched, amused,
Greet and Mia argued which was greater:
Empathy (Greet) or Experiencing (Mia).
They were both right of course,
Arguing the two sides of the great complementarity,
As if we could have one without the other:
Wave or particle; therapist or client.
But I loved that there was a place in this world
Where this argument could be had,
The mystery pondered,
And could seem so natural.
3. Shared Paths
Somewhere, in an old box of photos,
Currently travelling between continents,
There is a record of a visit between our young families,
A third of a century ago,
Our small children playing together,
Though probably no tiny spiders were involved.
But beyond that
We shared other important, professional paths:
Empathy,
Person-centred-experiential therapy,
Process-experiential/emotion-focused therapy;
Research, practice, training;
A common mission of holding space
For these rare things,
Putting them forward, in apparently
Inhospitable places
Where the medical model dominates.
Finding a niche nonetheless.
Years later, we got to hang out again
When you invited me to teach a day on your course,
In Antwerp
To see the precious thing you were building.
Now I realise that for several years
I ran through your section of Antwerp,
From Berchem to Wilrijk and back.
Now, as we retire, our trajectories stretch away
To the horizons of our lives.
We look back and see from whence we’ve come,
All we have accomplished,
And we’re grateful for the ride
And for the company:
Letting go, tuning in, taking hold,
And letting go again.
-Robert Elliott, Pleasanton, California, 3 April 2023
