The Compassionate Instinct

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.