February 1999
EMPATHY
By Jeffrey Lance, Ph.D.
What does it feel like to be misunderstood when you are upset? What is it like when you are trying to explain your feelings to your spouse etc., and they interrupt or become defensive and really don’t hear what you are saying? All of us can relate to experiences like these and the feeling of frustration, anger, and aloneness we may feel in these situations.
After many years of doing marital and couples therapy, it has become clear to me that couples and individuals have great difficulty with listening deeply or understanding the inner emotional world of their partner or spouse. This lack of empathy and listening skills often leads couples to feel uncared for and unloved, leading to bickering, arguing, withdrawing, and escalating into feeling detached and distant from each other. This in turn makes it very difficult to problem solve and come to loving compromises with each other because of the animosity that is engendered. This leads to much unnecessary suffering in our relationships.
But why do we find it so hard to listen and empathize with each other’s experience? Largely this is due to the way in which we were responded to by our caregivers in the early developmental years of our lives, and to the modeling they showed in their relationships to each other, and the empathy they showed toward each other’s feelings and needs.
We were all born into the world a bundle of needs. If these needs were adequately met, in a loving way, positive emotional states, and feelings about ourselves and the world became part of our inner world. When our needs weren’t met adequately, we expressed our concern and distress by expressing our feelings about this. Our parents empathic attunement to our clues of distress, and their appropriate and timely response, nurtured and comforted our distress, due to their ability to feel for us (empathy).
Unfortunately, for many of us, our parents didn’t respond empathically, appropriately or timely to our distress due to their own blocked pain, feelings and needs. They themselves were defensive or oblivious to our pain and needs, and responded with anger, rejection, withdrawal, or not at all. This left us in a state of unbearable distress and psychic pain. In response to this pain we began to numb out and repress and deny our own awareness of our feelings and needs, since their was no enlightened witness to help us work through these painful and frightening experiences.
From these experiences we lose touch with our own needs and feelings, and the ability for our own empathy is severely affected. Late in life we find ourselves unconsciously searching for a loving and empathic partner, but tend to unconsciously pick someone who reminds us of the caregivers from whom we didn’t receive what we emotionally needed. We will then struggle with this person to get them to be for us the way we wish our caregivers had been originally. To be empathic and responsive to our needs and feelings, and listen empathically to our inner world. However, Our spouse and partner are unconsciously numbed and shut down from their own inner experience, and the defenses they build to survive emotionally early in their life now interfere with their ability to be empathically attuned to themselves and to us. In this way the pattern of empathic failure reoccurs in one generation after the other.
To free ourselves from this empathic numbness, we must first free ourselves from our own repression, and numbing to our own deepest feelings and needs, that have been blocked and defended against since our own early years. Only by finding in ourselves, and feeling empathy and compassion for our own numbed and hurting self, can we open to a deeper empathy and perception of the cues of our own children’s needs and feelings, as well as those of our partners and spouses. In this way we can break the isolation, numbing, and empathic failure of generations, and give our children, and each other, an emotional treasure that cannot be taken away.
As Alice Miller has so eloquently stated:
Experience has taught us that we have only one
enduring weapon in our struggle against mental
illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about
the unique history of our childhood.
Quoted from: The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self.
Dr. Lance is a psychotherapist in practice in Glendale. He is a member of the Independent Psychotherapy Network.
