Empathic Communication
Getting into Sync with Others
EMPATHY IS DEVELOPED in interactions—in infancy, in childhood, during your teen years, and right now. The quality of your interactions has a large impact on your empathic capacities. If you have shallow relationships or inattentive friends and family members, if your relationships are not fulfilling or deep enough, or if you can’t find empathic people to interact with, then your empathic abilities may languish. On the other hand, if your relationships are deep and satisfying, if you have family members and friends who can meet you where you are and understand you, if your emotional styles are compatible, if your emotion workloads are equal, and if you have other healthy empaths in your life, then your empathic abilities will most likely flourish. Empathy is developed in interactions, and you can increase and deepen your empathic abilities at any point in your life.
As we move outward in support of your empathic skills, from your inner life to your home and now into your relationships, we’ll add specific empathic communication skills that you can use right now to change the quality and tenor of your existing relationships. But first, let’s look at one idea of an empathic conversation between a couple who’ve been together for a while:
Rosalie (frustrated and dejected): It happened again. My boss is a jerk, and everything I do is wrong. I’m so tired of this. I’m afraid that I’m gonna get fired, but I’m even more afraid that I’ll stay and get sucked into the vortex.
David (understanding): I hear you saying that you’re sad because your boss is being hard on you, and that you’re tired and worried that you might lose your job. But I also hear you saying that staying put is frightening.
Rosalie (sarcastic): Is there an echo in here?
David is engaging in a kind of pseudoempathy that is currently called mirroring but that was once called reflective listening. My mother told me that she tried reflective listening more than forty years ago on my little sister and me when we were fighting (we were three and four at the time), and that we both got very quiet and rolled our eyes at each other, as if to say, “Our poor mother has developed a brain-wasting disease.” Mom said that it stopped our fight very effectively, however, and that we ran outside to play (because she had freaked us out!).
My problem with reflective listening and other allegedly empathy-raising techniques is that they’re very obvious techniques, and I could see through them even as a toddler. I still can, though I have more patience today than I did then. I realize that people who use mirroring are trying very hard to get into sync with me, and I have empathy for that. But when I talk to you, and especially when I talk to you about trouble, I don’t want you to rephrase what I said. I know what I said, and I know how I feel. I’m talking to you because I want support or input or help or humor or love or commiseration or a crankfest or a complaining partner. If I’m talking to you when I’m in trouble, it means that I already trust you and believe in you. I already know that you can hear me. You don’t need to parrot me to empathize with me. You need to interact—honestly, authentically, and as yourself. When I talk to you, I don’t want to talk to a mirror; I don’t want to see myself. I want to see you.
Mirroring and reflective listening can be helpful if you’re working with people who aren’t very self-aware, because your skillful mirroring may help them become more precise about their own emotions. If you say to someone, “I hear that you’re feeling a little bit angry and cheated by that,” but the person thought she was being funny, it could really help her begin to become more accurate about her actual emotions, or about the way her emotions are coming across to others. Or if your Empathic Accuracy skills are currently low, learning how to mirror and reflect other people’s emotions will help you begin to develop better emotion recognition skills. If you can rephrase what you heard and mirror back the gist of what people say (that is, you don’t repeat their words verbatim; instead, you tell them what you think they’re feeling, without placing value judgments on their emotions), then you can become more receptive to and precise about the emotional signals people send.
Reflective listening can also be helpful if your relationships suddenly get tangled up and conflicted. It’s great to be able to say, “Wait, I heard you say that you felt uncomfortable at my dad’s house, so I made other plans!” And then your partner might answer, “Oh, heck, I meant that I didn’t want to go there last Labor Day, because I don’t like watching the game. But now I miss your dad!” And then your communication can move forward because you now understand each other. But using reflective listening for everything? Yeesh, it’s exhausting! So let’s look at David and Rosalie again, in a situation where David can be a real person with his own opinions, emotions, and truly empathic interactional style:
Rosalie (frustrated and dejected): It happened again. My boss is a jerk, and everything I do is wrong. I’m so tired of this. I’m afraid that I’m gonna get fired, but I’m even more afraid that I’ll stay and get sucked into the vortex.
David (understanding): Oh, man, I want to listen to you, but I’m really angry with your boss right now.
Rosalie: Thanks. (sighing) I’m angry with myself, for letting this happen.
David: What the … ? You don’t make him act like a jerk.
Rosalie: I just keep going over things in my mind: How can I do better? How can I make things work?
David: (softly): Why is it up to you?
Rosalie (angry, explosive): Because! (realizing how ridiculous that sounds, and laughing a bit, and then becoming sad, silent) Because . . . he’s just like my dad.
David: Ouch.
Rosalie (quieter): Yeah.
David: (silent, leaving space)
Rosalie (breathing heavily, like a sigh): Yeah.
David (quiet, working with the rhythm of her breathing): What do you need?
Rosalie (final, clear, but very low energy): I need to quit.
David (silent, but very watchful because he doesn’t want her to think he’s disapproving; he leans in toward her and says softly): Yeah.
Rosalie (crying now): I can’t fix it, and I never could.
David (softly): No.
Rosalie (angry): But why do I have to leave and lose my job, and why did I have to lose my childhood—when it’s other people’s damn problem? Why am I the one who gets hurt but still keeps coming back?
David (smiling gently): Yeah, why?
Rosalie (sighing, more focused, lifting her head): Okay, dusting off the résumé. Do I give notice first or wait? (deciding) I wait. Screw’em—I can always give notice, but I’m not gonna hurt myself just to make a point. They can pay me until I’m good and ready to leave.
David (laughing softly)
Rosalie (sighing, relieved): Thanks, whew!
What David and Rosalie did was deeply empathic, but David didn’t follow any rules or procedures or steps. He kept Rosalie company and let her set the pace. He stood up for her, questioned her, laughed with her, and used silence effectively—but most important, he listened; paid attention to her numerous, shifting emotions; and engaged empathically. This was an interaction, not a technique. (We’ll revisit this interaction later in this chapter.)
I do have procedures and techniques for specific situations when communication breaks down or when you need to tune in with others. However, it’s really important to remember that empathy is a skill you already possess and that you can just relax and hang out with people, listen to them, make mistakes (and apologize if you do), and be empathic simply because you already are.
IF YOU DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO EMPATHIC PEOPLE
Empathy is developed in interactions, but those interactions don’t have to be with other humans. If you’re isolated, or if you realized in the previous chapter that you’re surrounded by people who don’t understand you and you’re currently stuck in unfulfilling relationships, you can still develop your empathic skills. You can use your Einfühlung capacity to interact with art, literature, nature, science, ideas, drama, dance, meditation, movement, poetry, mindfulness practices, computer activities, hobbies, science, or mathematics. You can still interact even if your relationships with other people aren’t currently workable. And, of course, animals are almost always waiting for someone to interact lovingly with them.
If your current relationships with other humans are troubling, you may find that they’ll shift or improve if you can simply change the way you approach communication. Remember that most of your empathic work and emotion work occurs in the hidden and rather subtle world of nuance, undercurrent, gesture, and intention. If you can lean into this world empathically and make small shifts in your approach to others, you can often build a better ground for empathy between you.
LEARNING TO IDENTIFY EMOTIONS IN OTHERS
A great deal of the trouble I see in communication springs from incorrect assumptions about what people feel and what they mean—it’s a problem of Perspective Taking. However, this problem actually tracks back to poor Empathic Accuracy. Think about it: if you’re inaccurate about the emotions and intentions of others (or yourself ), your ability to empathize pretty much stops right there, bam. You won’t be able to understand the person’s perspective, because you’re not even in the right emotional ballpark. Skillful Perspective Taking springs from your ability to accurately identify what’s going on.
Incorrect emotional assumptions can also track to problems in Emotion Regulation, and I notice that people will often lose their empathic abilities in the presence of emotions they themselves don’t know how to deal with (anger and anxiety are two that come to mind). All of the empathic skills and practices you’ve learned so far will help you develop better Emotion Regulation skills. If you identify specific emotions that trip you up, then that’s awesome. That’s something you can work with intrapersonally so that you can develop better relationships with your own emotions and open up your emotional range to accept those emotions in others.
As you work with troubling emotions in yourself, remember to resource yourself when other people are feeling them (or repressing them). Yes, those emotions may be problematic for you right now, but remember your resourcing practice and remind yourself that there are places in your body that are grounded, focused, calm, and resourceful. Both things are true—the problem is currently true, and you have the internal resources you need to support yourself through difficult times. Both things are true.
Emotion Regulation skills are intrapersonal, and this book gives you many ways to work with and improve them. Your accuracy skills, however, develop in interactions; you learn by interacting, by asking, by listening, and by making mistakes. Some people make your attempts at Empathic Accuracy very simple, because they’re open books emotionally—they’re easy to read, and what you see is what you get. But in many cases, you actually have to learn people in the way you have to learn a new city or in the way you have to learn how to ride a new horse or drive a new car. I mean, the people you know very well—the people who really feel you and understand you and whose subtlest, secret, wordless glances can send you into fits of laughter—you almost certainly had to learn them, and they almost certainly had to learn you. Although we aren’t aware of this learning, the act of learning to read people empathically is intentional (though usually nonverbal) work that occurs in that secret interactional world I referred to in the first chapter—where gestures, body language, subtext, nuance, relational behaviors, and undercurrent are the curriculum. Let’s approach this curriculum more deliberately.
LEARNING PEOPLE INTENTIONALLY
Let me be clear before we start: This next empathic technique may have a very short shelf life, and you can’t use it with everyone. You’ll need to let people know you’re using it, and you’ll need to let them know why, because this process breaks some privacy boundaries. It’s not abusive—I’m not going to teach you to hurt people—but it intimately accesses people’s private, peripersonal space, so you have to be sensitive about when and where you use it.
In Chapter 1, I wrote about the ways that body language and facial expressions can give you an entrée into the emotional lives of others, and I gave you some direct examples of how to use body language and facial expressions to open conversations about empathy and emotions. Let’s look at those again: “When you curve your body downward and sigh out loud, it seems to me that you’re feeling discouraged, or maybe really tired, or both. Is that what’s going on?” or “When you use short sentences and don’t look at me when you speak to me, it seems that you’re feeling impatient and frustrated with me. Is that true?”
In this technique, you use another person’s body language to open a conversation and find out whether what you’re picking up is true. The trick to this is to keep your empathic mitts off of their behavior until the latter part of the sentence, where you ask about your impressions in the form of a question. So you don’t say: “Your gloomy face and your surrendering arm movements tell me that you’ve given up,” because that’s not a question, and you’ve already imposed your own emotions onto the person’s body. That violates all kinds of boundaries, and besides, you may be wrong. Remember that body language isn’t universal, it’s not even fully shared among members of the same family. That supposedly gloomy face might actually be a tired face, and those arms might be hanging uncomfortably off of sore shoulders—they may have nothing whatsoever to do with surrendering. Body language, gestures, and facial expressions can be an entrée into Empathic Accuracy, but there’s really no way for people to retain their boundaries, their emotional realities, or their dignity when you tell them authoritatively what their bodies are doing rather than learning what their gestures and expressions mean for them.
In order to respect the boundaries, voice, standpoint, and self-image of others, you let them know that you’re working to develop your empathic skills, and ask them whether they’re willing to mentor you. If so, let them know about this three-step process, because they may want to try it on you when you’re done:
HOW TO LEARN PEOPLE
1. Take note of two (or three, at the very most) expressions, postures, or gestures, and describe them without any emotional or intentional content whatsoever: So you would say, “When you raise your eyebrows,” and not “when you look surprised.” Or “When you move quickly,” instead of “when you’re anxious.” Or “When you look down and to the right,” instead of “when you’re avoiding me.” You want to describe the behavior precisely so that the person knows exactly what you’re talking about; however, you don’t want to impose your own emotions onto his or her body.
2. After you’ve described these gestures, stances, movements, or expressions without bias, you take responsibility for the emotions you’re feeling in response to what you’re seeing, and you explain them as clearly as you can. I like to use the word seems: “When you look upward and toward the left when I’m talking, it seems to me that you want to get away from the conversation. It seems like you’re feeling frustrated.” The word seems is boundary respecting in that it qualifies my impressions and makes room for the possibility that I could be mistaken.
3. After you’ve described the expressions, postures, or gestures without bias and then stated your empathic impressions (as possibilities, not as certainties), you follow up with a question that invites the other person to confirm or correct your impressions. “Is that what’s going on?” or “Did I pick that up correctly?” or “Is that how you’re feeling?”
That’s it—that’s the magic, which isn’t really magic at all. This three-step process is meant to help you learn other people. It’s an interaction, and it’s an interpersonal skill, which means that the other people not only have a say, but also that they get to be the final arbiter of what’s going on with their own bodies and emotions. This technique teaches you to use your soft, curiosity-level fear instincts to help you read and report what you see in another. It also uses your soft, self-respecting anger and your soft, otherprotecting shame to help you state your impressions without breaking the boundaries of another. When you use this process, the other person can confirm or correct your impressions—and he or she may learn surprising new information about what a certain posture, expression, or gesture might say to another person. In this interactional process, the goal is to develop stronger Empathic Accuracy, but the journey also involves making your emotion work conscious and becoming more deeply connected to the actual lives of other people. Bonus!
This technique may have a short shelf life, because it may only take three to five repetitions before you can tell whether you have a good sense of another person. In some cases, especially with people whose neurology or cultural background is different from yours (for instance, in people with ADHD, depressive conditions, very high intelligence, autism, developmental delays, Tourette’s, sensory-processing differences, high or low empathy, or in people from other cultures and linguistic traditions), you may have to use this process for a longer period as you calibrate your empathic skills and learn these new people properly. But in most instances, this technique is more of an icebreaker than anything else. You can also use it in special cases when you and another person lose your empathic bond with each other. But remember, this process is meant as an entrée and not as a main course. The main course is not technique based; it’s just being real with people and real with yourself. But you have to develop clear Empathic Accuracy to be able to get to that real place.
This next skill48 can help you arrive at that real place, because it actually invites people to share one of your empathic mindfulness skills with you.
CONSCIOUS COMPLAINING WITH A PARTNER
You learned Conscious Complaining as a solitary mindfulness skill, but you can also use it as an intentional relationship practice. Conscious Complaining with a partner is an excellent way to de-steam without blowing up, and it can help you create stronger and more honest relationships. I modified this partner-complaining practice from Barbara Sher’s Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want. Sher writes about how important it is for you to complain openly (in a safe and healthy practice), rather than shutting down and losing your emotional honesty and integrity. It’s an excellent book.
HOW TO CONSCIOUSLY COMPLAIN TOGETHER
In this two-person practice (which you can quickly teach to a loved one), one of you will take the position of the listener, while the other will complain consciously. Then you’ll trade places. Let’s make you the first complainer: You can start with some conscious recognition that the complaining needs to happen. In our family, we say, “I don’t need you to fix me. I just need to complain.” Then, you’re allowed to bring up whatever’s stuck in your craw— “Things are just rotten, this situation is bothering me, and things are too hard.”
When you’re complaining, make sure that you name out loud any emotion you feel. You may want to have your “Emotional Vocabulary List” (in the Appendix) so you can be very articulate about how annoyed, disappointed, uneasy, enraged, distrustful, or humiliated you feel. Learning to feel and name your emotions will help you become emotionally fluent and will increase your accuracy—but more than that, the act of naming your emotions can help you calm yourself and organize all of the action-requiring programs you have running. So complaining consciously with a partner is also an Emotion Regulation practice.
Your partner’s job is to support your complaining with helpful and upbeat yeahs! and uh-huhs!—no advice, no suggestions, just enthusiastic support. Your partner’s job is to create a safe haven for your complaining, which immediately makes it less toxic. Your partner will also get an excellent gift—a chance to practice his or her emotion work out in the open, instead of being an unhappy receptacle for the unconscious complaining of other people. Everybody gets a healing in this practice.
An important note: There’s a rule in partner complaining—the complainer can’t complain about the listener, because that wouldn’t be fair. If someone is willing to provide support for your complaining, then complaining about him or her would be cruel; it would be like taking a hostage. If there’s conflict in your relationship, this is not the right tool to use. This complaining practice is suitable when the problems are outside the relationship of the listener and the complainer (I offer two practices for trouble inside the relationship later in this chapter).
When you feel done complaining, you end your turn with gratitude: “Thanks! That’s been crushing me,” or “I didn’t realize I was carrying that much stuff around. Thanks!” Then you get to trade positions: the listener now gets to complain consciously, while you listen and provide support and perform openly acknowledged emotion work. When you’re both done, the session is over.
You’ll be amazed at how productive (and funny) this complaining technique is. We’re all taught to be positive and peppy at all times, which means we have to repress most of our emotions, reduce our Empathic Accuracy, and lose our Emotion Regulation skills. Often, this repression will kick our emotions into repetitive feedback loops, but Conscious Complaining lets us tell the truth and restore our flow. Conscious Complaining is a great all-around stress reliever, but when you can complain with a partner, there’s a special set of additional benefits:
1. It teaches you to reach out (instead of isolating yourself ) in a safe, boundary-respecting way when you’re in turmoil.
2. It teaches you and your complaining partner new ways to function around pain and trouble.
3. It gives both of you the opportunity for your emotion work to be requested, respected, and performed intentionally.
See if you can find more than one complaining partner to share this practice with. If there’s someone you regularly call when you’re tense and cranky, they’ll probably jump at the chance to perform emotion work in a more intentional way. And if there’s someone who regularly complains to you, you’ll probably love the chance to bring your own emotion work out of the shadows and create better reciprocity in your relationship.
Consciously complaining with your friends is a wonderful way to clear the air and be emotionally honest in the presence of another, and it sets healthy behavioral boundaries around a behavior that’s usually unconscious and unrewarding. In this practice, each of you takes responsibility for learning how to name and listen to your own emotions, which will add immeasurably to your emotional skills.
Now, let’s look at the emotions themselves and explore how to support people empathically—not by doing emotional heavy lifting for them, but by simply listening to their emotions and helping them connect to their own emotional wisdom.
EMOTIONS AS A PREREQUISITE TO TRULY EMPATHIC COMMUNICATION
Since empathy is, first and foremost, an emotional skill, I focused a lot of attention on emotions in the early part of this book. Here, in the communication chapter, let’s bring the emotions back and give you some ideas about how to support people and get into empathic communication with them. You can do this by remembering that emotions are action-requiring neurological programs.
As you recall, anger and shame help you set boundaries, fear helps you orient and focus yourself, sadness helps you let go of things that don’t work anyway, and so forth. And, of course, emotions do these things for other people as well. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio points out, emotions are evolutionarily ancient and reliably similar, such that fear is going to behave similarly in me, in you, in a person from Germany or Mali, in a wild horse, or in a housecat. Fear will require the same action-completion processes in every case. Emotions connect us to every living being, and I spent the previous chapters unvalencing, undividing, undemonizing, unglorifying, and demystifying emotions because they’re the key to truly understanding others—across differences, across borders, across languages, and across species. Emotions are universal, reliable, and profoundly informative.
With that in mind, let’s look at each emotion in terms of how you can empathically support people in taking the actions their emotions require. As we explore emotions, I’ll sometimes refer to the second conversation between Rosalie and David, in which he was able to be a real person and not merely a mirror.
ANGER: The Honorable Sentry
Anger arises to address challenges to the voice, standpoint, position, interpersonal boundaries, or self-image of another. When anger is present, you can support people by simply asking them what they need. Helping people find their voice is a great way to help them restore their boundaries. David did this with Rosalie, and then he stayed quiet while she found her own solutions and reset her own boundaries. Notice that he acknowledged his own anger at the beginning of the conversation, which helped him intrapersonally, to identify his own state, and interpersonally, to help Rosalie know that anger was okay.
APATHY AND BOREDOM: The Mask for Anger
Apathy arises when it’s not safe or correct for people to be openly angry, and it can give people a needed time-out. I don’t generally address apathy openly, because it’s a protective mask. Instead, I might express my own anger in the way David did—in a responsible and nonviolent way—to let the person know that anger is welcome between us. If nothing shifts, I back away and talk casually about other topics, or I end the interaction. The masking emotions (apathy and confusion) are ingeniously protective, and people have to decide to unmask on their own—I don’t push.
GUILT AND SHAME: Restoring Integrity
Shame arises to help people amend or atone for their problematic behaviors. However, it can be a very tricky emotion if the shame originated in the toxic and shaming messages of controlling parents, teachers, or authority figures. If people express appropriate shame about a thing they actually did and for which they have the power to atone, then you can help them find self-respecting ways to make amends or apologize. But if the shame is inauthentic or toxic, you can gently question it, as David did when Rosalie was taking all of the responsibility for her terrible workplace. You have to be very gentle when you question toxic shame, because people are already in a world of pain. But those same people can often borrow the concern in your question and turn it toward themselves to ask, “Yeah, why do I believe that?” However, if people in your life are really tormented by toxic shame, give them this book and teach them about Burning Contracts. Shame is a vital emotion, but when it’s inauthentic or toxic, it can easily be too much.
HATRED: The Profound Mirror
Hatred is a very powerful emotion that arises in response to behaviors people cannot accept in themselves and demonize in others. It’s a condition of pretty extreme boundary impairment, and it may be that the person just needs to vent in order to reclaim his or her voice and standpoint, calm down, and get grounded again. The problem with listening to this hatred, though, is that it can break your boundaries and include you in a dishonoring practice that may activate your own shame (let’s hope). Hatred can be a doozy, so I have some practices for it: certainly, Burning Contracts with the hated person is necessary, and in Chapter 10, you’ll learn a skill called Ethical Empathic Gossip, which can be very healing because it sets boundaries around the venting and requires behavioral change once the venting is over. I’ve also included a list of my favorite books on shadow work in Further Resources; they’ll help you work with hatred honorably and uncover the absolute genius inside it.
FEAR: Intuition and Action
Fear arises to help people orient to change, novelty, or possible physical hazards. When people around me are afraid, I’ll often simply ask, “What are you sensing?” because fear is about instincts and intuition. If people simply pay attention to their fear, they’ll usually be able to connect with their instincts and figure out what’s going on.
WORRY AND ANXIETY: Focus and Completion
Worry and anxiety arise to help people organize, plan for, and complete upcoming tasks, especially if they’re currently procrastinating. Anxiety is about the future, so it can be hard to stay grounded and focused when it’s active. You can help by suggesting or implementing tangible plans, such as creating a numbered list, a stack of papers, or a pile of whatever item needs attention. These real-world activities will help people figure out what really needs to get done. Writing out anxieties is especially healing, because it’s an emotion-specific action that can reduce the activation of the anxiety so that people can find their focus and their resources again. Of course, Conscious Questioning helps as well, if people are open to it.
CONFUSION: The Mask for Fear
Confusion is a masking state for fear and anxiety that arises when people are overwhelmed by change, novelty, or too much input and too many tasks. Confusion can be a lovely vacation from overwhelm, but if it goes on for too long, people can lose their grounding and their focus. The question for confusion is, “What’s your intention?” Sometimes people can lift the mask of confusion if you can help them articulate their real needs and preferences again. David did this throughout his conversation with Rosalie.
Jealousy arises when people sense challenges that may destabilize their connection to love, mate retention, or loyalty. These challenges may come from external sources, from an internal lack of self-worth, or both. Jealousy (and envy) contains some of the intuitive focusing gifts of fear and some of the boundary-setting gifts of anger. You can help by asking people what they’re sensing (to access their instincts) and what they need (to help them reconnect to their voice and standpoint). Remember, though, that jealousy is one of the most intensely valenced emotions there is, and people may feel shame (or anger, fear, etc.) about the fact that they feel this essential social emotion. Your understanding of clustered emotions, as well as your gentleness and patience, may be required.
ENVY: Interactional Radar
Envy arises when people sense challenges that may destabilize their connection to material security, resources, or recognition. These challenges may come from external sources, from an internal lack of self-preservation abilities, or both. Envy (like jealousy) contains some of the intuitive focusing gifts of fear and some of the boundary-setting gifts of anger. You can help by asking people what they’re sensing (to access their instincts) and what they need (to help them reconnect to their voice and standpoint). A helpful question to ask an envious person is, “What would be fair?” Envy, like jealousy, is a heavily valenced emotion, and many people react to it as if it’s a character flaw rather than an essential part of their social skills. So be on the lookout for clustered emotions. Your willingness to engage and your gentleness can help people uncover the genius in their envy.
PANIC AND TERROR: Frozen Fire
Panic and terror arise when a person’s physical life is directly and immediately threatened, and the choices are to fight, flee, or freeze. In the moment, there’s very little that you need to do beyond helping people pay attention and react in whatever way feels right. However, if the panic and terror track back to an earlier trauma, you can help people get to competent help (see the Trauma Healing listings in Further Resources).
SADNESS: The Water Bearer
Sadness arises when it’s time for people to let go of something that isn’t working anyway. If people let go, they can relax; but if they won’t let go, they might become very tense. If people try to hold on tightly to something that doesn’t work, you may see anger jump out in front of the sadness. The question “What do you need?” will often help people find their voice again and identify what isn’t working. Sadness is a very softening and interior emotion, so it’s important that you set good boundaries and don’t push or prod at people; gentleness is called for. When Rosalie got to her sadness, David remained very quiet.
GRIEF: The Deep River of the Soul
Grief arises when people lose something irretrievably or when someone has died. Grief and sadness are intimately related, but with sadness, people still have a choice about letting go. Grief arises when there’s no choice—the loss or death has already occurred, and it’s time to mourn and grieve. When people are grieving, you can expect to see multiple emotions arising in clusters or shifting continually. Everyone grieves differently, at different paces, and with different clusters of emotions. If you can simply be present and provide some kind of thresholding or private space for people who are grieving, you can support them in this deep emotion form of work.
SITUATIONAL DEPRESSION: Ingenious Stagnation
Situational depression is a specific form of depression that arises when there’s an already-dysfunctional situation occurring in people’s lives. This situation could be located in any part of a person’s interior or exterior life, and it can usually be addressed through changes to lifestyle or behavior. You can help people identify this dysfunction by simply listening as they speak. (I’ll introduce a very supportive three-step process later in this chapter that will help you do that.) Be aware, however: If the depression is cyclical or if it doesn’t respond to the healing changes people make, please help them seek psychological or medical intervention. Depressions that last too long are not good for people’s emotional, empathic, social, or neurological health, so it’s vital to take recurring depression seriously and address it responsibly.
HAPPINESS: Anticipation and Possibility
Happiness arises to help people look forward to the future with hope and delight. This playful emotion is one of the few that we’re allowed to feel comfortable with, so it’s not likely that you’ll need to do much beyond share happiness when it arises. Yay! You may notice, however, that some people downplay happiness as if it were childish or unserious to feel happy. In these cases, there may be some situational depression that is trying to point to situations that are regularly troubling or that reliably get in the way of feeling happiness. When people valence happiness negatively, they may need to observe their entire emotional realm (and the training they received about happiness in childhood) to find out what’s going on.
CONTENTMENT: Pleasure and Appreciation
Contentment arises to help people feel pride and satisfaction about a job well done. This emotion can be very tricky, because so many people have an uncomfortable relationship with self-respect and pride. Some people feel that pride and contentment are boastful and shameful, which means they may have a hard time feeling appropriate and deserved contentment about something they did well. Understanding shame will be helpful here, because when shame and contentment work well together, people will be comfortable with their own moral structure and be able to realize when they’ve done something to be proud of. But when shame and contentment aren’t working well together, some people may be unable to feel appropriate contentment, while others may develop strangely inflated contentment levels that don’t track to anything real. In Chapter 9, I explore inflated contentment in a section on bullying.
JOY: Affinity and Communion
Joy arises to help people feel a blissful sense of expansive oneness with others, with ideas, or with experiences. Joy is a very powerful emotion that usually doesn’t require much support from you, and it usually recedes naturally. However, extreme and exhilarated joy should be approached with care, especially if it cycles with depression or sadness. Repetitive exhilaration or flights of giddy mania may be a sign of emotional dysregulation, and it’s possible that the person might need psychological support or medical help.
When you know which emotions you’re dealing with, it’s so much easier to communicate with people and be truly empathic, since empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill that is developed in interactions. However, as you increase your emotional vocabulary, your Empathic Accuracy, and your Emotion Regulation skills, you may come up against a strange situation: Some people don’t want to talk about emotions . . . at all.
ANGRY ABOUT ANGER, AFRAID OFFEAR, ASHAMED OF SHAME
Knowing which emotions you’re working with is wonderful, but I have a little warning for you: some people feel strong emotions about their emotions, and if you say the name of certain emotions out loud, you can trigger strong reactions. For instance, if you mention anger, shame, or fear out loud and suggest that people might be feeling them, you might start a huge argument: “I’m not angry—your mother’s the angry one!” “Of course I’m not ashamed, shut up, yeesh!” “Fear? Are you calling me a coward?” Whoops.
This is a problem that people have asked me about for years: “If I understand the language of emotions, but no one else wants to hear anything about them, what do I do?” Until recently, my answer was that people should be honest about their own emotions and model emotional awareness as much as possible. But that answer bothered me, because it put a lot of pressure on people who were just learning how to work with emotions themselves. So in 2012, when I taught “Emotional Flow,” a live, eight-week online course to people from all over the world, I took advantage of this empathic crowd source to have some fun and to create a new method for addressing emotions honestly, even when other people don’t know how to.
WEASEL WORDS49
In my work, I refer to stress as a weasel word, or a word that people use to hide emotional awareness from themselves. If you observe the experience of stress empathically, you’ll see that it’s very clearly an emotional reaction. The sense of tension, the rise in cortisol and adrenaline, the tightening of the body, the rise in heart rate—these are all activations that occur in fear and anxiety (and often anger) responses. Luckily, you have skills for each of these emotions, and you can work with your stress responses in the same way you work with any other emotions: You figure out why you’ve become activated, you listen to each of the emotions you feel, you perform the actions for those emotions, and then you use your empathic mindfulness skills to return yourself to equilibrium. Easy.
However, if you don’t know which emotions you’re dealing with—or if you use a weasel word like stress to trick yourself out of emotional awareness—things stop being easy. Misidentifying emotions is a way to avoid what you’re truly feeling and to dissociate from the situation—“Help! Stress is happening! It’s an overwhelming force over which I have no control! I’m powerless!” People learn to weasel away from the truth, and they lose their emotional awareness when stressors are present. But stress isn’t the only weasel word for emotions; there are dozens—maybe hundreds—and they’re used all day, every day. People rely on weasel words like fine, okay, or good, each of which can mean nearly anything, depending on the context.
Another all-purpose weasel word that we looked at earlier is emotional. “Let’s not be emotional!” “We can’t talk if you’re gonna be emotional.” “I’m sorry I was emotional yesterday.” What in the world? Which emotions are we talking about here? If you don’t know which emotions you’re feeling, your Empathic Accuracy will be kaput, and you won’t be able to regulate or work with your emotions, because you won’t know which ones they are! Weaseling away from emotions seems to be full-time emotion work for many people, but it’s not good-paying work in terms of emotional skills and empathic awareness.
However, we can use weasel words to our advantage. As empaths, we can use weasel words strategically to help people gain a better understanding of their own emotions. If precise emotion words are so threatening to people that they use weasel-ish masking language in ingenious ways, then let’s perform a kind of empathic aikido and use those same words in service to emotional awareness.
I and the empathic crowd in the “Emotional Flow” course discovered numerous weasel words that you can use to support emotional awareness in yourself while you set good boundaries around the emotional ignorance of others. We also took advantage of the soft category of vocabulary words in the “Emotional Vocabulary List.” For instance, if people are clearly angry but they can’t even approach the word, you can ask if they feel peeved, annoyed, or displeased. They may then be able to connect to the fact that their voice, standpoint, or sense of self has been challenged in some way. Or if people are afraid but can’t stand the word, you can ask them if they feel curious, cautious, or uneasy. They may then be able to identify the change, novelty, or possible hazard they’re sensing.
We also found some very powerful words that can stand in for pretty much any emotion, and I call them the Wonder Weasels: stressed, bad, and unhappy. You can use these three Wonder Weasels pretty much anywhere and in relation to any emotion without unduly triggering people. I particularly love the wildly valenced word unhappy, because it suggests that happiness is the preferred emotion, while everything else is unhappy.
Two other words are nearly universally useful, and I call them the Lesser Weasels: upset and hurt. However, you have to be a little more careful with these Lesser Weasels, because both upset and hurt suggest emotional sensitivity, and a lot of people like to pretend that they’re emotionally impervious and invulnerable (like superheroes, except with no emotional or empathic skills). We also have a delicious weasel word from parents of teenagers: whatever.
THE FABULOUS EMPATHS’ LIST OF WEASEL WORDS!
If people don’t seem able to identify or own up to their emotions, you can use soft emotional vocabulary words, or weasel words, to gently bring attention to what is actually occurring.
Weasel Warning: Don’t be annoying by naming people’s emotions for them or forcing them into the awareness that you want. Instead, have fun and know that for some people, even the mention of the real names for emotions can be triggering. If you can gently bring awareness (even weasel-ish awareness) to the actual emotion that’s present, and if you can frame your observation as a question (or use the phrase it seems), you’ll support people in beginning to develop their own Empathic Accuracy. Nice!
In each list, I start with soft emotion words that are less weasel-ish, then I move into weasels, and finally to the Wonder Weasels and the Lesser Weasels if they’re appropriate to each emotion.
Anger: Peeved, Annoyed, Frustrated, Displeased, Affronted, Vexed, Tense, Agitated, Disappointed, Whatever, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt
Apathy and Boredom: Detached, Disinterested, Indifferent, Whatever, Unhappy
Shame and Guilt: Awkward, Flustered, Exposed, Demeaned, Stressed,
Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt
Sadness: Low, Down, Disappointed, Discouraged, Blue, Bummed, Whatever, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt
Grief: Low, Lost, Down in the dumps, Blue, Whatever, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt
Depression: Disinterested, Detached, Low, Blue, Whatever, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt
Fear: What do you sense?, Cautious, Curious, Uneasy, Jumpy, Unsettled, Off, Stressed, Upset
Anxiety: Concerned, Tense, Agitated, Unsettled, Off, Bothered, Jumpy, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset
Jealousy: Sensing disloyalty, Insecure, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt
Envy: Sensing unfairness, Insecure, Stressed, Bad, Unhappy, Upset, Hurt
Contentment: Satisfied, Pleased, Proud, Happy, Good
I’m not including happiness and joy in this list, because people are fine saying those words outright. As you go through this list, just notice how many ways we have to skirt emotional awareness and how five weasel-ish words can describe pretty much every emotion, except the three happiness-based emotions. Wow, that’s stunning, and it really highlights the problems we have in developing emotional skills and accuracy.
This list belongs to you now; use it with the blessings of an international band of funny empaths! This list may also be useful in the following communication skill.
MOM’S MAGICAL THREE-STEP EMPATHIC COMMUNICATION SKILL
I want to bring my late mother back into this chapter, because she was a brilliant woman and a quick learner; she stopped using reflective listening immediately after my younger sister and I reacted so comically to it. However, as an empath herself, Mom saw the value of reflective listening, and over the years she developed a modified version of the practice that’s more interactive and empathic. Now that we’ll be learning her practice, I think you should know her name: she was Billie Karyl Lucy Rogers Hubbard; she changed her name to Kara as an adult, though most of her friends called her Sam. If you want to refer to this empathic practice with her name, you now have many options! In my mom’s three-step empathic communication process, you learn how to listen, reflect, and then share.
HOW TO LISTEN, REFLECT AND SHARE
1. Listen first: When you’re working with someone in turmoil, the first step is to listen compassionately, without interruption. You let the person talk his or her way through the issue without turning it into a conversation about what you would do or have done or have thought of doing (and you don’t take anything personally—this step is not about you!). You don’t impede the flow of words, but neither do you just sit there like a rock. Instead, you make supportive sounds like, yeah, or mm-hmm, while still letting the person have the floor. This step often brings a solution forward on its own, because people almost never get the chance to talk without interruptions or suggestions (usually because the listener can’t simply sit with the discomfort and trust the speaker to find his or her own way). Most of us never get to the deeper parts of our stories or issues, because other people are always hijacking the conversation and trying to fix everything or shut down the flow because it’s uncomfortable for them. However, if we’re allowed to really talk things out, we often talk ourselves right into our own solutions.
The empathic practices of Conscious Complaining and Conscious Questioning are solitary ways of accessing the amazing problem-solving abilities that exist inside your internal monologue. My mom’s three-step process is a practice you can use with a person who doesn’t have his or her own empathic practice yet, but it’s also a process you can request from a friend when you have difficulties that don’t respond to Conscious Complaining or Conscious Questioning. Sometimes, you really need the support of another person, and this process can help the other person learn how to work with you in empathic, truly helpful, and boundary-respecting ways.
2. Reflect next: If the talking doesn’t bring solutions, the second step (when the person tells you that he or she is done) is to reflect on what you heard. People have so little chance to be heard that sometimes they skitter around their issues if you just let them talk. So to help them get back on track, the second step is to paraphrase what you heard them say, always checking in with them to see if you heard them correctly. This is the reflecting phase, and it’s not about your opinions just yet. If you can correctly reflect another person’s words, they may be able to hear what they meant to say, and they may be able to hear their own solution in the words that got away from them.
3. Share last: If your reflections don’t help the person see the issue more clearly, then the third step is to share your impressions and perceptions. This is the time when you can, you know, be an empath! Please realize, however, that you’re being empathic when you listen compassionately without stopping the flow and when you reflect accurately. You have to know when to say “mm-hmm” when you listen, and you have to know how to listen well enough to reflect; those are empathic skills. But if more input is needed, step three is where you get to call it as you see it—with caveats, of course.
Moving to reflection means that you get to bring your understanding of the emotions into play. When you share your information about what you see, be sure to protect the other person’s dignity. If you say, “I think I’m picking up this emotion. You tell me if it’s true,” then you place that person in a position of power as the final arbiter of what his or her emotional state is. If you try to name emotions for others or tell them authoritatively, “You’re feeling afraid,” you’ll invade their privacy, and you may activate the emotion that protects their standpoint, voice, and self-image (this is a test: name that emotion!). If you can instead ask, “Could this be some fear?” you’ll honor your emotional intuition by saying the name of the emotion out loud, and you’ll also honor the other person’s dignity by bringing forth your awareness as a question. Of course, you can also use your weasel words if you notice that the real names of emotions tend to trigger this person.
If you tell people how they’re feeling, you’ll place yourself above them as the knower of all things, and that’s not very empathic. When you engage perceptively, you focus on the other person’s needs, rather than on your own need to be an expert. The point isn’t to become a magical emotion translator; if you give over with your advice, your insights, and your wisdom, people will learn a great deal, but they won’t gain a great deal of self-knowledge. Remember that it’s an honor to be allowed so close to another person; it’s not a right! When someone unmasks before you, you need to behave honorably. Therefore, your sharing should always be done very carefully, with the full cooperation and permission of the other person.
Checking in with other people also helps you hone your empathic skills. If you ask about your impressions, and the person disagrees with you, this may help you understand when you’re projecting your own emotions into the situation. If so, you can apologize, ground and refocus yourself, and ask questions to regain your accuracy and clarity.
When you’re in the third step of this process, your first two skills—compassionate listening and reflective paraphrasing—are still important. Let’s say you pick up on a loose thread in the person’s conversation and offer, “I thought I sensed some resentment, like there was something that was still gnawing at you. What do you think?” If you correctly picked up that thread, you may help the person refocus and process verbally again. Then, you’d listen again, without interrupting, and reflect clearly what you heard. Sometimes, all it takes is your picking up that one thread, because uncovering an overlooked emotion often helps people get back on track.
This three-step process makes empathy very manageable and very respectful of the boundaries of both people. Again, the steps are listen first, reflect next, and share last. These three steps take a lot of the mystery out of the empathic process, thank goodness. Thanks, Mom!
WHEN SOCIAL POSITIONS ARE UNEQUAL
This careful, respectful, and question-based process can create a balanced and equal relationship. It can also be an excellent way to create equality if you’re working empathically with a subordinate, such as an employee or a person much younger than yourself. If you’re in a leadership position (which doesn’t lend itself to equal empathic relationships), it’s a good idea to equalize a little by being open about your own emotional issues before you start. You can even ask for input and let the other person know that you value his or her ability to interpret emotions and situations. You can’t change your age or your job title, but you can be real with people. So go ahead and be a leader or an elder, but use your skills to lead the way to equality in the relationship.
Something to be aware of: When you’re in the sharing portion of this process, be careful not to set yourself up as a translator for the other person’s emotions. When you can properly identify an emotion and ask the correct questions, it can seem as if you know more about a person’s life than they do. This can set up a very unhealthy dependency, in which people may think you’re some sort of expert. Make sure that you let people in on the process of asking the right emotional questions. Your skills in listening, reflecting, and sharing are very valuable, but they are skills. If you treat your empathic abilities as magical, you’ll cripple the people you work with, because they’ll begin to think that emotional awareness and Empathic Accuracy come from you. If you can share your skills openly, however, you’ll support people in becoming empathically self-aware—and then we’ll have more healthy and happy empaths in the world. Score!
WHEN PEOPLE DON’T AGREE WITH YOUR EMPATHIC IMPRESSIONS
Sometimes, people will flat out tell you that an emotion you picked up isn’t there, that you’re imagining it, and that they aren’t feeling it at all. You and I know that emotional awareness tends to be low in many people and that emotional honesty can feel threatening for others. Therefore, if you have someone in your life who swears that you’re an empathic failure, I want you to think about the many complex factors that can get in the way of skillful empathic interactions:
1. You could be right, but perhaps you phrased things in such a way that the person feels unmasked and unsafe for reasons that may have nothing to do with you.
2. You could be projecting your own current emotional state onto the person, who doesn’t feel what you’re feeling right now.
3. You could be projecting, yet it’s still true that the other person feels it right now.
4. You could feel your own intensity level of the emotion and mistakenly assume that the other person feels it in the way you do (with all of your baggage).
5. You could be having a kind of flashback to emotional behaviors in your family or your childhood—and you could be projecting those into this situation.
6. The person could honestly be unaware that he or she is feeling the emotion.
7. The person could be deeply ashamed of and dissociated from the emotion.
8. The person could view emotions as a sign of weakness or lack of control and misidentify them or ignore them intentionally.
9. The person could be trying to mess with you.
10. The person could be lying.
In the first five situations, your own difficulties with communication or emotional skills are getting in the way of skillful empathizing. All of the skills in this book will help you address those difficulties. Empathy is a malleable skill, and you can increase your empathic skills at any stage of your life. But in the second five situations, the other person’s (lack of) skills and emotional awareness are where the problems lie. If this person is in your most intimate empathic zone, you’ll need to go back to Chapter 7 to take a closer look at this person’s empathic awareness and emotional styles to figure out what’s up. In difficult situations like this, clear communication that is emotionally honest and vulnerable can really help—though in some cases, people simply can’t tolerate that kind of communication.
The way I deal with people who don’t want to be seen and who don’t want to be in any kind of empathic communication is to become very clear about my own emotional landscape so that I’m not projecting or leaking, because being seen and being vulnerable can make some people feel truly awful. Therefore, the most empathic response in that situation is to stop trying to be empathic, if you get my drift. When someone sends you clear signals that empathy isn’t appreciated, then Perceptive Engagement requires that you back away.
When I’m in the presence of emotionally unaware people who want to dampen my emotional awareness because it feels threatening or exposing to them, I immediately ground, set my boundaries, and threshold by breaking eye contact and moving away slowly, even imperceptibly—in the way you would with a distrustful animal. I also keep up a strong inner dialogue so that I can maintain my voice, standpoint, and emotional awareness, no matter what kind of empathic silencing is going on around me. In our emotional training, we’ve all learned wildly backward and unhelpful things about emotions, and many people simply can’t face their emotions. That’s okay.
If these people want to move forward with you, you can share this book and let them know that you’re working to develop your empathy. You can use the empathically clumsy situations between you as examples that will help you explore and deepen your relationship. However, if these people state that they’re not interested in developing an empathic connection with you, you’ll have some very important information about who they are, what’s important to them, and how you’ll approach them in the future (Wonder Weasels? Check!). Some people will not want to get into sync with you, and that’s okay, as long as it’s clearly stated and clearly understood.
In your intimate life, however, with people who really do want to empathize with you, there will be times when you and your loved ones lose your empathic connection with each other. The practices that follow, which were handed down to me by my mom, can be used when your intimate relationships need some empathic healing.
EMPATHIC MEDITATIONS FOR RELATIONSHIP CONFLICT
When conflicts pull normally close people apart, the resulting separations can be as painful as a physical injury. Although self-soothing and resourcing skills will help, the problem isn’t about a lack of resourcing skills; it’s about the pain of being out of sync with your loved ones. The following meditations can help mates, family members, and close friends come back together. I appreciate them because they focus on repairing the bonds between people rather than on performing conflict mediation. These empathic meditations help people restore their relationships so that the relationship itself can become a sacred space where people can turn toward the conflict together, as partners and not as combatants. I find that if I can repair the bond with my loved ones, we don’t usually need a mediator between us, because when we’re able to work as a unit again, we can deal with conflicts ourselves.
My mom called these practices Sufi sitting meditations, but I haven’t been able to track them to any particular Sufi teacher or lineage. We can call them Sam’s Sufi sitting meditations instead.
FOR A COUPLE
Start by sitting opposite your partner with your knees touching, whether you’re in chairs or sitting cross-legged on the floor. Place an item that symbolizes your relationship (a candle, flowers, a plant, a photo, etc.) near the two of you. When you’re settled in, place your hands on your knees, left palm facing up and right palm facing down. Your left side is generally thought to be your receptive side, so you turn your left palm up to receive. Your right side is thought to be your expressive side, so you turn your right palm down to express.
Reach your hands toward your partner and gently slide your left palm under his or her downturned right palm as you rest your right palm on top of his or her upturned left palm. In this way, you can create a circle of receptivity and expression, which is what healthy relationships should do.
Breathe deeply in this position, but don’t speak just yet. Relax into the breaths, and you’ll soon start breathing together. When you’re breathing together, look into each other’s eyes (if eye contact is too activating for you, simply turn your face toward your partner and close your eyes, or make small moments of eye contact that feel comfortable). You can then begin speaking and turn toward the conflict as a couple, instead of turning against each other. If you need structure for your conversation, use my mom’s three-step empathic process of listening first, reflecting next, and sharing last.
I have a small caveat: your hands may become hot. If so, it’s fine to just touch each other lightly so you can cool off.
This practice helps you treat your relationship as a sacred trust instead of a burden, and it’s a wonderful way to help both of you become calm and centered together. The communications that can occur in this meditation are usually very deep and meaningful, because your conflict is brought into a sacred space instead of just being allowed to fester. Where you go after breathing together is totally individual, but you go there as a couple rather than as fierce combatants.
When you reach clarity or resolution, close your session in some way that’s meaningful to you. Then take the item that symbolizes your relationship and move it to a place of honor in your home. This item can become a visual reminder of the significance of your relationship and the work you do to keep it strong.
FOR A TRIO
A variation of this couple’s meditation can be used when people just can’t come together on their own. If there’s too much conflict, the circle can be opened to admit a neutral third person whose job is to mediate and hold the space for the relationship as an entity. A candle, plant, photo, or other meaningful object that symbolizes the relationship should be placed in the middle of the trio.
In this trio, each person sits with his or her right palm over the left palm of the person to the right, and his or her left palm under the right palm of the person to the left. Each person breathes deeply, focusing on the meaningful item at the center of the group. When the trio starts breathing together, the speaking can begin. The hot hands caveat applies here as well; if you all get too hot, perhaps just touch each other’s knees or feet. The physical contact is important, but it doesn’t have to be uncomfortable.
With a trio, a triangle is created, so it’s important for the neutral third person to focus on the relationship as a whole, rather than taking sides. As the couple speak and hopefully find their own solutions, the third person’s work is to remind them of the importance of the relationship first and the issues second. If the couple needs help, the neutral person should use my mom’s three-step process of listening first, reflecting next, and sharing last.
When the couple reaches clarity or resolution, the trio should close in a way that has meaning for them and then move the symbolic item to a central location in the home. Using this symbolic item to create a small altar or shrine for the relationship can be a very healing next step that will remind the couple of the importance of their bond.
WHEN COMMUNICATION REACHES AN IMPASSE
If the partner meditations above don’t work and you arrive at an impasse, please reach out for the help of a professional mediator—a couple’s counselor, a therapist, or an actual mediator. Sometimes, you really need a third person who can hear both of you and identify the issues and threads that got away from you.
If you can’t afford professional support (or if your partner refuses), there are a lot of books on conflict mediation and communication at your library. However, I haven’t found too many of them that treat strong emotions as important carriers of vital information. I can understand this, because conflict can be dangerous, but if you’re interested in exploring conflict-mediation techniques, be aware that you’ll see all four of the problems that lead to the emotional confusion that we explored in Chapter 3. You’ll also see a lot of focus on anger suppression. Even so, some of these books can be very useful.
I found one approach in a book called Taking the War Out of Our Words, by Sharon Ellison. Her approach is valuable because it helps you engage in possible conflicts without unintentionally evoking anger in the other person. Ellison’s approach is based on tone, body language, and gestures, and she teaches you how to ask questions that aren’t unintentionally interrogating or manipulative.
It’s fascinating to observe how we’ve been conditioned to ask questions, with raised eyebrows that denote surprise and need, and an upward change in pitch at the end of the question, which often demands an answer. No matter which words you use, raising your eyebrows and shifting your tone upward at the end of a question feels more like a demand for an answer than it does like an honest request for information. Ellison suggests keeping your forehead fairly immobile and shifting your tone downward at the end of a question. It’s absolutely amazing how this changes communication. Ending a sentence with a downward pitch helps you seem surer of yourself. In fact, newscasters are taught very early not to use up tone at the end of sentences, because it makes them seem uncertain. So down tone has some authority to it, yet when you use it to ask a question, it has an amazing effect—it conveys that you’re stating something that’s true for you rather than demanding a response from the other person.
You don’t use down-tone questions for everything, because that would be silly. If you want someone to pass the salt or give you directions to the freeway, you raise your eyebrows and use up tone. But if you’re in a conflict and your partner’s boundaries are already impaired, simply reducing the amount of need you convey in your questions can help your partner feel like there’s space to breathe. Down tone is grounding, and it’s boundary respecting, especially if what you’re asking is challenging. Try it with an intense question like, “Are you saying that I take advantage of you?” Say it once with eyebrows and up tone, and emphasize a couple of the words harder than the others. This question can be a scathing accusation if you ask it the right (or wrong) way. Even with up tone, which can seem weakening, this question can be a threat or even an ultimatum.
Now calm your eyebrows and ask that question again without undue emphasis on any word, then end on a down tone. Can you feel that there’s a space all of a sudden for your partner to answer instead of merely reacting and attacking? Ellison’s choice to use down tone at the end of questions is genius, and it can shift a fight against each other into a deep conversation about issues that are actually threatening to your health, your happiness, and your relationship.
If you have relationships in your life that reliably devolve into power struggles and fights, Ellison’s work can really help you. She also teaches parents how to work with children without unintentionally aggravating them, as well as how to set boundaries without violence, in her audio book Taking Power Struggle Out of Parenting.
If you’re having serious troubles in one or more relationships, remember to resource yourself regularly. Find areas in your body that feel safe, calm, and resourceful and open up your focus to include the knowledge that you can experience both things. You have a relationship that’s currently troubled, and you have inner sources of calmness, grounding, and focused strength. You have both things. You also have other resources in your life—other empathic relationships with animals, nature, your mindfulness practices, art, music, and friends in your community. Reach out for loved ones and beloved activities when you’re having trouble in your relationships. Interaction is food for empaths, and when you have a relationship that’s troubled, you need healthy interactions to balance the scales.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at the development of empathy in children. As you think about troubled relationships in your life, it may help you to observe how children develop empathic skills. Luckily, because empathy is a malleable skill, you can actually apply the lessons of childhood empathy development to your present-day life. It’s never too late to have a healthy empathic childhood.