“To love at all is to be vulnerable.” – C.S. Lewis
As I have discussed in my previous two articles here and here, Brené Brown’s Rising Strong Process helps us move through conflict and emotions. Our final step is one of the most impactful ways we relate to our spouse: empathy. But giving or receiving empathy first requires vulnerability. We experience vulnerability when we face uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure (Brown, 2007).
In our marriages, vulnerability can be felt by both partners. It is sometimes a last resort after trying every other comfortable, non-emotionally exposed way to solve a conflict (Brown, Rising Strong, 2017). Vulnerability is scary, but when we respond in empathy we say “I can hear this. This is hard or uncomfortable for me, but I can sit here with you and hear your story.” (Brown, 2007)
Steps to Empathy (Brown, 2007):
Being able to see the world as others see it
Being nonjudgmental
Understanding another person’s feelings
Communicating your understanding of that person’s feelings
When we are truly empathetic, we allow a safe physical and emotional space for our spouse to open up. When a spouse is confident their feelings and fears will be met with understanding and love, it is easier for them to share. That is why vulnerability is the pathway to empathy; “sharing our stories allows us the opportunity to connect and experience empathy” (Brown, 2007) – especially from our spouse.
If you find vulnerability or empathy is new territory, be honest. Say “I know this is hard for you to tell me, but it is also hard for me to hear. Can we go slowly?” Or perhaps ask for the conversation to happen in more than one sitting.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Expressing empathy can be more difficult for men because it includes being vulnerable. Because of societal gender norms, showing emotions in this way can be viewed as weak. Gus Worland, founder of Man Up (a nonprofit in Australia), is determined to educate about the risks of men staying silent – assuring them that to truly “man up,” is to share. Wives, if this is something your husband struggles with, encourage and assure him that there is strength in vulnerability. But also seek to be patient and meet him where he is.
“If we judge ourselves harshly and are incapable or unwilling to acknowledge our emotions, we can struggle in our relationships with others. We have to know and accept ourselves before we can know and accept others.” (Brown, 2007) We can encourage our spouses and help them learn to be empathetic, but don’t push them where they are not ready. As much as we hope to receive empathy from our spouse, also be sure to extend empathy to your spouse. Those who both give and receive empathy are more resilient in relationships. (Brown, 2007)
If you are having a hard time understanding what empathy is in real terms, watch this animated video (we’ve shared this before, but it’s a really good one!).
Photo by Christina Rivers on Unsplash
Misconceptions about empathy
How can I be empathetic if I didn’t experience the same things?
We may not know what it is like to be a black woman in an all-white law firm, but we most likely can relate to feeling left out, alone or belittled. The key to empathy is to hone in on the emotion, not necessarily the situational details. (Brown, 2007) “Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” (Brown, 2007)
Love, then fix.
Some spouses really like to fix things, and sometimes their partner just wants to be listened to. (Like with this nail.) For the partner seeking empathy, recognize that while your partner may not always be able to name or understand how you are feeling, the fact that they are reaching out to fix the problem indicates that they see your pain and want to ease it. Meet your spouse where they are, and appreciate any help. Also help them understand that offering empathy first may make someone more receptive to help. For the partner seeking to fix, try slowing down, listening, and asking your partner when they share, “are you wanting me to help you find solutions right now, or are you just wanting empathy?”
Does it excuse behavior?
To show understanding is not to condone. Empathy is the right path towards positive change because it helps us know that we are more than our mistakes. It says, “you are not alone in your struggles, and we are in this together.”
Photo by Justin Groep on Unsplash
In the same way that empathy is the antidote to shame, lack of empathy often results in shame. Not just guilt, but shame. Guilt sounds like “I made a mistake” and shame sounds like “I am a mistake.” While shame does not motivate change, guilt is a very strong motivator (Brown, 2007). In a recent longitudinal study, 380 5th graders were measured in their proneness for shame. At age 18, those with just guilt-proneness predicted less delinquency, while those who were shame-prone were more likely to have unprotected sex, use illegal drugs and had more involvement in the criminal justice system (Stuewig, 2016). When we use shame as a motivator for behavioral change, it will have lasting negative effects. “How can we apologize for something we are, rather than something we did?” (Lerner, 2001) Shame defines us, but guilt is only part of us. Empathy can give us the confidence and support to positively change without shame.
It can be easy to confuse sympathy and empathy. Empathy is having the courage to reach across the world to understand someone else. Sympathy is when we look at others from our side of the world and feel sorry for them (Brown, 2007). We see their hurt and say “I’m sorry that this happened to you, but let’s be clear; I am over here and you are over there.” (Brown, 2007) Sympathy exacerbates shame and is about separation rather than compassion and connection.
Sympathy-seeking
When someone else is seeking sympathy, it can be easy to spot: “Feel sorry for me because I’m the only one this is happening to” or “my situation is worse than yours!” People seeking sympathy are not looking for empathy or connection, but rather for confirmation of their uniqueness. (Brown, 2007)This can feel like a no-win situation, especially in marriage. “One the one hand they are telling us they have it worse than anyone…. But they are [still] looking for our validation…which rarely produces real connections.” (Brown, 2007)
However, sympathy-seeking can be hard to spot in ourselves—especially in marital conflict. To combat this, ask yourself what you seek when you open up: connection or confirmation of uniqueness? It can be easy to resort to sympathy-seeking because both require sharing. We use the guise of vulnerability to disconnect. Sympathy-seeking is usually about over-sharing or making a spectacle of ourselves and not vulnerability. True “vulnerability is not live-tweeting your bikini wax. Vulnerability is about trust, intimacy, and connection. We share with people who have earned the right to hear the story.” (Oprah.com) And hopefully, that is your spouse.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Empathy in Marriage
Empathy can be especially difficult in marriage as we often have different perspectives – especially due to gender differences and families of origin. In my case, opposites attract. I am from the west coast; my husband is from the east coast. Despite our similarities, differences in our background can cause problems. We come from different life views and family experiences. This is where we have to be wary of sympathy-seeking and other disconnection tactics because of differences between spouses.
But I think this is also why empathy can also be so powerful in a marriage. When we can truly show love and step into another person’s shoes, we show our dedication to loving our spouse through understanding and listening. Women especially find more satisfaction in marriage when there is more empathy (Waldinger, 2004).
Revolution
The final step of the Rising Strong process is Revolution. It gives us a new vision of what is possible. When we can dig into our stories, personal and shared, we can make way for more authenticity, learning, wisdom, and bravery because of our vulnerabilities and “dark emotions” (Platek, 2018). And we can find power when we foster empathy in our marriages.
“Every human must be able to view the self as complex and multidimensional. When this fact is obscured, people wrap themselves in layers of denial in order to survive.” (Lerner, 2001) But “to love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to keep it intact, you must give it to no one.” (Lewis, 1960)
When we do not share ourselves we lose the chance to experience empathy (Brown, 2007). When we do not share with our spouses, we lose the chance to be fully loved and to love fully. We miss the chance to share every complex, multidimensional, broken, uncivilized, messy, beautifully human part of ourselves. Love is about vulnerability; you could get hurt, or you could be healed. Each step of the Rising Strong process can be terrifying, but it can also be transforming. Have the courage to connect through all of it—and Rise Strong together.
Practice perspective-taking by looking at the people around you and giving them a story. Where are they from? What are their favorite foods, hobbies, friends? What do their realtionships look like? What kinds of struggles have they been through? What do they have in common with you? Really get inside their heads and their lives! This exercise will hopefully help you to better understand that everyone has a story. When we seek to understand the stories of those around us, we will better be able to empathize and love them.
Brown, B. (2017). Rising Strong. New York: Random House.
Jeffrey Stuewig, J. P. (2016). Children’s Proness to Shame and Guilt Predict Risky and Illegal Behaviors in Young Adulthood. Child Psychiatry Human Development , 217-227.
Lerner, H. (2001). The Dance of Connection: How to talk to someone when you’re mad, hurt, angry, scared, frustrated, insulted, betrayed or desperate. New York: Harper Collins.
Waldinger, R. (2004). Reading Others’ Emotions: The Role of Intuitive Judgements in Predicting Marital Satisfaction, Quality, and Stability. Journal of Family Psychology , 58-71.
*The Healthy Humans Project is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases. Thank you so much for supporting our efforts to improve relationships!
Melissa discovered her talent for writing in her freshman writing class at BYU. She graduated with a degree in Family Life and then attended Le Cordon Bleu to pursue her dream of baking wedding cakes. After three years of professional baking, she hung up her apron to be a stay at home mom. She lives in Las Vegas with her husband and twin toddlers. She has since rekindled her love of writing and finds time to write while caring for her children. Melissa has a passion for sharing her knowledge and experiences with other women, to empower them to be their best selves. She writes about faith, family, love and relationships with the occasional baking metaphor.
In my article last month I talked about how the Rising Strong process can be beneficial for navigating marital conflict. Today we are going to explore common roadblocks to reckoning with emotions.
To reckon is “to narrate or to make an account.” We need to be able to talk about our feelings. That requires acknowledging them. This is typically more difficult for men, but it is by no means reserved for one gender. All of us can resort to poor coping when dealing with difficult emotions. But with the Rising Strong Process, if we deny our stories and our feelings, “they don’t go away; instead, they own us, and they define us.” (Brown, 2015) If we continue to deny the story, we cannot defy the ending.
How it affects marriage
The way most people respond to difficult emotions is to avoid them. Some offload, turning “I failed” into “I am a failure,” causing them to feel shame and disengage further. Others steamroll, choosing to be upset with their spouse, rather than owning a mistake that caused hurt or embarrassment. Silence, brooding and resentment, is an effort to escape criticism and can become withdrawal, both emotional and physical. Withdrawal can quickly turn into stonewalling — one of John Gottman’s Four Horsemen of Divorce. Rather than engage in the difficult emotions, we disengage, leave the room, and refuse to deal with it. This is a more common reaction for men (Gottman, 1999).
It can be easy to assume that when a spouse disengages or withdraws from you it’s because they do not care. But in reality, it is often a cue that they are unable to reckon with their emotions.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Emotional Curiosity
The first part of reckoning is acknowledgment. The second is curiosity. Curiosity can be the most difficult part. “Curiosity is the feeling of deprivation we experience when we identify and focus on a gap in our knowledge (Brown, 2015).” It can help us to connect two separate experiences or ideas. But the important part is to realize that, “we have to have some level of knowledge or awareness before we can get curious.”
In my opinion, this can be one of the largest stumbling blocks for engaging in the reckoning. Many of us were taught to not place value in emotions, only logic. We were told emotions or crying are signs of weakness. Or we were never taught to deal with or even talk about our emotions, much less connect how they affect thoughts and behaviors. These are all keys to emotional curiosity. (Brown, 2015)
Fear is the number one reason we do not act. Feeling emotions can be uncomfortable or awkward. We worry what others will think. Vulnerability is new and uncertainty is scary. We don’t know what we might find if we dive deeper. So “we self-protect—choosing certainty over curiosity, armor over vulnerability, and knowing over learning.” (Brown, 2015) Instead of facing the emotion, we off-load.
Common ways we off-load emotions:
Avoidance: A new study worries that the popular “trigger warning” on college campuses actually fosters a culture of avoidance (Flaherty, 2019), communicates to students that they are fragile and unable to cope (Sanson, 2019) and that we can actually increase our suffering by avoiding it. (Platek, 2018)
Not acknowledging vulnerability: Studies have shown that our ability to recognize a vulnerability to a diagnosis, or acceptance of one, greatly increases our chances of adhering to a positive health regime. (Aiken, et al., 2012)
Teapot emotions: We stuff them down, and one day they reach a boiling point and everyone knows it (Brown, 2015).
Stockpiling hurt: We force it down so much that it begins to affect our bodies. Sleep issues, anxiety, or depression can be the first symptoms of emotions manifesting in the body (van der Kolk, 2015)
The fear of high-centering: You recognize the emotions but don’t walk into them for fear of it dislodging something and affecting you in a way you don’t like.
Anger: Road rage and sports are socially acceptable ways to deal with pain, especially for men.
Bouncing hurt: “Whatever, I don’t care.” It’s easier to bounce it off ourselves. We become stoic or deflect with humor and cynicism (Brown, 2015).
Numbing hurt: Rather than lean into pain, we numb with alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, shopping, planning, perfectionism, food, Netflix, or even staying busy. We hide the hurt so that our feelings can’t catch up with us. This can numb the good in the process (Brown, 2015).
Photo by the hk photo company on Unsplash
Miriam Greenspan, Psychotherapist, and author of Healing through Dark Emotions, addresses a societal issue:
“Despite our fear, [we want] to feel these emotional energies, because they are the juice of life. When we suppress or diminish our emotions, we feel deprived. So we watch horror movies, and so-called reality shows like Fear Factor. We seek out emotional intensity vicariously, because when we are emotionally numb, we need a great deal of stimulation to feel something, anything. So emotional pornography provides the stimulation, but it only ersatz emotion—it doesn’t teach us anything about ourselves or the world.” (Brown, 2015)
She explains the positive benefits of all emotions:
“People don’t mind feeling joy and happiness. The dark emotions are much harder. Fear, grief, and despair are uncomfortable and are seen as signs of personal failure. In our culture, we call them “negative” and think of them as “bad.” I prefer to call these emotions “dark,” because I like the image of a rich, fertile, dark soil from which something unexpected can bloom. Also we keep them “in the dark” and tend not to speak about them. We privatize them and don’t see the ways in which they are connected to the world. But the dark emotions are inevitable. They are part of the universal human experience and are certainly worthy of our attention. They bring us important information about ourselves and the world and can be vehicles of profound transformation.” (Platek, 2018)
One of the biggest reasons that uncertainty in emotion is so hard is because it often means we have to change. Something in our life or in our relationship needs shifting and transforming. This is a big part of the Rising Strong process — change coming as a result of something difficult or uncomfortable. And that is often the hardest part. Sitting in our emotions can be hard, but moving past them to be better is very difficult, too.
For more strategies from Miriam Greenspan for working through emotions, see the full article here. This recent HHP article has similar sentiments. This is also a great one about emotional range.
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
So, what’s next?
Vulnerability in marriage creates opportunity for bonding, but it can also create hurt. It takes courage. When we can create a safe place for our spouse to bloom from those dark emotions, we can transform our marriages.
We just need to change the way we deal with them.
In the same way we need to own our stories while in conflict as I addressed in my first article, we need to give ourselves and our spouses space for the difficult emotions as we experience the reckoning. If your spouse is dealing with deep emotions, take a step back and realize that shame can change people’s actions, and that it is their story, not yours.
We naturally want to connect with others, but “when we feel shame … we are more likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors, to attack or humiliate others.” (Brown, 2007)
While feeling shame, we are actually desperate for belonging. That is exactly the time that you need to show your spouse you still love them, that you are staying put and you are strong enough to deal with their dark emotions. The antidotes to shame are compassion and connection. (Brown, 2007)
Be patient. Express love, encourage and appreciate them. The key is to create a safe space where they are allowed to explore those feelings without fear. Give them space if needed. Empathy is also crucial. I will be exploring empathy more in my final article.
There are some great resources available to help.
See this emotion wheel for ideas of more emotive words.
See this video about Permission slips, a strategy to allow emotions in.
Learn about tactile breathing, a method soldiers use in tense situations to calm and center themselves (Brown, 2015).
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
Conclusion
The Reckoning can often be the hardest part of the Rising Strong Process. Leaning into emotions is far more difficult than avoiding them. Brené uses the term reckoning for this process because “in navigation, the term reckoning, as in dead reckoning, is the process of calculating where you are. To do that, you have to know where you’ve been and what factors influenced how you got to where you are now. Without reckoning, you can’t chart a future course.” (Brown, 2015)
Just as Miriam Greenspan encourages, when we can deal with our dark emotions, suffering can lead to deeper connection, more compassion, and foster resilience and transformation (Platek, 2018). We can allow suffering to expand our minds to make room for rebirth. We can gain power because of emotions— to heal and to change our endings. We can be powerful and courageous— in our lives and in our marriages.
This week, consciously make time to practice identifying your own emotions. Set an alarm on your phone every day to remind you to pause, notice how you are feeling, and name the emotions you are experiencing.
References
Aiken, L. S., Gerend, M. A., Jackson, K. M., & Ranby, K. W. (2012). Subjective risk and health-protective behavior: Prevention and early detection. In A. Baum, T. A. Revenson, & J. Singer (Eds.), Handbook of health psychology (pp. 113-145). New York, NY, US: Psychology Press.
*The Healthy Humans Project is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases. Thank you so much for supporting our efforts to improve relationships!
Melissa discovered her talent for writing in her freshman writing class at BYU. She graduated with a degree in Family Life and then attended Le Cordon Bleu to pursue her dream of baking wedding cakes. After three years of professional baking, she hung up her apron to be a stay at home mom. She lives in Las Vegas with her husband and twin toddlers. She has since rekindled her love of writing and finds time to write while caring for her children.
Melissa has a passion for sharing her knowledge and experiences with other women, to empower them to be their best selves. She writes about faith, family, love and relationships with the occasional baking metaphor.
Practice perspective-taking by looking at the people around you and giving them a story. Where are they from? What are their favorite foods, hobbies, friends? What do their realtionships look like? What kinds of struggles have they been through? What do they have in common with you? Really get inside their heads and their lives! This exercise will hopefully help you to better understand that everyone has a story. When we seek to understand the stories of those around us, we will better be able to empathize and love them.
Melissa discovered her talent for writing in her freshman writing class at BYU.
