You can see a lot about a relationship by looking at the empathy partners have for each other. High levels of empathy usually indicate a strong connection, and greater relationship satisfaction. Less empathy shows the opposite, because it does not allow the partners to connect deeply.
Even though empathy is so central to strong relationships, many people find it hard to empathize. Are you like that? Do you practice empathy in your relationships?
If not, or not enough, what might be getting in your way?
You might be facing one or more common barriers. Here are several reasons you might find it challenging to have enough empathy in your relationship, and what you can do about it.
Empathy Buster #1 – You Cannot Accept Feelings That Are Wrong
The first obstacle you could be facing towards empathy is that you do not want to empathize with someone when his feelings are incorrect. You believe that whatever he is experiencing should not result in whatever he is feeling. You say to yourself, “He should not feel the way he does.” Since you see his emotion as unjustified, you do not want to let him sit with it. Instead, you want to correct his feelings or to dismiss them, instead of listening to how he feels.
Although this might make sense to you, it still hijacks your ability to have empathy. That will still leave you without depth in your relationship. So, despite it making sense to you to withhold empathy, it is important to adjust your approach.
What You Can Do:
Focus on Acknowledging, Not Agreeing
Overcoming this obstacle requires a new way of thinking about someone else’s emotions. Empathy does not require that you agree with the reasons someone has for feeling a certain way. It simply requires that you acknowledge his emotions, and try to understand how he is feeling. Instead of looking at his emotions as being wrong or right, just look at them as being. Focus on the emotion, rather than on if it has validity or is correct. Allow your partner to have an alternative point of view and feel differently, and understand that perspective.
The Person Does Not Necessarily Have a Choice
In addition, keep in mind that people do not usually choose their emotions. Feelings like sadness, fear, grief, and joy are not always up to the person. He is simply sharing the feelings he has. Those current emotions are real, even if he himself would rather feel otherwise.
Your job is to understand his emotions and meet them where he is. When you reflect back the emotion you see and accept that he has that feeling, you are saying that you understand his reality, even if it is difficult for him, or for you.
What If You Want To Change What He Is Feeling?
Sometimes you might feel the urge to change your partner’s emotions. Even if you do want to change his point of view, do not let it rob you, and him, of empathy. Even feelings that (you feel) are incorrect need to be shown empathy. Empathy is so integral, that if you empathize with someone’s feelings, you will strengthen your relationship, and if you do not, it will suffer. Whether the feelings are correct or not does not matter.
Furthermore, before you empathize, any attempt at trying to correct your partner’s emotions will not work altogether. If your partner is feeling a certain way, it is hard to shift his point of view while he still wants to express his emotions to you. After he feels understood, you can have a separate conversation where you express how you see things. First try to understand him, and only then try to be understood yourself.
Empathy Buster #2 – You Do Not Want To Be Affected So Much
The second obstacle to empathy might be harder to be in touch with. You might fear being affected too significantly by someone else’s feelings. You worry that if you let his joy, sadness or anger in, it will move you too much. You prefer to keep a safe distance because empathizing with his emotions is risky. It makes you unable to limit your own emotional reactions. You would rather not stir those emotions within you.
How You Can Change That
In order to get past this obstacle, it can be helpful to reexamine what it means to have empathy. Empathy does not mean feeling someone else’s feelings as intensely as they do. It means allowing yourself to really understand what they are going through, including feeling some of their feelings.
Let’s examine that idea a little more. Think about empathy. How does it work? How can one person feel someone else’s feelings? It sounds paradoxical.
The way we empathize is usually by imagining ourselves in the other person’s situation. It is not possible for us to feel the intensity of someone else’s emotions if they come from that person alone. They are the ones going through the experience, and only they can have the full intensity of the emotional response. In order to empathize, we instinctively call up our brain’s library of our experiences and our own emotional responses. Using those reference points, we merge that feeling with what the speaker is telling us, and empathize with them. That means that if we are sensing an overwhelming emotion when someone else speaks to us about their experiences, it is because that brings up our own similar emotion. If we are having a strong emotional reaction to an experience we are hearing, it signals to us that we should learn how to embrace and deal with our own emotions.
There are ways to process our own emotions, which begin with recognizing those emotions. It can also be beneficial to express them, to ourselves, or to someone with whom we have a relationship. If we are aware of how our own emotions can come up when someone else is sharing his emotions, it can allow us to understand what is going on inside us and how that can hinder our empathy for the other. Otherwise, we will penalize the speaker, who is sharing his emotion, because we twin ourselves to them and it brings up an emotion for us.
Empathy Buster #3 – You Do Not Like Emotions That Much
A third impediment to empathy is that you habitually experience things cognitively. That is the way you go through life. You think in concepts and arguments, rather than in feelings. If you do not sense your own emotions regularly, it is difficult to respond to someone else’s feelings. Since emotions are not the medium through which you see the world, empathic responses do not come naturally to you.
A similar hindrance, related to the previous one, is that you go through life with your feelings blocked because they are overwhelming. As opposed to being intellectual about it, you are numb to your feelings. That protective habit leaves you out of touch with your inner life. If you keep your own feelings closed off, you are likely to keep others at the same distance you keep yourself.
How to Deal With This
These two obstructions can be overcome to allow you to become more empathic and deepen your relationships. Overcoming these obstacles call for a different kind of work. They ask you to examine your relationship with your own feelings.
Why is it that you think that you look at the world unemotionally? It might be because of two related reasons. Either because you were brought up with less of a focus on emotions, or because, at a point in life, you needed to suppress emotions. Therefore, it became the way that you operate from that point forward.
When you understand how you broadside feelings in order to protect yourself, you can begin to make different choices in your interactions. You can learn to slow down and begin to feel your own emotions, and subsequently, to allow another person’s feelings to enter your world. When you tune into your own feelings, and another’s, you might consider using brief, honest responses that show you heard and felt what was said.
If you have a history of feelings overwhelming you, consider where that experience began. What would it feel like to allow some of that feeling into your life now, in a small and safe way? Ask yourself why you rely on intellect, or numbness, rather than emotion. How did that serve you in the past? How does it help you now? By staying distant, what do you protect yourself from?
Answering these questions will not fix everything overnight, but the awareness itself opens a door toward exploring and allowing for your own emotions. Consequently, you will allow for others’ feelings, too.
Empathy is not a skill that belongs to one kind of person. It is a practice available to anyone who is willing to notice their own interior life and to make room for the internal lives of others.
The more you tend to your own feelings, the more available you become to hold someone else’s. That is how empathy grows, and by growing it you deepen the relationships that matter most.
Rabbi Shmuel Maybruch's Blog 