How to Talk with Anyone about Anything, page 8
Caroline could have separated her feelings from Cheryl’s. The distinct role of cognition leads to the third main difference between sympathy and empathy, which speaks to the very nature of the sympathetic and empathic relationships.
3. INTERPERSONAL DYNAMIC
The dynamics of sympathy are expressed in a top-down, hierarchal way. The sympathizer takes the active role, and the listener is a passive object. The connotation is that sympathetic feelings, like pity or concern, are “bestowed” onto another.
In contrast, empathy is more horizontal and mutual. The empathizer is simply there beside the other person, respecting the space that holds them both. With gentle questions, the give-and-take in the empathic relationship has a chance to assess more accurately the other person’s needs, and, thus, touch them in a meaningful way.
As the empathizer, you slow down, suspend your thoughts, and move into silence in order to learn about the subjective state of the other person. This receptivity to learning new information puts the listener on a profound journey of discovering another person’s essence.
It invites them to open their heart to all sorts of new discoveries and learn about the wonder of who the other person actually is. The exchange of affect and information results in a powerful energy flow in both directions. Some who have experienced this energy exchange say that when this happens, the space between the two people feels sacred.
There is a sense that this Space-Between, once respectfully honored, contains the unrealized potential and the mystery that is the ground of all being. The two individuals move toward greater mutual understanding, even if they don’t agree on everything, or anything for that matter. This movement past contact and connection into mutual understanding brings us to the fourth distinction between sympathy and empathy.
4. MUTUAL TRANSFORMATION
Because of the hierarchical nature of sympathy, there is little transformation, if any, of either the speaker or the listener. It is a one-way street of assumptions and fusion. In contrast, empathy becomes a revolving door for meaning, integration, and transformation.
There is a gentle push-pull that elicits new information and understanding. The act of speaking and empathizing is a way of “meaning-making” for oneself and for one’s partner.
Theologian Nelle Morton referred to this dynamic as “hearing each other into speech.”3 As recipients of empathic listening, we discover a new vocabulary about our own experiences. The sacred and respectful space between us becomes the breeding ground of information, an ebb and flow of new discoveries within our relationships, and, simultaneously, within the selves.
When you become available to fully listen to others express their emotions, perhaps you will discover things about their lives that help you better understand their viewpoints, which may help you communicate without conflict.
For example, childhood friends Jennifer and Kathy had reconnected online after more than a decade, during which both had married and moved to opposite ends of the country. But their renewed friendship was threatened by the discovery that they had very different political views, primarily because of their opposing views on abortion.
Jennifer was pro-choice. Kathy was pro-life. The topic of abortion had never come up when they were children, so the two women were at first taken aback when they realized their views were so different. Fortunately, they were both empathic women who made the effort to understand each other’s positions and the experiences and feelings behind them.
In the dynamic process of listening and sharing, layers were peeled away, and they began to discover things they had not known about each other, which included experiences they’d had since childhood.
Empathy invites an inner excavation of hidden thoughts and feelings that makes it safe to bring them to the surface. It allows the speaker to formulate, express, and share ideas and feelings that may not have been realized or expressed ever before. Both speaker and listener become enlarged and transformed by the stillness of listening in this way.
Looking at these differences, we can see that sympathy is often our first and most primitive reaction to someone else’s dilemma. Empathy, which requires greater consciousness and often intentional practice, is a more highly evolved response, requiring more prefrontal cortex functioning. It’s not surprising, then, that empathy is a more recent concept in our understanding of relationship. Over the centuries, our instinct to sympathize gained the addition of higher cerebral processing, and the concept of empathy was born.
Empathy and Safe Conversations Dialogue
With SC Dialogue, we meet one of our greatest challenges: accepting the otherness of those we interact with. Without accepting otherness, we fail to make true connection. Empathy helps us learn about a consciousness that is not our own. We are invited to accept that others are different from us and, thus, may have different worldviews.
Our task, then, is to visit their worlds and imagine how they might feel, as well as what experiences and mindsets are behind those feelings. Empathy allows us to discover the otherness of people who come into our lives and to reflect on it, discerning its meaning and integrating this new understanding into our consciousness.
In the experience of giving and receiving empathy, we discover things in the lives of others that help us feel what they are feeling. Within the give-and-take of empathy, we experience vulnerability when we open ourselves to hearing with curiosity and speaking without self-editing. SC Dialogue allows us to practice using vulnerability as a strength as we learn more about each other.
There is an ever-widening circle here. Mutual empathy allows both parties to feel safe enough to become vulnerable. When empathizing, we allow others to appear without judgment or categorization, even after we have developed some understanding of their experience. When the spirit of safety is created, we can each cautiously emerge from behind our walls, give language to unarticulated thoughts and feelings, and reveal more of our authentic selves to one another.
Empathy can help us truly hear each other, because when there is receptivity and a safe space, words will flow. The listener is like a beacon in the fog, a signpost of solidity that allows the speaker to journey forth into often strange and scary lands. Empathy invites us to question and excavate hidden stories that will continue sabotaging our relationships unless they are told and understood in a conscious light.
Lastly, empathy plays an essential role in facilitating growth and healing. When we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, we open the door to mutually respond to our wounds with empathy. Through this connected emotional experiencing, we are inspired into action.
Empathy ultimately motivates speakers to stretch beyond their comfort zone in the service of the other. It requires a great deal of courage, as the listeners open themselves to truly receive. The experience of reciprocity can narrow the space between individuals with differences and heal the wounds that have separated them.
Just as a cut on the skin is slowly knit back together by the incremental joining and growth of new skin, the experience of empathic connection and dialogue can also serve to heal what had been severed. In empathy, we invite, we discover, we listen, we heal, and we become whole.
When we listen with empathy, we attend from a place of emotional intelligence and connection rather than from a distant, judgmental stance. When empathy is flowing in both directions, we see beyond the other person’s emotions. We then begin to move into a sense of understanding and away from conflict.
The New Consciousness of Empathy
The word empathy emerged in the last one hundred years and became identified as one of the central processes within psychotherapy. This suggests that the spread of the concept also might be signaling a developing consciousness within our nature as a human species.
As the world we live in moves toward a global dialogue, empathy is playing a central role in the development of a new consciousness. At the core of this new sense is our capacity for feeling ourselves into the hearts and minds of others, for listening and understanding without judgment, and for learning the art of true communion.
Empathy is an innately and uniquely human response. It’s time that we realize what a powerful force our capacity for empathy truly is. It invites a Copernican shift away from revolving around ourselves toward an expanded orbit that includes both ourselves and the others who inhabit our universe.
Whenever we speak, listen, and relate to another person without judgment, we are transforming the world one person at a time. We are manifesting our connectedness and creating a world that is safer than the one we now inhabit. We already have this power for transformation. Let’s act on it for the sake of ourselves and the world we share.
CHAPTER 5
Practice Zero Negativity
As you know by now, the roots of SC Dialogue sprouted in the early struggles in our own marriage and were grown to maturity in our work with couples. The concept of Zero Negativity was created about twenty years later, when we were on the verge of divorce. Lawyers had been hired, but neither of us had made a final decision.
While waiting for our feelings to crystallize, we decided to take a weekly break from our marital warfare and go on a date. To prevent possible conflict, we decided to do something we both enjoyed so we would not have to make any decisions.
We love libraries and bookstores, so we hit the books—in particular one large bookstore in New York City. Given the tempestuous state of our marriage, we normally spent most of our bookstore time searching for solutions in the Marriage, Psychology, or Therapy sections, but on this date day we veered into the Astrology section.
This was not familiar territory for either of us, so we thought it might be a safe haven. Perusing the shelves, we spied a very large book on astrology for couples. Intrigued, we pulled it off the shelf, sat on the floor, and started flipping through the pages looking for our astrological signs.
Since neither of us believed in such esoteric literature, it was sort of fun but not serious—until we spied a section that described the relationship between our two matched astrological signs: Virgo and Aquarius. This should be interesting, we thought, laughing at the silly idea that our lives and our relationship could somehow be determined by the alignment of the stars.
The essay began with a description of our personalities—as prescribed by our astrological signs—and it was mostly on the mark. Our curiosity got the best of us. We read on to the section about what sort of relationship Virgos and Aquarians could expect to have.
Our mockery of the book turned into a shock of recognition. The description hit home. The specific paragraph that changed our lives was not very long. As we recall, it said Virgo and Aquarius couples have very intense relationships, especially negatively. They tend to observe each other with continuous and ruthless scrutiny.
We looked at each other with wide eyes. Had someone been spying on us? While we were not accustomed to seeking information from astrology, this sentence seemed quite accurate.
We fled the bookstore and went to lunch. We needed to process this information. We spent the meal discussing this unexpected revelation from an unscientific source. In the course of our conversation, we made several decisions.
First, Helen proposed that we get a calendar from the bookstore, keep a record of any negative exchange on each day, and mark those days with a black X. If we got through a day without a negative exchange, we would give ourselves a red check mark.
Second, we decided to give ourselves nine months to monitor our negativity, then decide the future of our marriage. During the first month, we earned a black X every day. We did a little better in the second month, earning a few red checks on those days when we kept it positive. It was not until the third month that we went a full week without any black marks for being negative. Later we finally achieved a month without a black X.
The trend continued to be positive, and at the end of nine months we had had three consecutive months with only positive scores. There was hope! And so, instead of filing for divorce, we decided to recommit to our marriage and planned a small but full recommitment service on New Year’s Eve and threw a party with 250 guests. Since our recommitment party was in a room with views overlooking the Hudson River, where the New Year’s Eve fireworks would occur, we decided to claim the city’s celebration as our own.
We’d had our share of marital fireworks, after all, so why not embrace them and enjoy the way they brought dazzling light to the darkness? Our commitment to Zero Negativity was sealed that night, which is why we remain happily married to this day.
At first, we thought this might be just a personal exercise for us and not appropriate to introduce to other couples. However, because of its transformative impact on us, its relevance to all couples became apparent. We had discovered that any thriving relationship has to have one nonnegotiable quality: safety. And it is obvious that safety and negativity are incompatible.
Given the logic of that awareness, we made Zero Negativity an integral part of our work with couples, and eventually we made it a part of our core theory, which was taught and demonstrated to every therapist in our training programs globally. We now give it the status “nonnegotiable” if you want a great relationship.
We see Zero Negativity (ZN) as the third skill in SC Dialogues. ZN essentially involves eliminating put-downs, name-calling, eye rolls, or any other form of shame, blame, or criticism of anyone with whom you communicate each day. That’s what we decided to do for each other, and we recommend it to everyone, everywhere—at work, at worship, at play, in the classroom, the halls of Congress—all human ecosystems.
This may seem like an obvious thing to do. How can you communicate productively and build solid relationships by insulting and disparaging your coworkers, supervisors, clients, partners, or others with whom you interact on a daily basis?
Negativity is a major source of stress in all those relationships. Consistent research has associated negativity with anger and depression, which in turn are associated with suppressing our immune systems, making us vulnerable to disease and, thus, interfering with our health and shortening our life spans by as much as thirteen years.1 Negativity is clearly a dysfunctional interaction that seems endemic in the human race, a chronic pandemic more destructive than any virus that has threatened us.
But you don’t have to spend much time scrolling through social media posts or listening to conversations on podcasts and talk radio—or even in work meetings and dinner parties—before the rebukes and insults start flying between those who have differing opinions and perspectives.
It can get ugly, and all too often it does. Liberals attack conservatives by calling them racists and elitists. Conservatives disparage liberals as “lib-tards.” Anti-abortion advocates assail pro-abortion opponents as “baby killers.” Pro-choice advocates attack pro-life opponents as misogynists and religious zealots. Even terms once considered positive, such as woke and politically correct, have been co-opted, weaponized, and hurled as insults in today’s brutally polarized political environment.
Nothing productive comes of these tactics. Negativity only stirs anxiety, inflaming debates and discussions into angry confrontations. We know this, yet it is all too easy to give in to our worst impulses by going on the attack when we feel threatened. If your boss criticizes you for being unproductive, it is tempting to fire back, “You just expect me to do all the work so you can take all the credit.”
We understand that eliminating negativity in your interactions is not easy, but it is also a goal worthy of pursuing if you really want to build bridges and find common ground in your workplace, your community, your organizations, and your circle of acquaintances. Why does negativity seem to be everywhere, and why does eliminating it seem so hard?
These are really great questions, and there is a really good answer from brain science research. Getting a handle on this may help us understand ourselves and others when we fall into that negative space.
Thousands of years ago, all humans lived in environments in which there was no security like we have now. No social rules and no one regulating how we interacted with one another, like a police force. We all lived in hostile environments, and danger was everywhere, from wild animals to human beings from other tribes.
Our brains evolved in this dangerous environment and developed a “negativity bias.” Since the main purpose of the brain is to survive, we could not afford to assume that an animal we saw on the path or a person who was approaching us was friendly.2
If you made a wrong decision back then, you became prey. So the safest response was to assume the worst until there were no signs of danger. Then we would approach and eat or hunt or play together.
Although we now have security systems—police, sheriffs, military—that default negativity bias is still in place, and we have to manage it all the time. So your problem with negativity is not your fault. It is just your brain trying to protect you.
Knowing all this does not excuse any of us for not looking for a better way. The best protection now is to use the SC Dialogue process to talk about your differences and collaborate on win-win solutions.
Take the Pledge
Negativity is toxic energy that destroys safety and, thus, prevents connecting in relationships. Removing negativity from all your relationships is so important that we recommend embracing this concept by taking a Zero Negativity Pledge, which encourages you to focus on treating others around you with a positive, hopeful, and gracious attitude.
When you remove the negative energy and attitude from your conversations, you will be able to deal more efficiently with difficult or challenging issues because a negative charge does not overload them.
Here is an example of a Zero Negativity Pledge:
I pledge to make all of my relationships and conversations zones of Zero Negativity for the next thirty days by omitting from all my interactions any words, tones, or body language that could be experienced as a put-down and are not productive or healing.
