Empathy and emotion regulation: Reprocessing memories of childhood abuse

This article argues that therapist empathy is both an essential context and an active intervention for addressing the emotion regulation problems comm on among adult survivors of child abuse. We define healthy emotion regulati on, the role of parental empathy in the development of these capacities, an d the results of abuse and neglect as empathic failures. We define therapeu tic empathy and outline how it functions both to modulate arousal and to in crease client awareness of emotional experience, thus facilitating emotiona l processing of trauma memories. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.