The Relationship Between Self-differentiation And Empathy Fatigue In Counselors: The Chain Mediating Role Of Intrusive Rumination And Counseling Self-efficacy

Empathy,as an individual’s ability to feel and experience the experience and inner world of others,is an important technology for counselors to successfully carry out clinical counseling,and is of great significance for establishing and maintaining the relationship between consultants and visitors and improving the counseling effect.However,empathy also has a double-edged sword effect.Counselors need to frequently describe and replay the negative emotions and traumatic experiences of visitors in their work.High-intensity empathy makes counselors easier to fall into automatic emotional experience,which may eventually lead to empathy fatigue.Empathic fatigue threatens the development of counselors’ occupational health.It will not only bring physiological problems such as fatigue and insomnia,but also reduce the counselors’ empathy and affect the work effect.However,domestic scholars pay more attention to the problem of empathy fatigue of medical and nursing groups,and ignore the risk of empathy fatigue of counselors due to their special work nature.Based on this,this study,under the theoretical framework of empathy fatigue model(CFM),aims to explore the impact of counselors’ self-differentiation on empathy fatigue from the perspective of psychological resources,as well as the chain intermediary role of intrusive rumination and counseling self-efficacy in it,with a view to providing theoretical and empirical basis for the follow-up exploration of improving counselors’ mental health and promoting counselors’ professional development,and promoting the healthy development of the psychological counseling industry.In this study,325 psychological counselors were surveyed with the Level of Differentiation of Self Scale,the Event Related Rumination Inventory,the Chinese Version of Counseling Self Estimate Inventory and the Chinese Compassion Fatigue Short Scale,It was found that:(1)Counselors’ self-differentiation,intrusive rumination,self-efficacy and empathy fatigue showed different scores on different demographic variables.Specifically,the score of empathy fatigue of male counselors is lower than that of female counselors,and the risk of empathy fatigue is lower;The counselors who have worked for 1～5 years have the lowest score of self-efficacy;The scores of self-differentiation,invasive rumination,self-efficacy and empathy fatigue of full-time consultants were better than those of part-time consultants.(2)Self-differentiation,invasive rumination,counseling self-efficacy and empathic fatigue are correlated in two ways.Specifically,self-differentiation was negatively correlated with invasive rumination and empathy fatigue,and positively correlated with counseling self-efficacy;Invasive rumination was negatively correlated with counseling self-efficacy and positively correlated with empathy fatigue;Counseling self-efficacy was significantly negatively correlated with empathy fatigue.This study also verified the chain mediating effect of intrusive rumination and self-efficacy of counseling on self differentiation and empathy fatigue.Specifically,mesomeric effect includes three paths: self differentiation → intrusive rumination →empathy fatigue(-0.10),self differentiation → counseling self-efficacy → empathy fatigue(-0.11),self differentiation → intrusive rumination → counseling self-efficacy→ empathy fatigue(-0.02).