Relationship Empathy

I’m going to go into a deeper description about relationship empathy in a subsequent post, but for now, I’m going to identify that the keys to expressing empathy are (1) to demonstrate acceptance of the other person’s experience and emotions and (2) to demonstrate an emotional response that indicates a caring connection with the other person’s emotions.

Accept the person’s emotions

To demonstrate acceptance of another person’s experience, you first have to acknowledge the emotional state. Examples of acceptance, with increasingly direct emotional content, could include:

• “I see a reaction on your face, but I’m not sure what it means. Would you be willing to tell me?”
• “I hear you saying [or, “I can see. . . ”] that you are feeling sad”, or
• “I heard you say you are sad, but from what you told me, you might also be feeling rejected. Is that right?”

In the first example, you acknowledge that you don’t know what the emotional reaction you are seeing on the other person’s face, but you inquire further. The inquiry demonstrates a de facto acceptance that the emotion exists. In the second example, you repeat the feeling words shared by your partner or make a relatively simple observation to acknowledge sadness. The repetition demonstrates acceptance of the emotional experience. In the third example, you go beyond just the acknowledgement of the surface emotional content to identify and acknowledge nuance in the emotional experience. The nuance might even go beyond what the person has said. But the most important part of the third example is at the end. The question, “Is that right?” demonstrates that even if your attempt at understanding is incorrect, your goal is to learn. These sentences are all working towards acceptance.

However, keep in mind that acceptance and understanding are different. In acceptance, you only need to demonstrate that you believe that the emotion exists. For understanding, you need to be able to trace the internal process from the events to the person’s emotional experience. But in my experience, understanding, while helpful, isn’t necessary. You only need to believe that the other person has the emotional experience they are describing.

Demonstrate a connecting emotional response

The next step in empathy is to demonstrate that learning about the other person’s feelings generates a connecting emotional response. Sometimes when I’m working with people in couples therapy, the member of the couple trying to develop empathy will have a hard time shifting from the acceptance step to the emotional connection step. They might say something like, “I’m sorry you feel sad” while shaking their head, raising their eyebrows, curling their upper lip, and turning their face away from their partner. This kind of response describes an emotional reaction of contempt, but that’s not the kind of emotional response that creates a connection.

Here are some examples of connecting emotions when your partner tells you about a situation at work that made them angry. One reaction might be to share in the anger, “I can’t believe s/he did that to you. That’s very unprofessional behavior, and you have always had such a consistent work ethic.”  Another connecting reaction might be sadness, “After all that you have done for your team to have that team member treat you that way makes me sad. You’ve poured your heart out there.” A final example could be sharing confidence with your partner, “Even though that person treated you badly, that doesn’t have an impact on your skills. You are amazing at your job, and I have confidence that you can get through this.”

Which one is correct? I don’t know. Depending on the needs of the listener, each one of the responses that I used might work. The kind of response your partner needs is about their emotional make-up, and you will need to create an internal working model about which emotional responses work best for your partner in different situations.

Shared Vulnerability + Time = Emotional connection

A final advanced concept that I want to share about emotions is that emotional connections between people are built through shared vulnerability and time. The easiest way that I know of as a therapist to cultivate shared vulnerability in a couple is to encourage one person to reveal the vulnerable emotions underneath their communication. For example, I might help a client who is raising their voice towards their partner to shift to identifying the fears, hopes, and sadness behind the anger. However, another possibility would be for the partner who is being yelled at to be able to listen past the anger so skillfully that s/he could empathize with it, “It sounds like you might be scared, sad, and hopeless. Is that right?” in either case, though, on the other side of this vulnerability an emotional connection gets forged when the partners are able to spend time with each other in the vulnerable emotions.

I want to be clear, though, that emotional vulnerability doesn’t only come from spending time experiencing negative emotions. Positive emotions are bonding too. For example, one recipe for helping people bond emotionally is to help them face a challenge together (e.g., ubiquitous “team building” exercises at the company retreat). Sometimes, the vulnerability emerges in the context of an environmental challenge, and the emotions that are experienced are happy or joyful. In fact, when I listen to many couples talk about how they fell in love, they often share stories of engaging in new environments or activities together.

The second ingredient to create an emotional connection, I’m referring to as “time”. What I mean, though, is not just time allowing the vulnerability to continue or time being a couple. I’m referring to the repeated experience of this shared vulnerability. Once I help a couple experience shared vulnerability in session, I will encourage them to begin trying to create opportunities for it between sessions. For example, imagine that you’ve had a hard day at work and you come home. You remember that you’ve been encouraged by me as your therapist to try being vulnerable, yet launching directly into what happened at work feels too exposed. So, instead, you say to your partner, “I’ve been thinking about what Dr. Eric said about shared vulnerability, but it is hard sometimes to just launch into saying the vulnerable things. You know what I mean?” And without exposing too much detail, you’ve already shared your vulnerability about being vulnerable. Now the ball is in your partner’s court. Will they join you there? I hope so.

Conclusion

The last two posts have identified that emotions are created by our perceptions and the stories we tell ourselves. The emotions summarize our physical reactions to interpersonal events and signal to us whether our relationship needs are being met or whether we can anticipate that they will be met in the future. Since our emotional experience helps determine our behavior (and colors our next perceptions), it doesn’t matter if our emotions have logical causes. One way or another, in relationships, we primarily relate to the emotions we have. The best way to relate to emotions in others is with empathy, which includes both acceptance and connection. Over time, the mutual and repeated experience of shared emotional vulnerability and empathetic connection leads people to feel connected with one another. In my next post, I will share an empathy development tool that I use to help people and reflect a little bit on how I put that tool to use.

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Couples have many complaints about their relationship communication. One common one is that their partner is making a mountain out of a molehill. This is usually said dismissively. A justification is then given to cast the partner as unreasonable. I’m going to review some of those reasons in brief, refute each of them, and end with a general idea that you can use if you think your partner is making a mountain out of a mole hill.

She’s a Woman

There are a lot of ways that this comes up in sessions. Sometimes, a person accuses their female partner of being “emotional,” or sometimes the reaction is blamed on “that time of the month”, or on the woman’s perimenopausal symptoms, or sometimes a simple dismissal like, “She’s being irrational”. These same accusations are very rarely leveled at male partners in my practice.

Whether a woman is highlighting challenges in her relationship at one time in her menstrual cycle or during one phase of her reproductive years is an entirely insufficient means of dismissing the complaint. Just because a woman might bring something up at one time in her cycle doesn’t mean the complaint doesn’t have merit. In fact, this time in her cycle might be well-suited to address the challenge. In many cases, pointing to a menstrual cycle or perimenopause often becomes an excuse for dismissing any complaint, and therefore, it has no substance.  In skillful relationship communication, partners listen to complaints, grant them validity (emotional and otherwise), and earnestly seek a remedy if one is possible.

She or He is Just Stressed Out

When we experience stress, there are two things to keep in mind. First, a person under pressure from one domain of life may seek solace and comfort in another. So, a person facing work-related stress may ask for more support, comfort, or investment from their significant other(s) to help reduce their overall stress and workload. In some cases, this may mean that the person under stress makes a bigger issue out of something than it has been in the past. Therefore, in effective relationship communication, we demonstrate compassion for the partner, validate the need, identify what isn’t working, understand the interrelationship of the stress and the need (without dismissing it), and then try to find a way to resolve the challenge.

Second, a person under stress in one domain of life may become more sensitive to minor problems in another. So, your partner may have always been bothered by how you don’t put dirty socks in the hamper. When there was less residual stress, it may have been easy to let this annoyance go without bringing it up. Now, however, with added stress coming in, there is less energy available for tolerating dirty socks. A compassionate response is to validate the concern and make an effort to respond to it (at least while the stress remains high).

This Never Used to Be a Problem

Things change in relationships all the time. After 5 or 15 or 35 years in a relationship, you aren’t the same person that you were when you began the relationship, and neither is your partner. The discovery of a new complaint is a good time to learn how your partner, their values, or their needs have changed. If you take the time for this discernment, you may find and preempt additional challenges. For example, the socks may be what is being talked about, but what really is going on is that your partner’s sense of aesthetics has changed, and the entryway, the color of the drapes, and the way they dress are all going to change, too. In other words, even if “This never used to be a problem,” it may now be one, and denying the reality of it now isn’t going to help anyone.

This Isn’t a Big Deal

One definition of love that I heard recently is that the things that are important to your partner become important to you, too. So the statement, “This isn’t a big dea,l” cuts directly against that connection. If your partner is making a big deal out of it, then it is a big deal to them. If you deny the validity of the need, you create an instant separation between you. Instead, find the generosity to identify that though this isn’t as important to you, it is important to your partner. Get curious about why this is the case, and learn to adapt.

Mole Hills Matter

As you develop better relationship communication skills, you find yourself thinking, “This molehill is clearly important to my partner today. So, how can I soothe them?” You have entered into a validating stance toward your partner. Most often, in my experience, molehills become mountains because they weren’t paid attention to while they were just molehills. Even if something isn’t as important to you, you can improve your relationship communication by validating your partner’s experience, learning what the value underneath the mole hill is, and then figuring out how to support your partner in that value.

If your partner needs help learning to validate you and you live in California, Contact Me.