Clinical Social Work Journal

Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 1994

WORKING WITH VICTIMS:

BEING EMPATHIC HELPERS
Dorothy Gibbons, M.S.S.
Philip Lichtenberg, Ph.D.
Janneke van Beusekom, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT: Responding to victims empathically requires integrating two

apparently opposite realities: seeing the victimized person as vulnerable and
innocent while recognizing that person as influential and culpable. When this
integration is too painful, helpers disidentify from and project onto the victim, be-
coming either Disaffected Others or Emphatic Sympathizers and further contribut-
ing to the client's victimization. To be Empathic Helpers we need supportive com-
munities in which we explore our painful feelings around vulnerability and
culpability so that we can maintain our identification with our victimized clients
and lead them to a full understanding of themselves and their experience.

The majority of clients with whom we work as social workers are in

one sense or another "victims." Some of these persons are easily identi-
fied as victims facing an acute crisis as a result of some emergency, a
crime, or politically-inspired oppression. Others, however, who m a y be
striving to cope with long-term deprivation, m a y not be as easily identi-
fied as victims, and m a y in fact resent being referred to as victims. In
part, this r e s e n t m e n t m a y be due to a common tendency i n society ei-
t h e r to blame or to overprotect the victim, a tendency which obscures
both the complexity of the person's situation and the richness of her or
his full personhood. However, if we separate for the moment social atti-
tudes towards victims from the definition of a "victim"--one who is sub-
ject to deprivation, unnecessary suffering, or oppression--then we are
more likely to reach agreement t h a t most of our clients are indeed vic-
tims of biological, psychological, and social forces.

The authors wish to thank the Mary Hale Chase Fund for partially supporting this
research.

211 9 1994 H u m a n Sciences Press, Inc.

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Not only our clients are victims; too often we social workers have
been victimized ourselves. What has been found true for clinical and
counseling psychologists (Pope and Feldman-Summers, 1992), that a
large proportion have themselves been subject to some form of abuse, is
probably also the case for social workers. Therefore, since we are often
the crucial link between our clients and the larger society, we need to
have worked through some of our own painful issues towards victims
and victimization before trying to help our clients. Otherwise we m a y
find ourselves--despite all of our good and even noble intentions--func-
tioning as unwitting agents in further victimizing our clients, the very
people we intend to help.
Thus we are interested in how helpers respond to victims. Working
closely with victims universally and inevitably arouses feelings of help-
lessness, guilt, and responsibility within us. This is true not only for
social workers but also for others who work with victims. Fullerton, Mc-
Carroll, and Wright (1992), for example, studied the responses of fire-
fighters following the performance of rescue work and found identifica-
tion with the victims, feelings of helplessness and guilt, and fear of the
u n k n o w n among the typical responses. Our response to the arousal of
such painful feelings will determine our ability to work effectively with
clients. Workers who are able to accept and contain their own painful
feelings without denying or suppressing t h e m become "Empathic Help-
ers," able to identify intimately with the emotions that the victim is
experiencing and able to maintain a clear sense of self while reacting
empathically to their clients' sense of vulnerability, guilt, and rage.
However, not all workers are able to maintain a strong sense of self
while identifying with the victim's pain, for this identification arouses
the helper's own countertransference issues and a helper who has not
worked through these issues is likely to become frightened or over-
whelmed in the presence of the victim's intense emotions. As Catherall
(1991) states, only workers who have acknowledged and accepted all
sides of themselves are capable of acknowledging and accepting all sides
of the victim/client.
Helpers who have not worked through their own sense of helpless-
ness, guilt, and rage are likely to disidentify and project these feelings
in an attempt to defend themselves against the pain that has been
aroused within them. These workers become either "Disaffected Others"
or "Emphatic Sympathizers" as they create a psychological distance be-
tween themselves and the victim, a distance which limits their identi-
fication with the victim and emphasizes the differences between them-
selves and their clients. Such workers continue to deliver services to
their clients, but they have lost the empathy or the full and healthy
identification that forms the healing connection between the social
worker and the client. Although countertransference issues specific to
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working with victims have been discussed in the context of specific

forms of victimization (McElroy and McElroy, 1991), we believe that
working with any and all victims raises some basic countertransference
issues that are common to all of us through our own experiences of vic-
timization.
In this article, after describing Empathic Helpers, Disaffected
Others, and Emphatic Sympathizers, we examine the different psycho-
logical processes that a worker undergoes to become one of these three
types of respondents to victims. (Each of us is likely to be all of these
types at one point or another, while some of us are more likely to be
Empathic Helpers, and others more likely to be Disaffected Others or
Emphatic Sympathizers.) Also, we discuss the questions around our vul-
nerability, innocence, influence, and culpability that are raised by vic-
timization. Finally, we offer suggestions as to how workers can prevent
the processes that lead them to become Disaffected Others or Emphatic
Sympathizers so that they may maintain a healthy identification with
the victim and become most often the Empathic Helpers that they in-
tended to be when they entered the social work profession.
An Empathic Helper is a helper who "meets" a victim squarely and
authentically, who stays with the intense feelings of the victim, what-
ever they may be, without needing to stop or to alleviate these feelings
prematurely, and who enables the victim to grapple with and come to
terms with all the influences that are creating these intense (sometimes
repressed) feelings.
A Disaffected Other is a helper who, aider an initial period of caring
and sympathy for the victim, begins to regard this victim with aversion.
Many public welfare workers who begin their careers with idealism and
optimism become hardened and bitter under the onslaught of poor work-
ing conditions, intense feelings, and a sense of failure as they realize
how little they can do in the face of the overwhelming problems that the
clients must deal with on a daily basis. Social workers are not by any
means the only group of people who become Disaffected Others. Many
teachers in inner city schools become exasperated with their students
after putting great effort into their teaching and being met with hostil-
ity or indifference. Ordinary citizens may become Disaffected Others in
respect to rioters in the ghettos or unionists on strike. Often, these Dis-
affected Others initially felt some concern about such rioters or strikers,
but the violence or inconvenience associated with their causes fre-
quently has made these citizens feel uneasy or angry and so they have
separated themselves from the "trouble makers" and become Disaffected
Others. Disaffected Others are often perceived as "jaded" or incompas-
sionate people who either ignore the victims' plight or blame the victims
for their problems.
An Emphatic Sympathizer is a helper who, like an overprotective
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parent, takes up the cause of the victim and makes it his or her own. By
becoming overly involved in "the cause," the Emphatic Sympathizer of-
ten neglects or obscures the individuality of the victim and the unique-
ness of his or her experience. By stressing the power of the social situa-
tion and minimizing the h u m a n i t y of the victim, the Emphatic
Sympathizer often makes of the victim just one more example to support
the validity of the sympathizer's crusade. In contrast to the Disaffected
Other, who believes that the victim is importantly responsible for his or
her situation, the Emphatic Sympathizer sees the victim as mostly vic-
tim, a vulnerable person pretty much devoid of responsibility or agency
in his or her life. Many advocates for victims like the mentally ill or the
physically disabled become Emphatic Sympathizers by speaking for the
victims rather than helping these persons to find and express their own
power.
We believe that the process involved in determining which of these
three classes of response will become dominant is a rather simple one. It
consists of three basic steps: First, the helper identifies with the victim.
Second, the helper must then deal with the feelings that are aroused by
this identification, feelings that are powerful and painful. Third, the
helper either manages to contain these painful feelings while maintain-
ing an identification and becomes an Empathic Helper, or the helper
becomes overwhelmed by his or her feelings, disidentifies with the vic-
tim, and projects upon the victim in order to divest self of unwelcome,
stirred-up feelings. As a result of this disidentification and projection,
the helper--who entered the relationship with the conscious intention
of being an Empathic Helper--becomes either a Disaffected Other or an
Emphatic Sympathizer.
It is important to note that the first two steps of the process are the
same for all workers and that the third step of the process reflects the
helper's reaction to his or her own intrapsychic pain, not a rational deci-
sion to stay with or leave the victim. At this point in the process, the
helper's own pain overshadows his or her relationship with the victim
and, for the helper, the fate of the client becomes secondary to his or her
own struggle to survive this pain. For those who intend to work in the
helping professions, the ability to manage one's own pain and anger in
the face of the client's victimization seems particularly important since
studies have indicated that social workers are highly vulnerable to burn-
out (Daley, 1979; Freudenberger, 1977; Himle and Jayaratne, 1990). We
believe t h a t much of the affect associated with burnout--boredom, de-
tachment, dechne in motivation, and apathy (Cherniss, 1978)mis the re-
sult of the workers' attempts to protect themselves from the pain that
they have experienced after their initial identification with the victim.
Although some workers may habitually disidentify and project onto cli-
ents, all workers are susceptible to the pressure to do so when working
with a case that feels especially painful.
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At this point, we ask ourselves, what in particular causes the psy-

chological distress t h a t leads workers to disidentify with victims? We
believe that fundamental questions about control, vulnerability, and
blame are at the heart of the matter. The fact that questions about these
issues are universally raised by victims is well-documented in the liter-
ature (see, for example, Finkelhor and Browne, 1985; Janoff-Bulman
and Frieze, 1983; Miller and Porter, 1983; Seagull and Seagull, 1991). A
common t h e m e in these writings is how victimization forces the victim
into an awareness of his or her vulnerability in the world. This raises
intense and intolerable feelings of helplessness which victims often at-
t e m p t to dispel through self-blame. Such self-blame gives victims back a
sense of control which inevitably is accompanied by feelings of guilt and
doubts about their innocence. As workers we, too, become aware both of
our own and of our clients' lack of complete control over the events in
our lives, and such an awareness raises strong and difficult feelings of
helplessness within us. We often try to rid ourselves of this sense of
helplessness through either blaming the victim or attempting to seize
control of the situation, attempts which may alleviate our psychological
distress b u t which intensify the distress of the victim.
In our capacity as social workers and as people concerned with liv-
ing our own lives, we are continually confronted with questions about
our power and responsibility, questions whose importance is critically
heightened when we identify with our victimized clients. First, we ask
to w h a t extent do we experience our lives as subject to powerful forces
impinging upon us beyond our control and to w h a t extent are we agents
of our lives. The answer to this question speaks to our being both vul-
nerable and influential in each encounter that we live. Second, we ask
about our responsibility, our accountability to ourselves and to others,
for the actions we t a k e in the making of our lives. The answer to this
question informs our innocence and our culpability in the episodes that
go to m a k e up our lives. Thus we see here a dialectic of vulnerability
and innocence, on the one hand, and influence and culpability, on the
other. In every event that constitutes our living we are to varying de-
grees simultaneously vulnerable, innocent, influential, and culpable. As
best we can, we construct our lives to maximize our innocence and influ-
ence while minimizing our vulnerability and culpability. Yet every
event and every decision in our lives and in our work in some w a y forces
us to consider anew the possibility and the reality that exercising our
influence opens the door to being culpable of doing harm. Similarly,
when we recognize our innocence in the unfolding of an event or the
making of a decision, we must also acknowledge our own vulnerability.
Victimization, w h e t h e r our own or t h a t of others with whom we
identify, heightens our awareness of our participation in this dialectical
process. Victimization makes us intensely aware Of our vulnerability
and causes us to question our innocence so that our simple view of our-
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selves as both influential and innocent is destroyed. Did we, for in-
stance, place ourselves in jeopardy by the actions we took? If we did,
then our influence is related to our vulnerability, and we are culpable in
some degree, no longer so completely innocent. Our sense of balance has
been shattered. We may try to re-assert our innocence but have nagging
doubts about the amount and type of influence we have exerted, and our
guilty feelings may be a consequence of such doubts.
In the many moments that constitute our lives we experience vary-
ing degrees of influence, vulnerability, culpability, and innocence. In
those moments when our influence is minimal we are exceptionally vul-
nerable and innocent. In other moments when our influence is great we
also risk a high degree of culpability. The process of victimization is
complex and often constitutes multiple moments of our lives, sometimes
ranging from long before the victimizing act to many years after the act.
The degree of influence, vulnerability, culpability, and innocence in the
victimized persons may vary greatly during this time. Dealing with and
recovering from victimization requires a new understanding of being in
the world, an understanding that incorporates, over time, each and
every aspect of the dialectic: vulnerability; innocence, influence, and
culpability.
Another way of seeing this dialectic is that we need to be open to
being affected, from our own depths and from others in our world; and
we need also to do something with what is affecting us. We are both
instruments (of our unconscious and of others) and agents in the unfold-
ing of our lives. Both are necessary for us to realize our nature in com-
munion with others. Without being open to being affected by such
forces, we become dissociated within ourselves and isolated from others.
Without being agents, we become only empty tools of unconscious and
social forces. No person lives without openness and without some form
of executive powers.
This dialectic, this tension between vulnerability and innocence on
the one hand and influence and culpability on the other, and our ability
to experience it in its entirety, significantly affects our capacity to iden-
tify with victims in our work. Persons who are being victimized alter-
nately experience themselves in different places within this dialectic, as
for example, the battered woman who portrays herself overtly as inno-
cent and vulnerable and yet also feels guilty and as if she is responsible
for doing something wrong. Our responsibility in working with her is to
see in some realistic fashion both her innocence and her culpability, her
vulnerability and her influence in her relations with her partner. When
we see one side without the other, we are very likely acting either as a
Disaffected Other or an Emphatic Sympathizer, and, therefore, failing
to meet the victim in her entirety as a person.
Although our responsibility as helpers is to experience the full com-
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DOROTHYGIBBONS,PHILIP LICHTENBERG,AND JANNEKEVAN BEUSEKOM

plexity of the victim's painful situation, it is often difficult to remain

conscious of the fact that the battered woman who appears before us has
been influential and culpable as well as vulnerable and innocent in her
relationship with her batterer. In the presence of her suffering, our own
painful feelings will be aroused and unless we h a v e learned to tolerate
the ambivalence of being both vulnerable and influential and innocent
and culpable in relation to our own experiences of victimization, then
we will not be able to remain with the victim in her highly conflictual
state. To fully identify with her, we need to recognize and accept her
feelings of helplessness, aggression, innocence, and guilt. However, un-
less we have already come to terms with these feelings within ourselves,
we will be unable to identify with the victim and will project by placing
an exaggerated importance onto some of her feelings while minimizing
the existence of other feelings.
Aside from the internal pressure that workers feel to deny painful
feelings and to disidentify with the victim, there is also a societal pres-
sure to disidentify with or to distance ourselves from the victim. Be-
cause victims are often seen as the weak or vulnerable members of our
society, those who work with victims are in danger of being fused with
them in the eyes of the public and becoming discredited, less influential
members of society. Public welfare workers, political activists, and com-
munity organizers often experience a loss of social status because they
have a close association with the poor or oppressed members of society.
In an attempt to maintain their status while working with victims,
many workers create a distance between themselves and the victims by
becoming a Disaffected Other and treating the victims with disdain or
by becoming an Emphatic Sympathizer and treating the victims with
pity. (Professionalism may be a cover for these positions.) Whether a
worker becomes an Emphatic Sympathizer or a Disaffected Other de-
pends on how the worker sees himself or herself in relation to the larger
society as well as on how the worker deals with the vulnerable/inno-
cent-influential/culpable dialectic within himself or herself.
Our analysis thus far enables us to specify how the projections of
the Disaffected Other a n d the Emphatic Sympathizer are latched onto
the client/victim; what the projections do for the helper with respect to
her or his inner life; and what the projections do for the helper in re-
spect to the larger world. Since the projections differ for the Disaffected
Other and the Emphatic Sympathizer, we take up each separately in its
turn.
With respect to the victim, the Disaffected Other projects by: 1) em-
phasizing the culpability of the victim, focusing on whatever influence
the victim has exerted in the episode connected with the victimization;
and 2) obscuring the innocence of the victim by directing attention away
from the vulnerability of that person. Thus, the Disaffected Other fol-
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lows patterns familiarly known as "blaming the victim" (Ryan, 1976).

Consider the following:

Of the rape victim: She "asked for it" by dressing sexily, being in
that place, drinking too much, etc.
Of Anita Hill: She must be lying about being sexually harassed by
Clarence Thomas because she called upon him for influence at a
later time.
Of the battered wife: She stays with him despite his beating her.
Of the public welfare client: What is he doing with color TV?

In these and similar instances, the Disaffected Other attends to influen-

tial components of the victim's behavior which are not intrinsically re-
lated to what has brought about the victimization.
What does such projection upon the victim do for the Disaffected
Other? On the one hand, it bolsters his or her sense of influence in the
events of life without accompanying guilt. Unlike the victim, the helper
can believe that he or she controls what happens to him or her. On the
other hand, the Disaffected Other avoids the feelings of vulnerability
and helplessness t h a t have been aroused by contact with the victim.
(Sometimes the helplessness is aroused via the projective identifications
of the victim, sometimes merely by the normal identification of the
worker with the client.) By directing attention away from the vul-
nerability of the victim, the Disaffected Other also relieves self of the
feelings associated with vulnerability.
With respect to the larger world, the Disaffected Other fuses with
social forces and social norms that suggest we are in control of our lives
and our destiny and that diminish our attention to our common need for
depending on others in our h u m a n vulnerability. The distortion of the
dialectic of vulnerable/innocent--influential/culpable is manifested in
all three of these domains: the victim is considered to be more influen-
tial and culpable than he or she in fact merits; the Disaffected Other is
in control and invulnerable; and the larger world can rely upon the re-
sources of individuals without having to provide for our needs in our
neediness.
For the Emphatic Sympathizer the projection functions differently.
With respect to the victim, the Emphatic Sympathizer underscores the
vulnerability and exaggerates the innocence of the victim. This is the
overprotectiveness of the helper with his or her client. The Emphatic
Sympathizer stands between the victim and the victimizer as well as
the larger world, proclaiming to the victim that he or she is entirely in-
nocent and that the forces which victimize him or her are entirely cul-
pable. At the same time, the Emphatic Sympathizer obscures the cul-
pability of the victim by directing attention away from the influential
exertions of the victim in the circumstances that went awry.
Emphatic Sympathizers tend to see themselves as victims of the
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DOROTHY GIBBONS, PHILIP LICHTENBERG, AND JANNEKE VAN BEUSEKOM

sexism, racism, or political oppression of the dominant culture. They

feel impotent and angry in the face of powerful forces which, they be-
lieve, they must try to change despite feeling weak. To counteract this
sense of helplessness, they become professional helpers, establishing re-
lationships with their clients in which they feel an exaggerated sense of
influence without guilt. They become the "rescuers" of helpless victims,
feeling capable and powerful as they fix other people's lives. However,
in order to feel this exaggerated sense of influence, they project their
own sense of vulnerability onto the victim so that within the helping
relationship, the client contains all the vulnerability and the worker
contains all the influence.
Oftentimes, the client colludes with the worker to create and main-
tain the unequal relationship because the client, too, is initially more
comfortable in seeing himself or herself as completely innocent and is
willing to relinquish a sense of influence in order to be seen as the "all
good" victim. So long as the client colludes with the Emphatic Sympa-
thizer, the client is trapped in a helpless, victimized role. The worker,
who has the power, may seem to be using this power in a magnanimous
way, but the client remains a passive, ineffective person, whose life's
circumstances are dependent on the influence of others. This relation-
ship also perpetuates the Emphatic Sympathizer's victimization in the
larger society, since the distorted sense of power that the worker re-
ceives from this client-worker relationship helps the worker to avoid his
or her own sense of frustration in relation to the larger society.
Concomitantly, Emphatic Sympathizers tend to exaggerate the in-
fluence and especially the culpability of social forces and social norms.
Steele (1990) has shown how leaders of the African-American commu-
nity have acted as Emphatic Sympathizers by focusing on the racism of
the larger society to justify all limitations exhibited by African-Ameri-
cans. This focus on society's racism frees them from the risks of effort
and influence, such as exerting themselves in school or applying for
challenging jobs with the possibility of failing. Innocence is power, he
claims, and has been used too much in recent years to the detriment of
the community. Although we agree with Steele that civil rights leaders
in recent years have tended to be what we call Emphatic Sympathizers,
we do not subscribe to his implied individualism. Those who focus solely
on what the isolated individual can do exaggerate the influential/culpa-
ble aspect of the dialectic, thereby becoming Disaffected Others. At the
same time that they are indicting the larger society in its culpability
vis-a-vis victims, Emphatic Sympathizers are separating themselves
from such i n h u m a n i t y - - w h i c h gives a tone of righteous indignation to
their efforts. We can suspect that they are projecting some of their own
guilt onto the larger society, which may be why they so often alienate
those whom they wish to mobilize to their cause.
Because projection is the key process that limits D~saffected Others
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and Emphatic Sympathizers from becoming Empathic Helpers, it is vi-

tally important for us to learn how to lessen the compulsion to project
our uncomfortable feelings which are aroused in the face of victimiza-
tion and to learn how to undo those projections which we may have
already placed upon the victim. Considerable attention has been paid to
the description and diagnosis of the projecting activities of clients (see,
for example, Kernberg, 1987; Meissner, 1986; Ogden, 1979), and the
same guidelines commonly associated with working with clients' pro-
jections can be drawn upon when working with our own projections.
The first thing to remember is that people project when they find it
too difficult to entertain certain thoughts or feelings such as helpless-
ness, fury or intense guilt in their conscious awareness. Two suggestions
come forward when we address this fact. One, placing a heavier load on
the worker by challenging him or demanding more from her will act to
promote or solidify rather than to prevent or undo a projection. Projec-
tion comes from "too much already" and does not give way to more being
called for. Two, that which is unbearable for the individual alone is often
made more tolerable when shared or felt in safe communion with others.
Some kind of holding environment is important for the prevention or re-
versal of projecting processes. Adequate support for intense experiences is
critical, especially when victimization is the focus of attention.
In order to maintain an empathic identification with the victim, we
social workers need our own supportive communities or holding envi-
ronments in which we can freely express and work through feelings of
helplessness and rage without fear of being reprimanded or rejected. We
need communities which will encourage us to explore the compulsion to
blame or to overprotect the victim and which will ultimately help us to
re-experience in a reparative way our own painful experiences of victim-
ization, experiences which make it difficult for us to accept ourselves as
vulnerable, innocent, influential and culpable beings in the world. In-
stead of reacting to a worker's projections with rational arguments, mor-
alistic imperatives, anger or emotional withdrawal, members of this
community can maintain supportive contact with the worker while en-
abling the worker to talk about the experience that the worker is using
as a ground for his or her projection. Because projections are always
based on something real, the worker may need to re-experience the
painful emotions associated with this experience. However, this time,
within the supportive environment, the worker may allow himself or
herself to let go of defenses, have the full experience of pain, and learn
that both the self and others can survive periods of suffering. By con-
sciously experiencing the pain of victimization, the worker is relieving
the self of the need to deny the pain or to disidentify and project it onto
the client when these difficult feelings are aroused in response to the
client's story. A worker who feels supported and accepted and who knows
he or she can survive trying emotional experiences is less likely to become
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DOROTHYGIBBONS,PHILIP LICHTENBERG,AND JANNEKE VAN BEUSEKOM

overwhelmed while identifying with a client and, therefore, less likely to

become either a Disaffected Other or Emphatic Sympathizer.
This supportive community m a y function not only to comfort b u t
also to challenge, in a loving way, a worker's distorted view of the vul-
nerable/innocent-influential/culpable dialectic in respect to both the self
and clients. Because we are constantly tempted to respond to the events of
our everyday lives and to our interactions with victims by exaggerating
some aspects of the dialectic and because our ability to be Empathic
Helpers rests on our ability to maintain a balanced view of this dialectic, it
is important that such supportive communities be an ongoing, integral
part of social work practice and not just a springboard for the novice worker.
J u s t as we ask the victims with whom we work to examine how
they m a y have in some way contributed to their situation, we must ask
ourselves how we m a y have colluded with our agencies or with the
larger society in creating the isolating, non-supportive environments in
which so m a n y of us work. Before we can work effectively with victims,
we need to address our own e x p e r i e n c e s u b o t h past and p r e s e n t - - o f vic-
timization and to use our influence to mobilize those resources within
ourselves, our agencies and society which can aid in the creation of sup-
portive communities for social workers.
Reowning our projections and consciously acknowledging our dis-
satisfaction with the non-supportive environments in which we live and
work is a crucial first step in creating a community of Empathic Helpers.
Once we are no longer preoccupied with blaming or overprotecting others
in an attempt to avoid our own painful realities, we are no longer encum-
bered with distorted realities and are free to establish authentic, grounded
relationships with others. If we can remain grounded while in an unpleas-
ant reality, then others who share our dissatisfaction can join us, and to-
gether we can exert our collective influence to create more humane rela-
tionships with one another in our workplaces and in our communities.
We are all, at times, victims; none of us can escape this fate. How-
ever, we are not only victims. Our work, as social workers, is to accept
the inevitability of some victimization in the world along with the pain
associated with such victimization, while encouraging ourselves and
others to examine our experiences for clues as to how we may have con-
tributed to our victimization. Until we can be with ourselves in our
pain, we cannot be with others in their pain. However, none of us can
handle our suffering alone. We sometimes need others to empathize and
to contain some of our pain until we are ready to integrate these power-
ful feelings into our awareness. Empathic Helpers need a community of
other Empathic Helpers; without this supportive base it is too easy for
workers to become isolated and overwhelmed and to disidentify and
project in an attempt to protect themselves from these feelings. Al-
though these projections m a y temporarily relieve the Disaffected Other
or Emphatic Sympathizer from feelings of helplessness and rage, they
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do so at the expense of the client, the worker, and the society at large.
These projections function both to victimize the client again, this time
in relation to the worker, and to perpetuate the victimization of the
worker in relation to the larger society. And as long as the client and
the worker deny either their influence or their vulnerability they can-
not realistically assess their innocence or culpability and, therefore,
cannot successfully challenge a society that victimizes others.

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Dorothy Gibbons, M.S.S. Philip Lichtenberg, Ph.D. Janneke van Beusekom, Ph_D.
6240 Crafton St. School of Social Work 1007 Woods Ave.
Philadelphia, PA 19149 Bryn Mawr College Lancaster, PA 17306
300 Airdale Rd.
Bryn Mawr, PA 19010