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Understanding
Your Partner’s Feelings
When
partners share feelings, ideas, and beliefs, our responsibility is to be
attentive, respectful, and accepting. You demonstrate sensitivity by
listening attentively in order to understand your partner’s frame of
reference. The skill of empathy
helps us do this. To be
empathic is to listen and observe attentively, not only to hear the
words that your partner expresses, but also to understand the feelings
expressed. It’s important to focus on nonverbal clues, such as tone of
voice and gestures. By listening empathically, you are able to identify
with your partner’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.
Your
nonverbal and verbal behaviors assure your partner that you want to
understand the message. Maintaining eye contact, focusing on what is
being said, and giving feedback regarding your understanding of the
message, communicate caring and acceptance.
Empathy
allows us to enter our partner’s perceptual world and to spontaneously
feel what our partner feels. Empathy may not result in agreement, but it
allows us to demonstrate understanding. If we are empathic, our partner
is more likely to reveal feelings and perceptions. Sharing our deepest
feelings enriches our relationship.
What
do you do when your partner does not understand you or your feelings or
when your points of view are incompatible? Observing yourself in these
situations will help you measure your empathy.
This
exercise will give you practice in behaving empathically:
•
Identify an issue or an area that is difficult for you to discuss
with your partner.
•
Examine the issue from your partner’s frame of reference. Can
you identify the attitudes, feelings, and values that your partner holds
regarding the issue?
•
Discuss the issue from your partner’s point of view for 3-5
minutes.
•
What was it like to feel or think like your partner?
•
Now reverse roles and examine the issue from your own point of
view. What are your feelings and beliefs regarding the issue?
•
Discuss the issue from your own point of view for 3-5 minutes.
•
Evaluate how the role reversal helped you.
Through
expressing and listening to words and feelings, you and your partner can
grow to know each other more intimately.
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Adapted
from Time for a Better Marriage,
by Jon Carlson, Psy.D. and Don Dinkmeyer, Sr., Ph.D.
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Publishers, Inc., PO Box 6016, Atascadero, CA 93423,
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