Keep in mind that this very well may not be the time to “fix” their problem. When you come to understand accurately the mind and heart of your spouse in a given situation, it’s easier to be in tune with what they need at that moment. Take what you’ve come to understand from the previous steps and respond in compassion. (Even for the most stoic person, the more you put this into practice, the easier it becomes over time.) Allow yourself to experience any part of the anger, frustration, excitement, happiness, or whatever feeling they are expressing to you. This may take some conscious effort on your part, especially if they are emotionally responsive to a situation in a way you wouldn’t. Namely, your spouse’s emotional response. Respond verbally to your spouse with legitimizing replies like, “ Wow, that must be frustrating,” or “ I can see how you’d be excited about that.” Instead, acknowledge to yourself that these are their feelings (and not yours). Avoid judging your spouse’s feelings based on how you would respond in the same situation. You may listen and think, Gee, I’d never get so riled up (or excited, or sad) over this. Listen closely to your spouse to understand their feelings in the same way you’d listen to a teacher to understand how to do calculus. Listen simply to grasp what your spouse is feeling with as much accuracy as possible. Considering this trilogy-approach to empathy, how do you build empathy in your marriage? Here are some steps for couples to take: Then you go upstairs to goad the ankle-biters into gathering up the fungus-laden dishes so your spouse doesn’t have to for the 1,001st time. And out of compassionate empathy, you extend a hug, thank them for all the hard work they do. You allow yourself to feel at least a little bit of the frustration they feel. You listen to them and try to non-judgmentally understand how they’re feeling (even though the thought of lingering dirty dishes doesn’t particularly bother you). Your spouse comes home from a stressful day at work to find the kids still haven’t taken care of the dirty dishes in their rooms that they were told a thousand times to put in the dishwasher. So here’s what this may look like in marriage. This empathy triad, according to Ekman, keeps the whole person in mind, making empathy a work of both mind, heart, and behavior. It balances the first two parts so that we can take empathetic action. Which is good news for spouses (like you) who want to build more empathy in their marriage.īut the third part of Ekman’s empathy triad is compassionate empathy. The thing is, you can control whether you attempt to feel what the other person is feeling. It’s the same mental processes at work as when you shed tears watching a romcom or feel sadness when you witness someone who’s down and out. Cognitive empathy is what we just talked about it allows us to imagine how someone is feeling and say Wow, that must be really tough.Įmotional empathy goes a little further to allow ourselves to actually feel what our spouse is feeling (even though we don’t have the same experiences). Paul Ekman, who separates empathy into three parts. We find this reflected in an explanation of empathy given by Dr. And keep in mind this is a skill that you can learn, not an inherent trait that you’re born with.īut real marital empathy doesn’t stop with simply understanding. The goal of empathy in marriage is to understand as closely as possible what is going on in your spouse’s mind and heart at the moment. The keywords here (in my humble opinion) are detect accurately. Berkeley researchers Levenson and Ruef give: empathy is the ability to detect accurately the emotional information being transmitted by another person. There are many definitions out there for empathy some have described it as the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. What exactly is empathy, and can you have it for your spouse if you’ve never experienced what they have experienced? However, many people reduce the idea of empathy to it being just “touchy-feely” or something that some people are born having, but others not so much. Have you ever whipped up your favorite batch of homemade cookies to find out in the first bite that you left out that one key ingredient that makes all the difference? Empathy is that key ingredient to a great recipe for a healthy marriage that you don’t want to forget.Ī large body of research tells us the practice of empathy is essential to a thriving, happy, healthy marriage.
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