Did you know that we are biologically wired to identify emotionally with another person’s feelings? Our brain has a particular type of neurons, called mirror neurons, that explain our empathic responses to another’s pain: when a person in front of us is showing anger, frustration, or joy, our mirror neurons light up in our brains like a Christmas tree. Isn’t that fascinating? If we are wired to put ourselves in the shoes of another person, what happens between you and your teen in the middle of those countless arguments in which you don’t hear each other and don’t see the other’s point of view?
When working with parents of teens struggling with emotional reactivity, it’s as if I were working with emotional firefighters. They’re doing their best to calm fire after fire with their teens, while going through a full chain of emotions themselves, including frustration, hopelessness, confusion, and disconnection. This is a very exhausting job for any parent, and unfortunately, it’s like a full-time job for some of you.
I can sincerely tell you that your parenting job is not an easy one, and it’s understandable that because you are in constant crisis mode, you may naturally go on automatic pilot for handling conflicts with your teen or any interaction you have with her. The challenge is that unless you make a shift from automatic pilot mode to a strategic mode of handling your teen’s behaviors, you are perpetuating a cycle of disconnection between the two of you in which neither of you sees the struggle of the other. It’s as if you both were unempathic with each other; you both only see conflict in the relationship.
I’m sure you have heard the word “empathy” before, and it’s quite likely you would agree about the importance of having empathy in all relationships, not only in the one with your teen. Empathy is not just a nice word but also a behavior that can be learned and practiced, as any other skill. Empathy is the skill that will allow you and your teen to notice each other’s emotional struggle, and from that place of recognition and acceptance, you can choose your values-based behaviors.
Scientist Daniel Goleman (1995) sees empathy as an important quality of emotional intelligence. Empathy involves three components: you understand the other’s struggle on a thought level, you put yourself emotionally in the other person’s shoes, and you take action to alleviate that struggle. It’s like telling your teen “I understand how you think, how you feel, and I want to do something about it.” Now, if this is what empathy is about from a scientific point of view, then what are the misconceptions people have about it?
Let’s briefly go over some of the misconceptions about empathy as they apply to parenting skills:
Now that we have covered what empathy is and the most common myths about empathy applied to parenting, and you know that you’re already wired to empathically connect with your teen, why don’t you learn the basics of empathic behaviors?
You cannot be empathic without a pinch of curiosity, and you cannot be curious without being fully present with your teen. Being present with your teen is being fully there with her by mindfully paying attention to how she’s talking to you and what she’s talking about. Being present with your teen sounds easy, but given the myriad of thoughts, images, to-do lists, errands to run, and feelings that you go through on a daily basis, it can become quite challenging; it requires radical willingness to do it, 100 percent, all the way. It’s as if you were turning the attention switch on when being with your teen. When you’re present with her, then you can be curious about her.
Curious behaviors are the ones that start with the thought What am I missing when talking to my teen? Curious behaviors are important at all times, but they are particularly important when your teen is sharing something distressing with you. Curious behaviors translate into approaching the conversation with your teen as if you were actually Googling something about her that you want to know more about in that moment. You ask more and more questions until you get it, even if you disagree with her take on things.
For instance, Dennis frequently asks Bradley about the bands she likes to listen to, what new songs they have, and he even asks about the specific lyrics of the songs. Here is the tricky part: Bradley loves those “downer songs” that describe the darkest possible feelings a person can experience: songs about death, grief, and loss. Naturally, when Dennis starts this conversation, he has a pit in his stomach, a feeling of dread, and quickly his mind brings up the thought That’s awful. Bradley needs to hear something more uplifting, not that depressive crap. He also notices some fears about what else he will have to hear Bradley say, and he notices again the thoughts Oh boy, among all the things I have to do, the last thing I have time for is to hear those crappy lyrics. However, Dennis makes an extra effort to mindfully notice those thoughts, name them as coming from “the dark side” (because of his love for the Star Wars movies), and with intention and curiosity, he asks Bradley another question about those songs. Dennis’s parenting value is to learn about his son the best he can, especially while he’s a teenager. He mindfully recognizes and labels his own mind-talk, the emotions that come along when living his parenting value, and then chooses to ask Bradley another question.
Exercise: Practicing Curiosity with Your Teen
Here is an exercise for you to practice curious behaviors: get together with your teen and ask intentionally about a particular interest she has. During the conversation with your teen, watch out for the “I know it all” thoughts or negative judgment thoughts that your mind may be coming up with; you can defuse from those anti-empathic thoughts by acknowledging them first, naming them, Here come my anti-empathic thoughts, and finally choosing a parenting response that will help you to have the relationship you want to have with your teen. After you complete this exercise, write down in your parenting journal any reaction you notice.
Being mindfully present and curious with your teen are the key prerequisites for learning empathic behaviors. If you step back, look again at the interactions with your teen, and keep in mind that parental empathy is about putting yourself in your teen’s shoes, then you may have more room to make a choice about how to handle sticky situations with her.
Teens who suffer with emotional sensitivity often want their struggle to be seen instead of negatively judged, appreciated instead of minimized, and discovered rather than quickly solved. This is not easy for any parent in the midst of an argument, but it is not impossible either.
Here are some specific principles to help you practice empathic behaviors with your teen: ask, accept, appreciate verbally your teen’s struggle, and ask directly what you can do to help your teen in that moment. You can easily remember these behaviors by memorizing them as the four As.
If you put in practice the four As, you will become very skillful at putting yourself in your teen’s shoes. Showing your teen empathy when she’s struggling, with whatever she’s struggling with, will improve your relationship with her, because you get her and are showing her how to create healthy relationships.
Exercise: Practicing Empathic Statements
Pick up your parenting journal and come up with empathic statements for these situations:
The more you practice empathic statements, the more skillful you’re going to be to deal with your teen.
It’s time to learn a more complex empathy skill that requires you to be fully present and open with your teen, so you can directly learn from her and not from what your mind tells you she’s going through.
Here is the rationale for practicing empathic learning: your teen struggles as much as you do, and unless you learn directly from her about her pain, there is no way you can teach her how to handle difficult moments in a skillful manner and in preparation for what life will require from her.
Exercise: Practicing Empathic Learning
Here is an exercise to practice empathic learning with your teen. It has three different parts: in the first part, you will learn about your teen; in the second part, your teen will learn about you; and the third part is for you to practice putting yourself in your teen’s shoes.
First part: in a moment in which both of you are relatively getting along, ask your teen the following questions about your relationship with her.
When asking your teen the above questions, make sure to practice the four As: ask, accept, appreciate her struggle, and ask how you can help when she responds! Let your teen know that you will take some time to think about this and get back to her.
Second part: let your teen know about your emotional inner life in regard to your relationship with her by completing the following sentences as a starting point:
Third part: privately grab your parenting journal and complete the following sentences with regard to the situation you just discussed with your teen:
Make sure you come up with a tentative solution to your teen’s struggle regarding her needs, fears, and specific requests in the first part of the exercise, even if it’s a temporary one. Learning from your teen directly and sharing with her what you go through in regard to your relationship makes you a real person instead of an authority figure who only prescribes behaviors. No one is better than you to teach your teen how be empathic with others.
When practicing empathic learning, watch out for the judgment machine or past- and future- oriented thoughts getting activated; if you see them showing up, do your best to turn up your defusion dial: notice them, name them, and bring yourself back to your teen and this exercise. Notice that the exercise above focuses on one difficulty that you share, since you don’t want to start a battle of words with your teen by discussing a laundry list of challenges or complex situations. The purpose of this exercise on empathic learning is for both of you to learn from each other’s struggles, because in moments of conflict, it’s quite likely that you don’t see each other’s difficulties.
Being present, curious, and showing empathic behaviors to your teen will certainly improve your relationship with her; it will naturally take a couple of trials for you to get in the habit of doing it. Learning or improving any behavioral skill also requires being prepared for potential blocks in the road, and that’s what this section is about. Over the years, I have witnessed three common empathy blocks for parents: problem-solving behaviors, denying the teen’s feelings, and lecturing or advising their teen. Let’s go over each of these empathy blocks.
Problem-solving behaviors include cheerful and solution-oriented statements such as “Everything is going to be okay,” “Let’s just watch a movie, so you don’t have to think about it,” or “Don’t worry about not being invited to the camping trip. I’m sure there will be other camping trips for you.”
Parents may also deny their teen’s feelings about their experience by using correcting or minimizing statements, such as “Actually, this is not what happened, if you recall…” or “I don’t understand why this is so upsetting to you. It’s actually not a big deal.” The more you deny your teen’s emotions, the more your teen is noticing and experiencing them.
Finally, lecturing or advising with comments such as “I don’t want to say this, but I told you so,” “If you had listened to me, this wouldn’t be happening,” or “If you were nicer to those kids, you wouldn’t have to deal with this” will make it harder for any teen to respond positively; in difficult moments, your teen, like anyone else, is simply not in the best place to learn anything.
Here is your challenge: can you notice those urges to try to solve the problem, deny it, or teach your teen about her troubles? If you notice yourself having any of those urges, ground yourself with your breathing, pause, and see if you can instead show an empathic behavior. Urges, like other sensations or emotions, are temporary, and they can’t take over the moment unless we feed them. If you notice those impulses, you can even shift your facial expression into a curious one by lifting your eyebrows and opening your eyes when talking to your teen. You can also practice defusion skills from those problem-solving and lecturing thoughts by naming them first, imagining you’re placing them on the cars of a commercial train, and seeing the train moving on the train track until it’s gone from your sight.
Remember, the more you practice empathic behaviors, the more you’re modeling for your teen how to connect with others and create long-lasting relationships.
Being present and curious with your teen are prerequisites for empathy skills. Empathy skills require that you understand how your teen thinks about a difficult situation, get a feeling for her struggle, and then attempting to do something about it as if you were the one going through the experience. To practice empathy skills, remember to use the four As: ask, accept, acknowledge your teen’s experience verbally, and ask directly what you can do to help your teen in that moment.
Watch out for potential blocks for delivering empathy skills, such as fusion with myths about empathy and urges to solve the problem, deny it, or teach your teen about her feelings. Within ACT, as you are learning throughout this book, a key question is to look at the impact of your thoughts, sensations, images, urges, feelings, and actions and whether or not they help you to move toward creating the relationship you want to have with your teen. So if you find yourself buying into any of those myths as if you were fused with them, ask yourself this key question: what happens to the relationship with your teen when you rigidly hold on to that myth and behave based on that?
To practice empathic behaviors on an ongoing basis, identify a situation in which you struggled with your teen and write it down in your journal at the top of the page; then draw a line dividing the page into two columns. On the left side, write how you felt, thought, any urges you had, and what you did; on the right side, write how your teen may have felt, thought, what urges your teen may have had, and what your teen did.
Keep in mind that you can approach your teen’s likes, dreams, and struggles by getting fused with the thought I know exactly what she’s going through, or you can ask, What am I missing this time? Your choice.