What Relationships Need is Sweet Empathy

The focus of this article is to explore the significance of empathic listening in all relationships.

Have you been in a relationship where your partner tried to impose a solution to a conflict by any of the following: blaming, insulting, criticizing, accusing, shouting or using force?

It is a good guess that none of these behaviors resolved the conflict. If anything these negative behaviors made it impossible to bring about a cooperative solution to the conflict.

What is missing from the above?

Empathic listening would have provided a healthy solution.

In healthy relationships, partners talk about their issues and listen to each other using empathy, which often leads to a mutually satisfying outcome.

Empathic listening involves two steps:

1. Being willing to listen solely to understand what the other person is feeling and thinking. 

This involves your ability to imagine what the other person's inside world is like; thus, putting yourself in the other person's shoes and imaging what the other person is feeling.

It doesn't involve: Judging, rebutting, advising, or contradicting what the other is telling you.

2. Your ability to summarize your understanding of the other's feelings and the reason for them is called the "mirroring". This is a process where you are able to reflect back the message and the feelings the other is communicating to you.

Five Basic Guidelines for Developing Empathy Skills:

1. Fully attend to the other person's tone of voice, posture, and facial expression;
2. Listen fully to understand to what is being communicated from the other's internal framework without necessarily agreeing, disagreeing, blaming, or defending;
3. Understand the underlying feelings attached to the message being sent; the other could be feeling sad, angry, fearful, or happy, etc.
4. Communicate back what you heard, using a sentence stem like: "What I heard you say is…" along with "I imagine you might be feeling (name the feeling.")
5. Ask the sender, "Am I accurately hearing what you are saying?"

In summary, empathic listening is a way of showing respect, acceptance, and understanding and support for all people that you have a relationship with.

Yes, All relationships are made sweeter by using empathy!

Reference: Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples by Dr. Harville Hendrix.

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