If you want to restore your relationship try using empathy
Has your relationship hit a stumbling block? Try using empathy to restore it.
by: E.B. Johnson
Relationships are complex and multi-faceted, and that can make it hard to keep up in today’s fast-paced world. No matter how close you are to your partner, no matter how much you love them, life can get in the way sometimes and make it hard to retain that sense of love and connection that we so desperately seek. So, how do we fix that? By utilizing massive and radical empathy.
Empathy is a transformative tool when it comes to repairing broken relationships. Our partnerships are founded on empathy, as well as mutual beliefs and desires that help guide us and help us to overcome adversity. When we get too caught up in our own drama and narrative, however, it can be easy to lose sight of the other person and the connection we share. If you and your partner are struggling, empathy is often the roadmap by which you can find your way back to one another. It’s a journey that takes effort, however, and a lot of longterm commitment.
The real secret to a happy relationship.
You don’t have to access some magic formula or travel to depths of a psychology wonderland to find the secret to a better relationship. Our partnerships are built on mutual understanding, and they are built on shared experiences and shared beliefs. Following that logic, it is our shared sense of empathy and compassion to that allows us to bridge difficulties and remain connected throughout the hardships and the adversities of life.
Feeling empathy for another person is natural, and it involves putting yourself in their shoes and making the conscious effort to see things from their point-of-view. It’s going beyond taking in what they say on a superficial level, and actively attempting to feel the emotions and the experiences of the other person.
The compassion and the empathy that we should feel for our spouses and our partners extends far past basic sympathy — which is simply saying “Okay, I see your struggle” — to being able to feel and relate with their pain, their happiness and even their devstating grief. Truly healthy relationships, relationships that are balanced and prepared to stand the test of time, requires us to care for our partner as deeply as we care for ourselves.
Why our relationships lose their empathy.
Our empathy fades naturally in relationships, and sometimes it’s just interrupted by the circumstances of our individual lives. Whatever the reason, a major piece of coming to cultivate compassion in our partnerships again is understanding how life can pull us away from this higher sense of self.
Letting go
Relationships are powerful things, but they also have the power to make us too comfortable. Getting too comfortable in our relationships (or getting too busy with family, work, etc.) can cause us to fail to look after own physical, mental, and emotional needs. Over time, these things wear us down and cause us to detach from our authentic self. Lost and struggling, we lash out and become angry at anyone and everyone around us — losing our empathy, our understanding, and the people who matter most along the way.
No personal time
Personal time is important in a relationship, and it becomes especially important the longer our relationships go on. When we stop connecting with each other regularly on a one-on-one level, we lose sight of all the little changes we’re each undergoing. We become new people while the other person has their head turned, and this can lead to a slow disconnect and a distancing that severs the bond you share. In that space, your compassion and empathy for one another disappears. You become strangers to each other and that ushers in a scary time of uncertainty.
Unresolved anger
No matter how much we love our partners (or how well we know them) it is inevitable that we will at some point hurt their feelings or step on their toes. When this leads to anger, it’s important to confront those feelings up-front, rather than letting them fester over time. When we fail to confront the way we’re feeling with our partners it can create feelings of resentment and even hatred that causes our compassion to erode.
Zero shared experiences
The experiences we share in our relationships are important, and they help us to bond and connect with our partners on a number of different levels. When we share experiences together, we create memories together and this helps us to see past one another’s faults to all the various strengths and values that are contained beneath. If you’ve stopped going on adventures with your partner or spouse, or if you’ve stopped just enjoying doing things together — you might losing empathy for one another and you might be doing it fast.
Loss of attraction
Sometimes, people just grow apart and their relationships change. There’s nothing insidious in it, and there’s nothing sinister or controllable. As we grow, we change, and that can lead us to want different things from our partners and our relationships. This loss of connection or loss of attraction can be hard to deal with and even harder to understand, leading to confusing feelings and a sense of obligation that makes it hard to see the right answer. The only this is left unresolved, the more resentment can increase and empathy can decrease.
Signs the empathy has left your relationship.
There are a number of signs that the empathy is quickly leaving your relationship. Whether you just find yourselves fighting more often, or you’re dealing with something more subtle like trivialization and avoidance, in order to repair our partnerships we have to embrace what’s going wrong and be honest about the part we play in it.
Never able to agree
Is the honeymoon over? Do you find that you no longer share a majority of opinions or preferences with your partner? If you’re never able to agree on anything, or find that arguments are on the increase, it can be a sign that you’re both struggling to empathize with one another. True empathy requires the occasional compromise, but it also requires reaching out and understanding through sharing common ground. If there’s no common ground in your relationship any more, there can be little hope of compassion.
Dismissed feelings
Our feelings are a critical piece of who we are, and they are an important part of the internal compass that guides us and helps us to find fulfillment. When our partner dismisses the way we feel, it indicates a lack of empathy and it indicates a disinterest in you and what you want and need. The dismissal of feelings in a relationship is never healthy, and almost always indicates a serious imbalance of both interest and power.
Constant blowups
When one or both partners are no longer able to control their emotions, and no longer care to it results in explosive outbursts and hurt feelings. Over time, these explosions build up until they become major chasms in-between both parties, that make it impossible to connect and impossible to see where the other person is coming from. Drama becomes the norm, and inappropriate feelings get broken out all over the place as partners lash out, act up and reach outwardly for the things they aren’t getting (physically or emotionally) from themselves or their partners “back at home”.
Inability to sympathize
If you’re an empathetic partner, it means you sympathize with your spouse or loved one when things get rough. Sympathy is recognizing the emotional states of others and then reflecting back the appropriate response. If you can’t be caring and present when your partner is hurting or going through something tough at work — you aren’t sympathizing with them and you’re not being there for them like an equal help-meet should be.
Trivializing it all
Trivialization is a common tool of manipulators and narcissists alike, and it’s a useful one when the abuser is trying to flip around confrontation or hurt feelings. When your partner trivializes your feelings, they let you express them, but then immediately reverse the narrative as to downplay those feelings or make them appear less worthwhile than they really are. Truly caring for someone means allowing them to express themselves, but also valuing that expression with equal regard to your own.
Avoid, avoid, avoid
Avoidance is a means of coping that many of us utilize without realizing it. Two people who are struggling to connect, or struggling to feel for one another, might start to avoid one another rather than deal with the issues at hand. If you avoid your partner, if you avoid communicating with them or doing anything that might make one or both of you come face-to-face with the difficulty and pain that you’re facing…it’s a sign of emotional upset and inability (or unwillingness) to see where the other person is standing.
How to re-establish empathy in your relationship.
Even if your relationship has hit some major stumbling blocks, you can find your way back to one another again by simply focusing on compassion and focusing on one another. When you allow yourself to reconnect on some basic levels, you can find your way back to an even ground. These simple techniques are some of the best ways to jumpstart the process and get back to that sense of mutual empathy and understanding.
1. Listen with intention
The first step in learning how to re-establish empathy with your partner is learning how to listen with intent. Too often, we get sucked into and bogged down with the details of our own day-to-day misery. Tunnel vision activated, we start to lose sight of our partner’s needs and become obsessed with our own point of view and our own perspective. When we start listening to our partners — and doing it intentionally — we discover new parts of them we never knew existed.
Open up a new channel of communication with your partner and do it openly and earnestly. Ask them questions and listen actively while they reply. Absorb what they’re saying, and engage with it by questioning them and digging deeper into the point that they’re making. Leave your mind blank. Don’t form any replies before they’ve completely said what they want to say. Repeat this every day (day in, and day out) until it becomes second nature and neither partner feels they’re ever fighting to get their point across.
Don’t ask someone questions to guide them. Don’t lead someone to the platform where you get to then talk about your own issues for the next 60 minutes. Develop a practice of genuinely listening and listening for one reason and one reason alone: to learn more about the person who’s sitting on the other side of the table. So many of us lose empathy because we lose sight of the person we love. Reconnect. Re-engage. And do it through establishing regular and authentic methods of communication that add to the future that you’re trying to build together.
2. Communicate kindly
Relationships are emotional, and that includes the good emotions and the bad ones too. When our partner crosses a line, or they make us feel as though we aren’t being heard or seen — we can find ourselves lashing out and crossing boundaries that we would never normally cross in our normal state of mind. This is why it’s important to focus on kindness when it comes to communicating and finding out empathy again, and why it’s important to apply it to every facet of our lives together.
Practice kind communication with your partner, and consciously invoke it (even when you’re angry). Focus on respect, and always think before replying or letting your feelings get in the way. How would you want your partner to speak to you? What tone would you want them to use? What format would you want them to deliver bad new to you in? These are important considerations to make and ones that can help you find kindness in your anger.
When we focus on kindness and respect above all else, we can see new opportunities in and for ourselves and other people. Kind responses to negative behavior can encourage kind responses in return. Rather than stoking the fires and driving each other further and further apart, you can start to build the bridges you need by just deciding to be nice rather than nasty when the going gets tough. Finding empathy for your partner again doesn’t have to be difficult, but it does have to be conscious.
3. Show your appreciation
If you’ve been in a relationship for a long time, then you now that things can be come stagnant and often get lost in-between all the other little details that go into creating a life together. When we get stuck in a rut, we go on autopilot, and in that space we often forget to show our partners the respect and appreciation they deserve (and need). If you want to find your compassion again, start by showing some appreciation.
Let your partner know how much you love them, and express to them how much you appreciate who they are and what they do for you. Thank them for the kindness and the compassion that they show to you and reciprocate those kindnesses through simple gestures of love. Appreciation isn’t just something we show through words. It’s something we gift through our deeds as well.
Consciously work to create small gestures of love and gratitude for your partner. This doesn’t have to cost a lot, and it doesn’t have to be extravagant. A note on the desk or even a flower picked from the garden can often do the trick. Whatever you do, let your partner know that they are seen and that all the effort and time they put is does not go wasted. We each fight a thousand little battles every day. Show them how much you appreciate theirs.
4. Nurture the friendship
Chances are, before you were in a formal relationship you and your partner were friends. Friendships are important, and they allow us to connect — in some way — on deeper and more honest levels. There are things that you would share with your friends that you would never share with a partner. There are things you can see and value in your friends that you can’t see in your partner. If you want to get back to empathy, nurture your friendship before you nurture your romantic relationship and watch how things change.
Friendship is a comfortable place, and a place in which we can have fun free of many of the expectations that await us in the heavy place of marriage or longterm relationships. Once you and your partner have hit the rocks, focus on rebuilding your friendship before the more intimate stuff, and you’ll often find a natural happiness and compassion you didn’t realize was missing.
Cultivating the friendship that you share can be done in increments, and it’s more about sharing experiences (once again) more than anything. It’s also about doing things in low pressure settings, however, and having fun without expecting some type of return or attaching it to some related form of responsibility. Mutually healthy and loving relationships feel like hanging out at a friend’s house, with the freedom to leave at any time. The catch is you don’t have to leave, however, and the friend is also the person you can and do want to go home to.
5. Create safe spaces
Though they get a bad rap in today’s hot-button, talking-point society, safe spaces are important and they’re especially important in our relationships. More than an actual physical space, safe spaces in our relationships are sanctuaries in which we know we can be ourselves and express ourseslves without fear of blowback or denial. When we create enough safe space in our relationships for our partners (and ourselves) to feel safe, secure and wanted — we find a way back to empathy and the compassion we’ve been seeking all along.
Stop putting limits on yourself and stop putting limits on your partner too. You’re both grown enough and mature enough to handle what the other person has to say, so leave enough room for both parties to express themselves and stop denying the other person the space they need to be who they are, or say what they want.
When your partner expresses a need to talk about something serious, find a mutually workable time in which you can both sit down and talk things out comfortably. Limit interruptions and try your best not to reply with things like, “I’m too busy,” or “Maybe we can figure this out later”. Don’t criticize your partner when they open up, and leave the negative feedback off the table unless it is absolutely crucial, constructive and kind. The more you allow your partner to be themselves and speak up, the more you’ll be able to do the same; slowly and with some conscious effort each day.
6. Start on the inside
As much as an outward show of compassion and understanding can transform your relationship with your partner, it has to start with an internal cultivation. If you’re not showing your partner enough kindness, understanding and compassion — chances are that’s because you’re not treating your own self that way.
Start using applied self-compassion in order to tap into those stores of confidence and understanding that make you a better partner. Be kind to yourself, and try to see everything you do (the good and the bad) through the detached eyes of a third party.
We all make mistakes. And we all slip up and we all fall down sometimes. The true power in our humanity is how we recover from it and come back to build ourselves and our relationships anew. If you want to be a better spouse or loved one, try being a better version of yourself first. When you’re kind to yourself, that glow radiates out and permeates all your other relationships too, transforming the way you connect and bond with your environment.
Putting it all together…
Relationships can feel like riddles sometimes, and that’s especially true when we grow apart from our partners or lose our sense of empathy. Get back to “happy” and reconnect with your partner by re-establishing the bridges of compassion that once brought you both together. Only when we find our way back to understanding can we find our way back to balanced and healthy relationships; a process that requires commitment from all parties involved.
Start listening with intention and get interested in the life and perspective of your partner again. Actively engage in what they’re saying and don’t just listen to them eagerly for a chance to respond. Communicate kindly with one another and do it respectfully at all times. (Even when you’re, what? Angry.) We often lose the compassion we hold for our partners over impulsive statements and hurtful words we later regret. Always approach your other half with respect, and never let yourself fall to below-the-belt tactics. Appreciate one another and show that appreciation by nurturing your friendship, rather than your intimate relationship alone. The friendship we share with our partners is important, and we explore those friendships by creating safe spaces in which we can be ourselves and express ourselves.
