Empathy: Do I have it?
How does a man actually practice empathy? Empathy is so much a character trait developed through sanctification, you can’t just manufacture it. But what a wise man taught me once was, you can prepare and cultivate your heart for it. The idea of empathy is to see another person’s experience through their lens. It’s not asking the question, “how would I feel in that particular situation?” It is asking, “how do they feel in that particular situation?” That person’s life experiences are all coming to bear on the moment. If you have trouble dialing in to empathy, here is an incredible simple tool that helped me throught my recovery. Take a look, then I’ll explain it.
This is how you work through it:
Identify something that brings up past pain. It could be something happening in the moment, or something from the distant past.
Think about what it must feel like for your wife to experience this. For example-
Buying a crappy birthday present. Especially if its a pattern, how does it feel to receive that from you? Perhaps there have been hints. Or even overt statements about what to buy/do. When you show up with something that was winging it at best, and completely out of left field at worst, what emotions might get stirred. Write them down.
Consider what you feel, for her, when you acknowledge that you’ve brought about these emotions in the person you love the most on the planet.
It’s easy to go into shame mode here, writing things like guilty, ashamed, angry at myself, disappointed in myself, etc. That’s how you feel for you. You want to key in on what you feel for her.
Share it. You can literally speak from left to right across the chart: here’s what has happened and what I’ve done, what I can imagine you feel, and what I feel for you.
For me to cultivate empathy, I had to go through these type of exercises on my own, outside of the heated exchanges. So that meant being out in the field at work in the middle of the day, or while at lunch looking at the feelings wheels and matching words to emotions. I needed to try and practice seeing life through her lens. It was tough. Sometimes I was only coming up with the right words to match what I thought she thought I should feel. Are you tracking with me? Sometimes I had to let myself off the mat, cause I knew I had to start somewhere.
That facilitated me being more able to do empathy when the heated moments happened.
Is this the ultimate fix? Nah. But it is one more way you can tap into your heart, and then hopefully connect with your wife’s heart.