Empathy is the ability to imagine (or understand) what someone else is experiencing in their life. Authentic empathy is a huge ingredient in a close and impactful relationship. But how do we develop empathy?

A quick Google search revealed pages and pages of tips for developing empathy, such as “Three steps to more empathy”, and “Do these twelve things to develop empathy.” If you want more steps than the one I’m going to talk about below, Google is your friend!

There is only one way that I know how empathy is developed: You have to practice it.

As with anything that doesn’t come naturally to us, we have to practice it. You’re not good writing with your non-dominant hand? The only way to become better is to practice writing with it.

Practice makes progress, not perfection.

Practice empathy in your car driving to work. Imagine the different stories that people are facing as they head into work. Try this: If someone cuts you off, or cuts in line, resist the finger or the outburst …instead, tell their story aloud. Perhaps they got a call that someone important to them is ill, or that their child was dropped off at the wrong bus stop. Those would be legit reasons to cut you off.

Practice with people that you don’t know. Ask them questions that will help you understand what challenges they are facing.

Read a novel. Studies have shown that reading fiction exercises our empathy muscles as we get to look inside a character’s experiences that isn’t a threat to our own ego. (As an aside, the Ego is enemy of empathy. The two with fight against each other)

Your empathy muscle needs exercise. Exercise it to become empathically strong so that when you need it the most, you’ve got it.

When we empathize we put our egos aside and share the space with equally important people. We’re all on this same planet, trying to do our best, working things out in our odd ways often times bumping or crashing into one another along the way. It’s messy, but it’s good.

Empathy makes space for everyone in the mess. How can you practice empathy today?

If you want to be in relationships, you have to learn how to do conflict. One of my mentors, Dan Allender, says it well: “All good communication leads to conflict.” Most of us believe that good communication will lead to consensus, not conflict.

Some experts estimate that over 70% of communication is non-verbal. This means that it’s nearly impossible to not communicate. We may not be communicating well, but we’re always communicating. Even if we’ve left the presence of a relationship, we are still communicating something in our leaving.

Conflict is the result of good “transmitting” (communication) of differing messages.

The word “conflict” comes from the Latin word confligere which means “to strike together.”

Notice this doesn’t say “to strike against each other.” The reason a lot of people, myself included, are afraid of conflict is because it usually feels like a “strike against” not a “strike together.” Unfortunately, avoiding conflict is only going to make it stronger the next time we face it.

Good communication that leads to conflict and then reconciliation is the foundation of a strong relationships. Communication that leads to unresolved conflict after unresolved conflict is what weakens relationships. This idea applies to all relationships: friends, spouse, family, work, professional, doctor, etc.

If you want better relationships, you have to become better at striking together, not against. Start with how you communicate. Instead of communicating to receive something, try communicating to give something of care to someone you love. That might be the conflict that turns things around.

When we talk about ourselves or others as being “broken,” we begin to treat them like an object to be fixed, not a Subject to be known.

We are people with stories and souls, not an object to be used.

Objects are made to do things. A vase holds flowers. A dishwasher cleans dishes. Scissors are made to cut. Chairs don’t care how you use them. When an object breaks, we attempt to fix and get it back into the original working order. If we can’t fix it, we get rid of it.

When we apply this principle of “fixing” onto people’s lives (others or ourselves), we treat them like an object. Like there is something wrong with them until they are fixed and put back together. And if we can’t fix them? Discard.

You can’t fix a broken heart.

You can’t go back in time and undo what’s been done.

You can’t discard the agony of death without severing part of yourself.

These wounds we experience are often the birthplace of passion and purpose for our lives. Objects can’t heal, because they are not alive.

When wounds heal, the story is a beacon of hope for others. Just visit any cancer floor at a hospital or a 12-step support group, you’ll see this in living color. That which is painful is most universal.

The great philosopher Tow Mater from the movie Cars said his dents were too valuable to get rid of because he got them from spending time with his best friend Lightning McQueen. “I don’t fix these. I wanna remember these dents forever.”

What dents in your life need healing?

Some people will ask (aka demand) that you jump through certain hoops to prove that you are sincere, loyal, or committed to them. These requests come from very insecure or threatened people, and are done so to control and manipulate you. The problem is that early on in the relationship the requests are never overt enough to be a seen as demanding or controlling.

When you don’t jump through these hoops (perhaps causing some kind of ego hurt to the other), you’ll likely be shamed, sometimes with some spiritual/emotional abuse thrown in there such as “A follower of Jesus would be moved to apologize…”

Don’t make the mistake of automatically believing that the other person wants what’s best for you, or actually knows you enough to understand why you’re acting or reacting the way you are.

If you cause damage to their ego, other shaming statements might be made about you to try and get you to fall back into line and into submission. A statement like: “Any decent human being would have an empathic response to the feelings that someone was hurt.”

What this statement does is that it causes confusion and self-doubt, because there is truth in it! A decent human should have empathy to someone being hurt … unless that hurt is being weaponized. Then it is wise to hold empathy at bay so as to not be in danger of the attack.

Above all, the one with an insecure and fragile ego is going to attach themself to someone willing to give themselves away to those in need. In our youth, this is beautiful and redemptive and is a great picture of filling in each others gaps. But if the gaps in the relationship are only filled because you’re jumping through hoops … then perhaps it’s not a relationship worth all that much.

I think this is why the book, “The Giving Tree”, is so profound. It can be read two ways: Either an amazing picture of sacrificial love; or a picture of codependency and taking advantage of someone.

Or maybe it’s both.

At the end of the day, don’t give your self to people who won’t care unless you do everything their way (hoops). Learn to say no and learn how to suffer the awkward social (or family) gatherings that happen afterwards. It will get easier with time

.

The next time you find yourself in conflict with your spouse, take your shoes off. Seriously.

Conflict in your marriage is holy ground. It’s where our life story shows up at a primal, non-verbal level.

Our bodies remember things our words can’t describe. We offer silence and respect when entering a place of reverence. Conflict is this place of reverence.

Taking your shoes off puts your feet in bare contact with the physical ground, and terrain. You’re more sensitive to what you’re walking on without your shoes. You will walk slower, with more caution. If you are aware of it, this practice will help you to be more sensitive to what you’re wading into emotionally with yourself, and your spouse.

Do I belong is more of a question for ourselves to answer than it is for others. It’s a problem when we only ask this of others. If I ask my wife “do I belong” and her answer determines my mood for the day, I’ve given her too much power.

Perhaps I’ve caught her on a bad day, or on a day that I’m in the dog house because of something I’ve done or left undone. So to give her the sole power to answer this question wholly is unfair to her, and to me. I need to be able to accept my own belonging to humanity, this planet, the community I live in, the places I go, my workplace, profession, and so forth and so on.

If my posture towards these aspects of belonging is “I’m not sure that I belong, will you tell me if I belong or not?” It gives the other too much authority to tell me if I fit into their wish for me, and let’s face it, don’t we all of wishes for other people?

Sometimes these wishes are for the good of the other, sometimes for ill. So why would we subject ourselves to the possible wish for ill from another person? The answer to this question has to do with your story.

What we know about human development is that the mother, often the primary nurturer, reflects back to the baby their identity. Babies are bon without self-identity. They are a blank slate. Now sure, they have genetic dispositions, personality traits that have yet to be developed, but fundamentally the infant is unknown as a unique individual. The infant develops their sense of self and the world around them through their mothers face.

When mom is upset and frowns at the infant, the infant is distressed. She believes herself to be the cause of the frown. She does not know mom just got a difficult phone call. She only knows the feeling of stress as a feeling that showed up when mom looked at her. Conversely, when mom smiles at her, she believes that there must be something good about herself.

This feels good to infants, and lets be honest, to all humans. So back to the question about subjecting ourselves to the ill wishes of another. Sometimes in our story there exists an experience where mother took out her own feelings of ill wishes on the infant. Perhaps this occurred during breastfeeding. The infant, unable to control their own bodily impulses, bites mother while being fed. The natural instinct of mom is to wince in pain and withdraw so as to protect herself, and her body.

Two things happen here. One, mom winces and withdraws. Baby sees this take place and internalizes the experience that she must have done something bad. Secondly, mom now has a choice. She either reengages with baby to forgive, or she will punish the baby for the bite.

This story now begins to create a “sliding door” type moment for the baby (if you haven’t seen the movie “Sliding Doors”, check it out. Through the concept of a “parallel universe”, the movie explores how vastly different life can be if we did or did not experience a significant event). If the mother reengages with the baby, forgives the bite, the baby is soothed and can now learn that biting is painful, but not so painful to break the relationship. If the mother doesn’t forgive, and withdraws, perhaps even scolding the baby for biting, the baby internalizes the feeling that her bite, uncontrollable by her, is bad and it severs relationship with mom.

The baby cannot understand why mom withdraws except that it must be because she herself is unworthy of love. She only belongs to mom when she behaves properly. Her acceptance is conditional. Now fast forward 30 years and the baby is a single woman looking for a partner. Without any healing of her identity wounds, how likely will this woman be able to manage rejection, being ignored, or the blank stare of a man who doesn’t know what to say? Not very likely. Though no fault of hers, she now believes her belonging to the world is conditional.

Love is not to be trusted because “bites” happen, sometimes still uncontrollably by her. On the flip side, if mom forgives the bite and reengages with the baby, now there is a feeling of acceptance despite painful accidents. She belongs even when she does something that isn’t right.

Even when she makes a mistake. Fast forward 30 years and the baby is a single woman looking for a partner. She’s capable of handling difficulties in intimate relationships because repair was a building block her mother taught her.

This question of “do I belong” began at birth. It continues into adulthood, and it informs all of the relationships that we engage in. When there is doubt about belonging, we will struggle to be present in our relationships. Especially intimate ones. We will have difficulty trusting others. We will have difficulty trusting ourselves. And we will struggle to maintain stability in intimate relationships. As you and your spouse interact, you are both asking each other this question of belonging. It is vitally important that you answer this question over and over and over again.

Tell her you chose her. Tell him that you would choose him again. Give to the other what you most want to hear. Drown each other in gratitude for belonging to each other. Leave no doubt at the end of the day that you belong together.

One of the greatest tragedies of our Western culture is that we too readily believe that salvation is found in our individualism. In our autonomy from the world. Let your marriage be a protest agains this. Resist temptations to serve yourself alone.

Give yourself over to belonging to another person.

When we were kids, my siblings and I would always fight over who got the toy out of the cereal box. It became a sly game of determining where the toy was inside the bag without pulling the bag out of the box or in digging around inside. There were rules our parents setup to keep things fair (which in a family with 6 kids is next to impossible).

No using a bowl the size of the sink.
No digging around in the bag of cereal.
No cereal at night.

There was sheer joy when you’d be the one to pour the toy into your bowl! This was supposed to be the only legit way of gaining possession (It will come as no surprise to hear that we found ways around that idea).

For a lot of us, marriages start out like a pursuit of that toy. We find ways to be together. We spend time crafting ideas and ways to be creative in our pursuit of the prize.

We get euphoric and that incredible rush when we finally get what we’ve been pursuing. And sometimes once we’ve gotten what we want, we often don’t really know what to do with it. So much of life is about anticipation, the pursuit, and the chase; and marriage is no different.

A couple I was recently counseling highlighted this dynamic. They explained how much coasting they had done in their relationship. Almost 18 years later they woke up to realize how much distance there was between them.

The husband explained that his wife needed a secret decoder ring to interpret all of his jumbled communication. She, of course, did not have that ring and thus their communication was stagnant. He gave up trying to find a decoder ring realizing that it might work once, but wouldn’t work the same way the next time she communicated something.

It was true for them, and will be for many other marriages: Without persistent work, couples will eventually lead separate lives. In the 20+ years I’ve been working with couples, I’ve seen that it doesn’t take much to throw off the equilibrium of a relationship.

It’s easy to understand that a disabled family member, death of a child, or the loss of work could be highly disruptive to a relationship.

But those are not the real cancers of relationships.

The real cancers are the unspoken everyday fouls made with one another that do not get the attention they need.

Effort is something we reserve for what is most valuable and precious in our lives. My guess is that if someone were to visit the homes of a stale or cancerous relationship, they would see television, social media, work, and kids as the main areas that the majority of effort is spent.

Rarely do I interact with couples where I hear of regular consistent time spent together away from the easy distractions of life. This is true at my office, but also in my own social circles. The sad truth is that couples just don’t spend enough time together needed to sustain their relationship.

Sure, it’d be lovely to have a secret decoder ring to find out what the other person is really saying. Unfortunately, this ring would make the relationship worse. No one wants to be in a relationship with someone who’s always right, or who knows all the answers. This would feel more akin to a relationship between a child and parent than that of a marriage. The old adage is true: We get out of life what we put into it. If you put nothing into marriage, you’ll likely get nothing in return.

The word “comfort” comes from the Latin word which means “strengthen greatly.” We use this word to describe relief from distress more so than strength in our distress.

In Western culture, the majority of us have a plethora of “things” that are comfortable. Comfort food. Comfortable shoes. A comfy sweatshirt. Comfortable friendships. Comfortable habits. Comfortable life.

For so many of us, the pursuit of comfort is not producing great strength. Sometimes comfort is not what we need. Sometimes we need discomfort that creates the opportunity to grow, or to become strong.

Discomfort is not typically on our menu of options we gleefully chose for our lives. Yet it is the discomfort that moves us to change, or causes us to do something different with our lives.

I ran across an article about a chess player (Adam Robinson) who was in a chess development program for teens. He spoke of playing against Bobby Fischer (one of the greatest chess players in history). In playing Bobby, he would usually lose. It was this short paragraph that struck me:

“As young teen I played thousands of speed games (each side 5 minutes) with Bobby Fischer, the greatest chess player in history. If he got edge early (and my defeat obvious) I’d resign on spot to play again. Bobby stopped me once and said “Don’t resign. You have to learn how to play bad positions.”

Think about what he just said for a moment. Some could argue that chess is just a game, but I think this quote shows that it’s way more than that. “You have to learn how to play bad positions.”

That is the story of life. It’s not always going to go well for you, and if you always resign when it doesn’t go well, you’ll be way better at quitting than you will at succeeding. I love to play golf, and it often happens that when I hit a bad shot (or many bad shots), it takes a lot of emotional and mental work to change the measure of success.

Learning to struggle is just as much a process as it is in learning to win. Most don’t struggle well because they’ve never learned it (and/or never been taught). Don’t resign. Don’t give up. Struggle well. Playing from a bad position can teach us valuable lessons about life that grows our capacity for success. What is it that you’ve been too easily giving up on that you need to struggle with and change your definition of success?

Many times it is our comforts that keep us from becoming who God created us to be.

Yesterday I wrote about why couples need to keep dating after they marry. Sometimes it’s been so long since a couple has had a meaningful conversation, they’ve forgotten how to do so.

When I say “forgotten” I don’t mean that they (or you, if this describes your relationship) don’t know how to talk together. It’s that they don’t have the memory together of a conversation going well. Perhaps conversations lead to the fights, and thus they avoid talking to keep from fighting.

Regardless of the need, The 15-minute date is a great solution to kick-start a quiet relationship, guide a difficult conflict, or promote healthy boundaries in conversation.

This short-and-sweet fifteen minutes is structured so that both husband and wife get a chance to talk and listen. (The biggest problem in most marriages is not about communicating, it’s about listening). Both need to talk, and both need to listen.

So here’s how the date works. It’s broken up into three 5-minute segments:

• Speaking

• Reflecting

• Responding

SPEAKING
The person who asks for the date get’s to speak first. They get the floor to speak about whatever they need to for 5 minutes. Set a timer and hold to the boundary of this time. The listener is to listen only, no talking.

REFLECTING
At the end of the 5 minutes, restart the clock and the listener is allowed to ask follow up questions, and reflect back what they heard (not the interpretation) the speaker say. This is space is still about the speaker, and their needs.

RESPONDING
For the final 5 minutes, the listener gets a chance to respond to what has been said, what has not been said, and to offer any feedback or conciliatory ideas to the original speaker.

At the end of the fifteen minutes, stop the dialogue and let it rest. Take at least 15 minutes to let what has been said and what has been heard to metabolize. If you’re in a good place to revisit the topic, ask to see if the other is open to revisiting.

Guidelines for the date:

• The best time and place for this date is when distractions are at a minimum.

• No screens, kids, books, or music.

• Try to do it in a private setting.

• Use caution if either is Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired (Acronym for HALT).

• Start with something positive about the other person, or the relationship.

• Seek to end the date with peace and kindness.

Most relationships I encounter in my office are suffering from a lack of trust. I think everyone is asking the question, “can I trust you to do right by me?” By the time most have arrived in counseling, the answer to that question is probably a “I’m not sure” or an emphatic “no, I can’t.”

Think of trust like the gas you put into your vehicle … you’re not getting very far if you don’t have it. Here are a few thoughts on how to build trust in your relationships at work, home, and with your self (if you don’t trust yourself to do the right thing, likely no one else will either).

1. Follow through.
   Let your yes be yes, and your no, no. If/when you’re unable to follow through, proactively own it and explain why if asked.
   

2. Delay gratification.
   Learn to wait and be patient. Just because you can get something doesn’t mean that it’s best to do so right away. Having the ability to wait will be a great attribute when the time comes when you have to wait.

3. Tell the truth.
   Don’t run a PR campaign with those you care about. Don’t lie. Don’t shade/justify the truth. Speak the truth for the sake of growth, yours and theirs.

4. Own your mistakes.
   When you mess up, own it. Don’t explain it. Don’t piggy back on why your mistake was a result of their mistake. Your intentions don’t matter unless the other person cares or asks about why you did what you did.

5. Make amends.
   Become proficient at apologizing. Correct the mistakes you can, and accepting your limitations when you can’t. True amends are life changing interactions, for everyone involved.
   

6. Use your powers for good.
   Your words have the power to build and to destroy. Your choices can bless and they can curse. Your unique abilities can be a gift and they can be a burden. Offer to help the other person grow, don’t demand or require them to grow.

When men seek help in addressing the issues with their porn use, many times their wives do not seek their own help. While there are a myriad of questions that come up regarding porn use, I often hear wives ask questions like: “Do we need to have more sex?”, “Why am I not enough for him?” or “Why can’t he stop?” Here are the 4 things women need to know about their husbands porn use:

1. It’s not about you.

Porn is almost always something that is brought into marriage. I can only think of a few instances over the past 15 years of working with couples when porn use first started after marriage. This is not about the wife “being good enough” and more about the man’s inability to have an intimate and close relationships with a women (or it’s an outright addiction). Porn is easy because it requires nothing from a man beyond what his body is naturally designed to do.

It is difficult for a man to develop a healthy view of women that is apart from the notion that women are sex objects. Over and over again the modern culture tells us that women are sex objects. It’s why so many men are unable to have close relationships with their daughters as they go through puberty — it’s difficult to see a woman as anything other than an object. They don’t want to view their daughters sexually, so they distance themselves emotionally. Porn perverts and distorts the reality of a woman’s value and thus he cannot have a true understanding of your value either. Perhaps his distance from you emotionally or sexually is actually a good thing so that you too do not become just an object in his life.

2. Porn use is about shame.

The bottom line is this: Shame is at the core of porn use. Shame says “I’m not enough” which can easily be felt sexually and non-sexually alike. Porn use causes shame, but the real challenge is that it promises an escape from shame. Men can use porn and fantasy as a way to “be enough” for the fantasy on the screen. The porn stars never reject the men. They always tell the viewer, “yes, yes, yes, whatever you want.” The cycle starts over when a man needs to be enough, and can’t get that in the real world, so he resorts back to the fantasy world. Porn can become the only place where he feels potent, and in that there is tremendous shame because he probably feels so impotent in the real world.

Shame doesn’t last very long in an environment with grace and empathy. But here’s the problem: Wives often can’t give the gift of grace and empathy to their husbands because of their own stories. These young women have been sexually abused (to varying degrees) and they have their own wounded sexuality. Without doing her own work of recovery and healing, she will not be able to offer empathy and acceptance because the husbands use of porn will always make him like “all the others who have harmed me.” This is why it is so important for the wife to tend to her own work so that she can know how to be in relationship with her husband without enabling or shaming him.

3. Having more sex can cause more harm.

This is a delicate topic as withholding sex can be harmful just as the use of porn is. Some errant advice given to wives of porn addicts is that they need to make themselves more available sexually and this will keep the husband from acting-out. This is awful advice because it invites the fantasy life of porn into the marriage bed, and says that the wife’s lack of sexual availability is reason for the man’s acting out with porn. If someone gives you this advice, run away.

Women do not need to be more sexual for their husband to keep him from fulfilling his needs elsewhere. This is enabling behavior. Most would not want an affair partner in their marriage bed with them, but this is exactly what the advice to “become more sexual for him” is doing. It’s bringing a fractured sense of intimacy into a sacred space meant to be shared only between husband and wife.

There needs to be hard work and conversations about the harm that porn has caused in a relationship before sex can be trusted as an expression of love and commitment. This does not mean that couples need to stop having sex altogether if porn is present, rather that the purposes of sex be talked about, perhaps with professional help, to establish healthy boundaries. Do not limit sex as a form of punishment or control, and do not give in to having more sex just to make things better.

4. Porn use is cheating.

Though men are resistant in accepting this, porn use is an affair. It is taking the most trusted and vulnerable act that a couple can share together, and giving it away to someone else. Yes, it’s kind of a “one-way” relationship as the images provide no relational feedback, but it is still taking the sexual embrace outside of the marriage bed.

All affairs are a result of a breakdown of trust and intimacy. All affairs are a passive “screw you” stance towards the spouse that says “you won’t give me what I want, so I am going to go get that from somewhere else.” Instead of working out the issues of the relationship in the context of the relationship, fulfillment of sexual needs are being done outside the marriage. That is the very definition of cheating.

Don’t go at this alone. Get help even if your husband won’t. It’s not an easy topic to address, but it’s not impossible to heal from. Be patient, take your time, and work hard to find a path forward towards wholeness, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

(For some sobering statistics about porn, check out http://www.covenanteyes.com/pornstats/)

Subscribe now