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R—Reading the Other Person’s Emotions
As you have worked your way through the first three sets of Action Plans, you’ve begun building a good foundation for the last two competencies of SMART Love. You are growing in your self-awareness of your emotions and in being able to manage your emotions. These are individual skills that you are developing. We’ve added the interactive competency of becoming more accountable to each other. And now for the last two interactive competencies.
To develop these last two skill sets requires that you work together as a couple. You will find that these skills build on how successful you have been with applying the earlier skill sets. Our being able to read our spouse’s emotions requires that we be aware of our own emotions, and it will lead to our becoming more comfortable as we work together as a team in understanding each other’s emotions.
Empathy
Reading the other person’s emotions basically describes our ability to be empathic. Empathy is something we have all experienced at some time or another. We can easily recognize it when we receive it from someone. We’ve all had teachers who we felt really understood us. They sensed we were struggling with something, and when they talked to us, we just knew they understood. Or we might have had the same feeling with a friend who really got what we were experiencing emotionally. We might not have used the word empathy, but that’s what it was.
The word empathy was brought into the English language from the Greek word empatheia, which literally means “feeling into.” It describes the ability for someone to perceive, and in some ways feel, the subjective experience of another person. Empathy involves the ability and the willingness to understand another person’s thoughts, feelings, and struggles from their perspective. It allows the other person to express their emotions while we respect their boundaries. It involves listening to more than just the words. Empathy does not mean solving the problem, agreeing, analyzing, or arguing, as these may close down the other person’s emotions.
Taking the other person’s perspective in a situation requires that we know our own emotional worlds and are able to separate our emotions and expectations from theirs. It requires the ability to be sincerely interested in what the other person is experiencing in silence or with words. It is a shared process of listening and responding while we suspend our own personal biases to make room in our thoughts and emotions so that we can share in their personal world. Empathy often transforms the listener simply by the experience of entering into the other person’s world.
The other person senses our empathy as we listen and notice their facial expressions, their body language in general, their posture, the tone of their voice, and other deeper intuitive things that are expressed nonverbally. That’s why understanding nonverbal parts of communication is so vital to empathizing. When one’s nonverbal communication contradicts their verbal communication, we will always believe the nonverbal. It’s deeper than the obvious and more accurate. More than 90 percent of the messages we give each other, in our marriage and elsewhere, are nonverbal. That’s because the heart usually sees things rightly, for it pays attention to our own intuition and to the nonverbal.
Empathy is different from sympathy. When you express sympathy for someone, you are saying you have compassion for that person, but you don’t feel what they do. Sympathy can also have broader applications. For example, we may have sympathy with a cause or with a group of people. We may watch our favorite team lose the final playoff and feel sadness for them. Sympathy is the ability to feel and express caring and understanding. It may lead us to want to help a group or person in need, but it is simply caring and not an emotional identification. Empathy is always a shared emotional experience with another person.
When we are able to be empathic, especially with our spouse, the benefits are immeasurable. They include being more sensitive and better adjusted emotionally in our own lives. In the context of SMART Love, learning how to show empathy leads us to experience a richer and more fulfilling marriage.
The Roots of Empathy
The foundation of our ability to be empathic as adults is laid early in our lives. For example, if you’ve been around a group of toddlers, you may have had the experience of watching one of them fall down and start to cry. Pretty soon others are crying, and if your child is there, eventually they start crying and come to you for comfort, even though they didn’t fall down and hurt themselves. The roots of empathy begin to develop from the day we are born. In a nursery filled with newborn babies, when one of them cries, the others react with tears as if the problem one child is having is their own.
This is explained by the fact that we are delivered into this life with “mirror neurons” in our brains. These are designed to very quickly help us learn how to do things by watching and mirroring others. Because the mind is so primitive at this early age, it mirrors all kinds of things, including the hurt another child experiences. Through mirroring, the child interprets what another child is experiencing as if it were their own. These mirror neurons are the foundation, it is believed, for our developing the ability to be empathic.
By the time we are eighteen months to two years old, instead of mirroring the crying child, we will now reach out and try to comfort them, without understanding what we are doing. We may retrieve the child’s security blanket, take them one of our toys, or even seek the aid of a parent to comfort them. Some even suggest that, at this early age, the better way to discipline your child who did something wrong is to point out how their behavior affected someone else, not to tell them that what they did was wrong or bad.
By the age of four, our brains are more structured, and now we begin to understand what we’re doing. And by the time we enter elementary school, we are able to naturally feel empathy for other kids in pain.
Again, the amygdala is involved. There are a large number of connections between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex that are constantly reading another person’s face and voice for evidence of what they are feeling. They are also constantly reading what we are doing as we speak and listen.
For example, if I were talking with you, my amygdala would relay information to my prefrontal cortex, which is the decision-making part of my brain. It might say things like, “Careful, he’s getting upset,” which causes my prefrontal cortex to adjust how I am saying something to you. Then it tells me, “That’s better, he’s calming down. Careful how you say it.” Of course, that’s illustrative, not actual. The amygdala doesn’t talk, but in a microsecond it is communicating this type of information to the executive part of my brain.
Your amygdala is doing the same dance as it evaluates what I am saying to you. It’s reading my five senses and using your five senses, along with our intuitions, to instruct your executive brain how to adjust what you’re doing and saying. It’s like a symphony of the amygdalae, and the idea is to get them to effectively tune in to each other to create the possibility of empathy and attunement.
What we are describing in the dance of our amygdalae is how we tune in to each other as couples to let the other person know we understand. Attunement is being in or bringing into harmony—a feeling of being “at one” with another person.
We once watched a video that highlighted the importance of attunement by showing a mother and her infant, who was probably about nine months old. It was a designed experiment in which, for a certain period of time, the mother was to look into her infant child’s eyes and interact with him. The infant was animated, laughing, and totally responding to his mother. They were in harmony with each other.
Then the mother was told to break eye contact and look away from the infant. It didn’t take long for the little guy to start to make noise, to fuss and wave his arms—all trying to get his mother’s attention again. Finally, the child started to cry, and the mother was told to reengage with her son. Gradually, the infant calmed down and reengaged with his mother. That was an example of attunement, misattunement, and reattunement.
When we’re infants, emotional attunement is the basis for our building a strong, secure attachment with both mother and father. The attachment formed in infancy is typically consistent with our later adult attachments, and especially the attachment we form with our spouse. If you did not have the benefit of forming a secure attachment with a loving parent in infancy, your marriage relationship may be challenging. But when you as a couple are attuned to each other’s emotions, it can be part of the healing of the insecure attachment styles you may have brought to the marriage from childhood.
Secure adult attachments provide the safety needed to experience empathy with each other in marriage. They also correlate with better health, lower depression, and less anxiety. Secure attachments make us better lovers and better parents. When we can look at our spouse with attention and tune in to what they are feeling and experiencing, it is calming, and it fosters a deep connection. It’s the same thing the infant experienced when his mother really tuned in to what he needed.
So what happens when we get out of tune with each other? The same thing that happened to the infant. We experience immediate distress, and if the misattunement goes on for any length of time, a growing passivity and negativity about the relationship develops. Over time, both the child and the adult will shut down their emotions, even obliterating them from their awareness. Or the child will selectively discover that certain emotions are okay to express, but they must shut off those deemed not okay. Fortunately, what gets shut off can also be rediscovered and reintegrated in a nurturing marital relationship.
Trust and Attunement
At the root of our being able to develop empathy with each other and being in tune with each other is the important issue of trust. When in a relationship, we ask questions like, “Can I trust you to be there and listen to me when I’m upset? Will you prejudge me? Can I trust you to make me your priority over other family, friends, and even your work? Can I trust you to respect me?” On PsycINFO, the research database used by psychologists, there are over one hundred thousand references to the word trust. Trust is a big issue in life, especially in marriage.
Trust is essential in all areas of life. It’s important to be able to trust a neighbor or a merchant. In fact, trustworthiness is one of the most important qualities in deciding who to date and then who to marry. When we think of betrayal, the destroyer of trust, we typically think of big things like infidelity, but research says that betrayal can be very small and can happen in just one instance. The act may seem like a small thing, but if it touched a raw nerve in the one betrayed, it’s betrayal.
Just as betrayal may be felt over something that appears small, building and rebuilding trust is based on many small moments and equally small behaviors over time. Researcher John Gottman says that behaviors that “turn towards” the other person help build trust, while behaviors that “turn away” from the other person can be felt as small betrayals and eat away at our ability to trust. A key example of how we “turn towards” is when we face up to a difficult situation and choose to interact regarding the issue. We “turn away” when we choose to ignore the situation and act like it didn’t happen, or we avoid talking about it.
The more we “turn towards” our spouse, the more we build trust, and the more we build trust, the more attuned we are to each other. And the more attuned we are to each other, the easier it is to respond to our spouse with empathy. But it takes time, as Don and Pat now realize. They had to face their trust issues with each other. It took time for them to respond to the changes they were each making in their communication. For what seemed like too long, they responded as if the other person were acting in the old ways, and they would brace themselves for the anger. But gradually, they became comfortable with the new patterns of trusting and becoming more attuned to each other.
Types of Empathy
When your spouse sincerely says to you, “I feel your frustration,” it may sound like empathy, but is it really? If so, what type of empathy is it? There are basically three ways to interpret that statement. The first is cognitive empathy, which indicates your spouse at least understands your perspective. They are able to see the situation from your point of view. They understand, at least intellectually. But cognitive empathy is really more a form of being sympathetic. It falls short of being empathic, at least in the way we have defined empathy.
The second type is empathic concern, where your spouse recognizes what you are feeling—they are attuned to your emotion—and show a genuine concern. But again, this isn’t true empathy. There is no shared emotional experience, where they enter into your frustration. This could be called “being compassionate,” but it still falls short of how we have defined empathy.
The third type is personalized empathy, where your spouse actually feels your pain, distress, and emotion. This fits our definition of empathy. You can get a feel for personalized empathy when you watch a suspenseful movie. As the action increases and the tension mounts, you notice you are feeling more tense, and when the feared object suddenly appears on the screen, you may jump in your seat and even shout something like, “Watch out!” The actors have successfully personalized their situation, and you have genuinely experienced true empathy.
Obstacles to Developing the Skill of Empathy
We’ve seen that the foundation for our adult capacity for empathy was set in motion when we were very young. None of us experienced perfection along the way, and our deficits in our ability to be empathic are based on failures in how attuned our parents were with our emotions when we were toddlers and children.
Our first obstacle in our struggle with this competency of SMART Love is falling short in our ability to express empathy. That means we will have a tendency to set off negative reactions in our spouse and in our family. We will not be sensitive to the moods of the important people in our lives and will create problems rather than resolve them.
Even when the deficits are minor, we may still resist being empathic with our spouse. Empathy only goes in one direction at a time. So one of us has to go first, and we may not like that idea, because it means we are to meet the needs of the other before we get our needs met. Empathy takes us from being selfish to being sacrificial.
The second obstacle is a more common problem. I worked with a couple where the husband could not break free of the idea that empathy meant he had to agree with his wife’s perspective. As a result, he was seldom supportive of his wife, since he believed that being supportive meant agreement. Empathy has nothing to do with agreeing or determining who is right and who is wrong. It is simply experiencing the emotional responses of our spouse and allowing ourselves to be attuned to their perspective.
The third common obstacle is the fear that we will get it wrong. One of the things I do as a counselor is try to enter the emotional world of the person sitting across from me. I remember early in my practice having this fear: what if I get it wrong and totally miss the other person’s perspective? I had to face that fear, and I found it to be groundless. Over the years, I have usually gotten pretty close to being right. But when I do miss it, the other person is gracious and corrects me. I think that making the effort to be more empathic will feel so good, your spouse will willingly correct what you may have missed.
Finally, as we said in one of our earlier Action Plans, we have to be willing to be emotionally uncomfortable. Being empathic will take us into some painful emotions, both in what we experience with our spouse and in what gets stirred up within ourselves. Discomfort is going to be part of our being empathic, but the rewards more than make up for the pain of the moment.
Becoming more empathic boils down to developing our ability to be a good listener. As a culture, we are not very good at listening. It’s a lost art. We have what I like to call “the People magazine attention span.” If something is going to take more than two pages or more than two or three minutes, we lose interest and want to go on to some other subject. But empathy, attunement, and trust all take time.
I sometimes joke with an audience by telling the men that good listening is simply learning when and how often to say “uh-huh.” After all, that’s what the stereotypes portray a counselor as doing. At least it indicates that we are still listening. There is an art to listening that requires us to focus our attention on the speaker, and every now and then we restate something they just said so they know we really are listening. Jesus said in Matthew 11:15, “Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand!” He couples hearing with understanding.
I’ve also found that for men, it’s hard to resist the urge to fix what their wife is dealing with. Men’s brains are designed to listen, get the picture, and then offer a solution. Men love to fix things. Women’s brains are designed to want to talk. There are exceptions, but these characteristics of how men listen and how women talk are generally true. So both have to work harder at listening.
Jerry struggled with this. Once he came out of his silent routine and started to interact with Kimberly, he wanted to solve all of her problems. He had to learn that she just wanted him to listen and respond. At first he said it didn’t feel like a manly thing to do—just listen. But when he experienced Kimberly slowing down now that she felt listened to, it got easier over time.
The interesting thing that happens when the man does listen is that what he thought he needed to fix already got fixed by his willingness to listen. Add in attunement, and you’re well on your way to enriching your ability to be empathic.