What You Need To Know
Empathy is about being patient, kind and ready to not always be right.
Empathetic people tend not to judge another person but to instead attempt to understand them.
Working on accepting your own foibles will prepare you for understanding others.
Let’s face it, relationships are tough, but people who figure them out do better in life. Men in long-term marriages live longer, have better health overall, report higher levels of happiness, and tend to be wealthier. Divorce, to say the least, is expensive.
While there are a host of tools that marriage counselors teach couples who are struggling, ranging from boundary setting to negotiating conflict to expressing needs in a nonthreatening manner, the tool that underpins it all is empathy.
What is empathy?
Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings of others and feel some of the things others do solely by witnessing it. There is much debate about whether empathy is inherited or learned, and like every human feeling and behavior, I believe it is a bit of both. Some people are born more empathetic than others. But, at the same time, some family systems fail to teach empathy to children. This is especially true with boys, who are often taught that the only acceptable emotions are anger and aggression in athletics.
A teaching moment for empathy might happen when a small child steals from another. Families who teach empathy do fewer time-outs and more asking about how the victim might feel and what restitution can be done to help the other child feel better. Punishment alone sends a message that a kid is bad; punishment with an opportunity for understanding and repair gives a child a mastery over social skills. Children who aren’t taught empathy can become callous adults, oblivious to the hurt and pain they create in others.
So let’s assume your family wasn’t so emotionally wired. And, to top it off, you were raised with traditional gender parenting and taught not to express your own feelings. And now you are looking at a crying or angry wife who keeps saying you don’t understand her. What’s a guy to do?
I must interject here that when women leave relationships, they most often say it is because their emotional needs aren’t being met. So if you think that working harder to give her more stuff or buying lingerie to give her more hot sex will fix the problem, think again. Women want to feel seen and heard. Don’t you?
There are four strategies to master empathy skills: Self-awareness, non-judgement, listening skills, and self-confidence.