With that definition of empathy in mind, it’s not hard to see why we should try to cultivate it. Perspective taking enables us to see things from our spouse’s point of view or helps us to build workplaces that demonstrate care and compassion for employees. Our sense of justice and fairness stems from our ability to really understand other people’s emotions and therefore respond to their suffering.
Gratitude is another seemingly simple skill that just doesn’t seem to fit into contemporary American society. Indeed, argues psychologist Robert Emmons in Part I of this book, “We’ve come to overlook, dismiss, or even disparage the significance of gratitude.” It’s easy to understand why. After all, “thank you” is one of the first phrases we teach children to say—how complicated could the concept be? We see gratitude as a basic form of politeness, like chewing with your mouth closed, and we don’t usually consider what deeper significance it may hold.
Yet the fact that we try to make “thank you” such an essential part of a child’s vocabulary and that children (and adults) often have a hard time bringing themselves to utter those two words suggests that gratitude is more complex than we typically assume. Indeed, as many contributors to this book make clear, true gratitude is more a state of mind than a single act, and it takes real effort to cultivate. The same can be said of forgiveness and apology and indeed any act that acknowledges our interdependence with other people and deepens our social ties.
Fortunately, we have good reason to believe that most of us can develop empathy and gratitude, as well as forgiveness and apology and other related skills—and there’s overwhelming evidence to suggest that we should. As several essays in this book reveal, skills like these can serve as powerful tools to build health, trust, cooperation, and respect between people in a number of daily situations, from home to work to politics.
The essays in this section do not deny that humans are capable of great selfishness and insensitivity and that there’s sometimes no greater challenge than simply getting out of our own skin and identifying with another human being. But while the advice to see from another person’s perspective may at times sound unrealistic, the following essays make clear that it’s advice we can all learn to follow.
FEELING LIKE PARTNERS
Philip A. Cowan, Carolyn Pape Cowan, and Neera Mehta
RICK AND ANNA met on a blind date and immediately became enchanted with each other. They moved in together four months later, and after two more years they decided to get married. They planned to have kids after four years, and that worked like a charm. Jason came along right on schedule and his sister Debby arrived two years later. Unfortunately, somewhere over the years, not everything went according to plan. As we look in on Rick and Anna after they’ve been together for almost ten years, their early enchantment seems to exist only in wistful memory.
Rick returned home from work about half an hour ago. He’s slumped on the couch when Anna sees him in the living room.
ANNA: How come you didn’t put your stuff away after you came home?
RICK: I’ll do it in a minute.
ANNA: It’s been a whole bunch of minutes already. Now I’ve got your sweater and papers dumped in the dining room, the kids’ toys in the kitchen, and me tripping over everything while I’m trying to make dinner.
RICK: Give me a break, Anna. I had a horrible afternoon at work and I’m just fried.
ANNA: You haven’t asked about my afternoon. Your mother kept me on the phone for an hour, yelling about some cousin of yours who insulted her.
RICK: And I suppose you were your usual sweet and patient self, trying to help her calm down?
ANNA: (No answer)
RICK (voice raised): I’ve had it, Anna. You’re out of control.
ANNA: Maybe you need a more patient wife.
RICK (leaving the room): Maybe I do.
It didn’t take Rick and Anna long to go from a small complaint about putting away “stuff” to a discussion about the survival of their relationship. Readers familiar with self-help books or the professional literature on couples therapy will probably say that Rick and Anna need to learn more effective communication skills. After they recover from their heated exchange, Rick and Anna will probably say the same thing.
We think their problem goes deeper than that. In our careers as family researchers and couples therapists, we have conducted long-term studies of more than 300 families, following many from their first child’s birth through the preschool, elementary school, and high school years. We’ve seen couples confronted and even overwhelmed by the challenges in their relationship, but we’ve also seen many partners find ways to overcome these problems. We’ve found that it’s simply not enough to teach couples like Rick and Anna the “right” thing to say in the middle of a fight or ask them to follow communication “rules,” such as “Summarize what your partner just said before responding to him” or “Make ‘I’ rather than ‘you’ statements.” Couples’ relationships suffer less from a failure of words than from a failure of imagination—an ability to imagine what a partner is thinking and feeling. We believe that the key ingredient missing from Rick and Anna’s conversation—and from the relationships of countless other couples—is empathy.
BEYOND WORDS
What do we mean by empathy? There’s a thinking component of empathy that involves the ability to take another person’s point of view (“I can see why you find it so hard to talk to my mother when she complains all the time”) and an emotional capacity to feel what the other is feeling (“Oh honey, it hurts when I see you so upset”). Both of these aspects describe what might be going on inside one partner when the other is feeling intense emotions—often negative (sad, angry, frightened) but sometimes positive (elated, delighted, joyful). Another important aspect of empathy involves behavior consistent with that empathic position. The simple statement “I feel your pain” isn’t really evidence of empathy unless the speaker actually does something to show a true understanding of the listener’s experience. If Anna had explained to Rick how overwhelmed she was feeling about caring for the children and taking care of their home, Rick could have shown her that he “gets it” by helping to pick up the toys or working with Anna to prepare dinner.
A number of researchers have investigated whether accuracy in “reading” one’s partner is an important ingredient of couple satisfaction. Are partners happier in their relationships if they can conjure up an accurate picture of what the other person is feeling and experiencing? Indeed, studies have found that people who gauge their partner’s thoughts and feelings more accurately during disagreements are generally more satisfied with their overall relationship. But for empathy to be truly beneficial, both partners need to experience it. If Rick had responded empathically to Anna’s frustration about her conversation with his mother but Anna ignored or dismissed his response, Rick would likely have been left feeling even less empathic and more distant from his wife.
Clearly, both Rick and Anna failed to demonstrate empathy in their exchange. Rick discarded his papers and sweater on the floor and didn’t move to pick them up when Anna complained. Anna didn’t respond to Rick’s statement about his terrible day, and in turn, Rick was sarcastic, almost contemptuous, of Anna’s description of her conversation with his mother. As their hostile exchange quickly escalated, the specter of not being the right partners for each other overshadowed everything else. In a more empathic mode, Anna might have greeted Rick before complaining, asked about his day, and softened her complaint once she heard how difficult it was. If she had done that, Rick might have been more inclined to place his belongings out of the line of traffic and ask about Anna’s day the next time he came home.