That’s often easier said than done. As we all know, it’s especially difficult to take other people’s points of view, feel what they’re feeling, and act on those feelings when we are stressed ourselves. Some people seem to be not very good at this at all, but even the most empathic people occasionally find it psychologically difficult and emotionally taxing to empathize with their partner—and the tone of family relationships often reflects those difficulties.
The good news is that there are ways partners can learn to empathize with one another. Our own research and clinical experience, and that of a number of colleagues, suggest several methods for fostering empathy between spouses. While there isn’t one recipe that guarantees partners’ empathy in every situation, we believe there are enough tools to help couples like Rick and Anna not only survive adversity, but use it in a way to strengthen their relationship.
FOSTERING EMPATHY
Empathy seems to come more easily to some partners than others. Yet although we tend to describe some people as empathic and others as lacking empathy, empathy is not a fixed trait—a stable characteristic that a person expresses similarly in all situations. We believe that under ideal conditions, everyone can be at least somewhat empathic in the moment.
We see five main conditions necessary for fostering empathy in couples’ lives. These are when both partners (1) are reasonably mentally healthy; (2) have grown up in empathic families; (3) work collaboratively in parenting their children; (4) have relatively low levels of stress external to the family or sources of support to cope with the stresses they face; and (5) have what they consider to be a fair division of labor and an effective way of solving the problems that confront them.
Even if they don’t meet one or more of these conditions, partners can still work on ways to overcome that problem and empathize with each other.
The first major impediment to understanding “where a partner is coming from” is either partner’s serious cognitive or emotional problems. These problems can prevent them from reading others accurately or may trigger disabling levels of anxiety or symptoms of depression. For example, one aspect of depression is the tendency to see and expect the worst in other people. It is extremely difficult for a depressed person to understand that a loving partner can do something hurtful unintentionally. It is also hard for the nonde-pressed spouse to understand why the depressed partner is reacting in such an unrelentingly negative way. One option for couples that find themselves in the middle of escalating negative exchanges is for one partner to talk to the other about seeking outside help as a couple to deal with the emotional problems. Empathy may come easier once the couple has started to address these issues.
Many researchers and therapists also look at how childhood attachment to parents affects partners’ abilities to empathize with each other as adults. Studies of attachment across generations suggest that parents who make their children feel secure and reassured during times of stress prime them to feel empathic in their adult relationships. Adults whose childhood experiences led them to expect caring, understanding responses from loved ones when they were upset find it easier to be optimistic and empathic when relationship problems stir their emotions, even if their partner doesn’t act empathically in the moment. By contrast, partners whose caretakers dismissed their childhood fears feel anxious and not worthy of care. They are then more likely to feel threatened and react negatively to a spouse who doesn’t seem to understand their feelings.
Also, for many partners, the relationship between their parents has provided a salient model of what they can expect from couple relationships. If both partners’ parents typically disparaged and insulted one another, it will be more difficult for the couple to establish a civil way of solving problems. Some couples whose parents were always in high conflict tend to mirror that pattern, while others try to avoid upsetting conversations altogether. In a couple where one partner experienced constant shouting and arguing in his family and members of the other partner’s family never raised their voices, neither partner has a useful model for tackling the differences that partners inevitably need to resolve. Although it isn’t possible to change what happened to us when we were children, it is not too late for adults to understand more about their own and their partner’s early relationships. This often leads to insight about how partners’ styles of responding to conflict may be a reaction to the way they were treated by the closest figures in their lives years ago.
Working from this perspective, psychologist Susan Johnson talks about how strengthening a feeling of security in romantic relationships can compensate for old wounds and allow partners to be more empathic and flexible in the meanings they attribute to their partner’s behavior (for example, “Rick must have had a difficult day and that’s why he just dumped his stuff when he got home. It’s not that he doesn’t care about what I need”). As a therapist, Johnson uses empathy herself to help couples feel more secure. In exploring the roots of each partner’s reactions, she acts as a model for how to be an empathic partner. She might say to Rick, “It sounds as if you can’t imagine that anyone will take your needs and desires seriously. So you feel as if you have no choice but to agree when Anna says you may need to find someone else rather than work it out with her.” In this way, Johnson explores Rick’s fears and reformulates his negative reaction as an understandable position, with the goal of strengthening both Rick’s and Anna’s feelings of empathy for one another.
NEW CHALLENGES FOR COUPLES
Becoming parents increases opportunities for disagreements between partners, especially when new parents discover that they have some different ideas about parenting. Some disagreements can be resolved by having discussions when things are calm, rather than when emotions are running high. On some issues, it may be possible to let each parent handle the children in a different fashion, so that each parent has a unique relationship with them. On other core issues, they may need to work out a way of responding to their children that satisfies both of their instincts.
Either way, when partners are parents, as Rick and Anna are, the conditions for empathy can be difficult to create because time and attention get shifted from the couple to the children. Modern parents who are typically juggling at least two jobs and care of the home and children have few occasions when they are alone together and reasonably well rested. Because they are already working away from home for so many hours, parents feel guilty about stealing time as a couple. Yet family research with parents of young children reveals that children suffer academically, socially, and often emotionally when their parents are unhappy. The results of our years of working with partners who are parents have provided a clear message: If you feel you can’t take time to work on your relationship for yourselves, do it for your children. We know that children will reap the benefits of their parents’ more satisfying exchanges—both because they’ll have models of empathic behavior to emulate and because they’ll be more free to concentrate on their own learning and development, instead of becoming preoccupied with their parents’ distress.