Incomplete thoughts re Listening, Empathy, and Challenge – as promised 

Listening to another, really listening, is evidence of love. It’s love in action. Being heard is being loved. Listening, and being heard, holds therapeutic power in itself. It stands alone. But, being heard does not necessarily lead a person to desired change. 

Change comes from being heard and being challenged and responding to the challenges. 

Empathy is identifying with another so accurately that both parties know what at least one person is experiencing. Empathy is impossible without Listening. 

It’s as if they  – Listening and Empathy –  go hand-in-hand for a long walk. Listening leads, guides, pulls, until they are strolling side-by-side. 

When I know you empathize with me, or are empathizing with me, I’m aware that you know, as much as is humanly possible, what it is like to be me. When you hear me and empathize with me I know you experience my world almost as I experience it. We are together. I am not alone. My world feels safer because you are safe and you are with me in my world and you understand. 

Empathy, too, stands alone. It, too, in itself, is powerfully therapeutic. 

Empathy in itself, too, does not necessarily lead to desired change. 

Change comes from being heard, understood, and from responding to challenge. 

Challenge – to recall our metaphor – is the third sibling to Listening and Empathy. I think of it as an older brother or sister.

Listening and Empathy are a powerful duo but Challenge can help to seal the deal. Challenge pulls them both along toward new adventures. Listening without Empathy is nothing more than an interview. Empathy without Challenge leaves me understood, accepted, warm, comforted – all good things. Empathy with Challenge gives me hope, helps me to see the possibility of greater health and the joy of seeing and embracing new options. 

There are therapeutic encounters – expensive ones – that go on week-by-week and year-after-year that reek with beautiful empathy and where the client is fully heard. 

Then, the client leaves warmed all over but, unChallenged. 

Empathy without Challenge is (somewhat) useless if it is healthy change you wish to see.

There are some things a person simply cannot do for (or to) another person, no matter how much commitment there is, how deep the love may be, or how noble the goals. This is so even if the helper is overflowing with determination, and the helpee is hungry with need. This is especially true when people are in love, a time when people are most inclined to be convinced in their power to change another person.

It is impossible to make another person:

• Love you, want you, need you, miss you, or trust you.
• Love, want, need, miss, or trust someone else.
• See, feel or think in a certain manner for an enduring period.
• See the light, or get some sense into their lives.
• Lose or gain weight, save money, want, or not want sex.
• Use or stop using drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or bad language.
• Become healthier.
• Be happy or fulfilled, be angry, want change, succeed or fail at anything. 

The above are “inside” jobs. Until the motivation is self-generated within the one in need, the helper will work harder than the helpee and ultimately drain the helper of all enthusiasm and energy.

Empathy is a lot easier to define than impart. 

“Getting to” empathy is not easy. 

Also, Empathy has two very close siblings: Listening and Challenge. 

The three travel together as a package deal. 

It would be a “therapy joke” to suggest they are codependent but, while they are distinct, they function together, much like fingers on the same hand. 

Empathy is not something a person can use when needed like a spatula. 

Like listening, it’s first a skill, then, a life-style. It’s not a trick or formula, a way to get what you want. Using any interpersonal skill to get what YOU want is called manipulation or domination or intimidation, siblings from a whole other family.

Empathy is the beautiful, artful consequence that grows within a person who has sought to understand him or herself and his or her struggles, failures, successes, and therefore finds it easier to enter the experience of another, than one who has not. 

Self-knowledge, self-acceptance, are the keys that release or withhold you and me from empathy. 

No matter how extensively trained or confident, you and I cannot enter the world of another at greater depth than we have dared to enter your own. I’ve met unschooled “losers” with more empathy than trained professionals. I’m sure you have too.

Empathy and sibling-Listening, are somewhat (not completely) useless, without the third sibling: Challenge. I will try to say more about that in a few days.    

I write often about integrity. It is important to me. 

It was not always so. 

Over the years I have had to do a lot of costly mending. 

Some breaches of my integrity have hurt others, some perhaps beyond repair. I remain hopeful. 

Integrity is often reduced to a matter of keeping your word or paying your debts on time. 

I think it’s about all that and much more. 

It is about being integrated. It’s being unified within. 

Focused. 

It’s about you and me bringing all of who we are to all of what we do and all of what we stand for. 

It’s welding the body (physical), heart (passions), head (thinking), spirit and soul (the core of life and identity) into one focused life. While people are more complicated than dividing them up into neat portions and parts, to do so is an attractive trend.  

Integrity is investing all of our “components” or “parts” into who and what we are and into what we do with our lives. 

Perhaps you have discovered that whatever you do with one “part” of you impacts all the other “parts” of you. That’s why when you get your body “in shape” you feel better all round and even think more clearly! 

Sadly, it also works in the other direction. 

Integrity (holiness) is about living in such a manner that they all work together for our individual and for our communal good. 

“I have been married for 11 years. I have a teenage son born before I met my wife. My wife has not accepted my son. I sent him to boarding school to avoid creating an unbearable environment. Now, she is refusing to have him visit. I am at a loss when he asks me when he is coming to visit his siblings. This is causing a rift in our marriage.” 

Your wife wants a husband, your son wants a dad. The boy wants to come home to his siblings. None of these unique, distinct, overlapping relationships, needs to impinge on or overtake each other. It’s possible to have them all. 

While your wife’s issues dominate you will live on egg-shells, your son will live in growing confusion, and your marriage will deteriorate. Until you provoke a healthy confrontation your son will lack a dad and your wife a husband. 

I will suggest your wife’s resistance to your son has nothing to do with you or son. His presence in your life evokes something within your wife that predates you. Her apparent inability to embrace your son (and now you) is deep, deeper than you and your son. She needs help from “outside” the family.

Tell your wife the boy will visit regularly. If your wife is willing to learn to be a mother-figure to a boy, he will help her find whole new avenues of growth and love. This won’t happen while you help her by hiding him from her. 

Kindness

You know it when you experience it or witness it. It can be faked or used to manipulate, but not for long. Kindness can be as subtle as easing the load of common and difficult human interactions. It’s helping a stranger who needs it. It can be dropping a note to a friend in need, acknowledging someone’s grief. Listening can be all the kindness someone may need. 

Kindness can also have profound consequences: saving someone from bankruptcy or helping another find a job during difficult times. 

Kind people usually don’t have to spend time preparing gifts of kindness. It flows out of them, no matter what the season. 

It’s an expression of who and what they are. 

Awareness

People who are aware of their wants and needs and dreams and desires and who are aware of the degree of impact their lives have on others are comfortable to be with. This comfort, born of self-awareness, is a gift to others in itself, an all-season thing that also cannot be wrapped on unwrapped. 

This one is more difficult to fake. 

When you are with an aware person he or she accepts you as you are and you experience no pressure to give anything in return. Their self-acceptance lets you off the hook. They spend no effort trying to change you or coerce you or make you “fit” because they are not trying to doing any of those things to themselves. What a gift!

Divorce theme #4 – impact on children

My pre-teen son is a victim of “our” divorce. He cringes when his dad and I talk because it quickly escalates. Before the divorce he tried everything to keep us together. Now he tries everything to keep us apart. He shudders when we fight. 

Your image of a fearful child is surely sufficient to motivate you to keep the child away from your skirmishes and to reach a place where they do not have to occur at all.

Your boy is connected to both of you. The disconnect will, as you have so graphically portrayed, will tear him apart. 

Try to remember there was a time you loved the boy’s father enough to marry him. This may be of little comfort when you are desperate but it may help to see the “big picture” when you are most desperate. 

Your son miraculously embodies both parents. When you reject each other you are both in some ways rejecting your son. No matter how much the connection between you and your ex has disintegrated you can do your part in engaging in respectful behavior.

That part is about you, no matter how your ex behaves.  His behavior is up to him, your is up to you. While you think you are “causing” each others behavior you are not yet unhitched. You divorce may be final but your connection is still “live.”

Mature parenting demands the adults sacrifice for their children AND develop strong and meaningful lives as if they were not parents at all! 

I know it is difficult. It is difficult in the best of circumstances, and much more so when there has been a divorce.

My ex has a really nice family. These are people I know well and have been very close for years. Two of these dear people are my children’s grandparents. My ex wants me to have nothing to do with any of these people anymore. What do I do about this?

You divorced your spouse, not her/his family. I am aware some would disagree but I do think it is possible for mature adults to maintain healthy relationships with family-by-marriage people. I will not pretend it will be easy or comfortable but it is possible.

While I’d suggest you do not go out of your way to humiliate an ex I’d suggest you not afford that person undue power. Give the divorce a little room to breathe – a few months perhaps – and then see how much interest remains in servicing relationships with members of your family-by-marriage. Those that continue to possess vitality will probably endure; others are likely to drop away. 

Grandparents? If they are of sound mind and generally regarded as good people I’d suggest you fully cooperate in fostering their relationships with your children and your relationship with them. 

Please, resist any urge to punish children or grandparents because things have not worked in a marriage.

My ex seems to want to monitor my life and gets difficult and moody if I don’t cooperate.

When there have been control issues in the marriage they won’t cease because the marriage has.

Controllers are controlling, married or not. 

The glorious thing about marriage is that your lives connect very powerfully. Children,  mortgages,  cars, vacations, savings accounts, inheritances, mutual friends, businesses (successes and failures) become the glue that binds it all together.  Marriage is a theme park for the controller, especially if it’s faith or religion endorsed. Of course he or she is going to resist your efforts to escape even after the decree is issued. 

Unhitching all that requires skills taught nowhere. 

Unhitching all that – which is what divorce means – is as war and is as painful as can be even if it’s desired and necessary. 

But, alas. These things are mutually developed. Blaming the controlling party only goes so far. 

He or she was permitted such ploys by the partner – with or without awareness. 

You entered it together. You have to escape (unhitch)  alone. 

Divorce is legal. He or she has no authority to reign in the dissolved, non-existent relationship. 

The only legal connection will be determined by what the courts declare regarding the parenting of minor children. 

Stay out of control. Speak up. Resist. Refuse. Access your backbone, voice, and courage. If you accommodate controlling behavior it will grow. If you refuse to water it, it will react and fight but it will die and both parties will be better off. 

No one benefits from arm-wrestle living, not the stronger or the apparently weaker.

Theme: I have been divorced several years. My young-adult children do not like the man I am dating.

My response: In decades of listening to people, many of them facing this and parallel situations, I will say it is extraordinarily rare for sons and daughters (all ages) to embrace the person a mother or father dates post divorce. Resistance, rejection – subtle or gross – are common and understandable reactions. 

I’d suggest you “obey” your children. End the relationship. But, do this only if your children will agree to similar choosing, vetting, endorsing on your part about whomever they choose to date and/or marry from this day forward, forevermore. You may want to go all out and suggest the entire family agrees to arranging all of each other’s relationships – intimate to casual – from here on out. Agree to always Gate-Keep for each other.

Unless the person you are dating is married (which is another matter completely) then I’d suggest you be very kind and patiently suggest your sons and daughters honor your choices and begin to learn to celebrate that their parent has found sufficient healing, sufficient post-divorce repair, to even want to date and enjoy a “new” relationship.

May you find real joy. 

Don’t let young adult children – or younger or older – rob you of your adventures.