Psychful

You’ve hurt your loved one and stayed to listen based on the blog post Heal Hurts 1. As a result of your listening, you’ve gathered the information listed in Heal Hurts 2. Now you are ready to say something helpful after all your sensitive listening to your loved one’s emotional pain. It’s time for empathy and to show your empathic understanding of your loved one’s feelings.

First some definitions. Empathy is feeling with someone, sympathy is feeling for them. Empathy is a bit more intimate than sympathy. Empathy is feeling some of the same feelings your loved one is feeling, demonstrating that you’ve “been there” and felt similar feelings in a similar situation. When you have never felt the way your loved one feels, never having “been there”, the best you can do is sympathize or feel sorry for her. Your goal in healing wounds is to practice empathy, to feel some of what your loved one feels, and then communicate that reality to her.

Secondly, it is important at this stage of the healing process to show a complete understanding of your loved one’s situation. It is not the time to defend yourself or your actions. You do not have to agree with everything your loved has said up to this point, but you must begin to respond to her with empathy and understanding.  Anything less will not do.

To simplify this emotional process, and to give you a starting point from which to practice a new sensitivity to painful situations, try completing the blanks in the following empathy script with the information you gleaned while listening to your loved one.

“I want to be sure I understand. You felt _(insert feelings she reported)_ when I _(state how you hurt her based on her description)_.” And what you need me to do (in the future) is _(clarify what your partner is asking for)_.”

The short version of this which you may tattoo on the back of your hand:

“You felt___when I___, and in the future you need me to ___.”

That’s it, for now. Don’t add anything at this point. It will just water down the effectiveness of making these statements.

Using this formula sounds very contrived, elementary and insincere. Don’t worry about that.  If you have read this far, you have probably messed up many opportunities in the past to help heal your loved one’s hurts. If you sincerely but awkwardly spit out the statements suggested in this script, she will know that you are trying to do better. She’ll know this isn’t the real you, and, for now, that may be a good thing. Don’t analyze this to death, or toss it aside as too simplistic. You may not be able to afford that.

Let me share a case example from my clinical practice to explain how this worked. A couple visited with me some years ago and in their first appointment announced “We have a hundred issues we need to resolve!”  They sat down and I presented them with some printed cheat sheets that covered the points I have been making in these recent blog posts. We mechanically went through the scripts addressing their issues following the scripted formulas given here and some others I use when people are hurting. At the end of about three weeks of meetings, they came in and declared, “We don’t need to work on the list of issues anymore.” When I asked why, they said, “We have developed the skills to address our concerns now and in the future, so we can drop the other 94 issues.” This simple script had enabled them to begin to find their own language to use in future efforts at healing their wounds, and to release their grip on past grievances.

After you have completed the empathy script, stop and wait for a response from your loved one. If she thinks you “get it”, that you understand and can feel some of what she is feeling, she will likely express some appreciation for your efforts. If you have skipped any of the items on the script, or been incorrect in understanding how you hurt her or how she feels or what she wants in the future, she will likely go back to explaining again and it is time for you to listen again. Repeat this process until you “get it”.

When you have convinced your loved one you “get” the three elements of the empathy script, then, and only then, you can move to the next step, apology. This will be covered in detail in the upcoming post, The Art of Apology.

Listening to your loved one after you have hurt her is a courageous skill. It does not come naturally to most people. To do this well, to do it out of love, requires an active process of mental focus and emotional courage. Simply allowing her to “vent” until the storm blows over is a passive, ignorant, often cowardly process. Any fool can do that and most do. Learning how to help heal her emotional wound is similar to learning first responder skills for a medical crisis. Knowing what to do enables you to stay mentally focused and emotionally self-controlled so that you can do your part in the healing process.

Your reason for listening is to clean the dirt from the emotional wound. By your active listening you create the emotional safety for her to talk about her hurt, the potential source of future infection. The wound must remain open long enough to get the dirt out, and only she can tell you how long it takes to cleanse the wound. Trying to patch things up too quickly, because of your own discomfort, will likely lead to infection and scarring.

Actively listening to your wounded loved one requires you to focus on learning three things: 1) How have I hurt you?, 2) What are you feeling?, and 3) How can I help? The answers to these questions are needed in future steps you take to heal this wound. Listening for these answers enables you to stay actively focused on your loved one and not get caught up in your own reactions to the situation. Remember, this is a crisis, and you are trying to be responsible and do the next right thing.

How Have I Hurt You?

Never assume you know exactly how you hurt someone you love. It may be a fair attempt at empathy to say “I know I hurt you when I said…”, but it can be presumptuous, inaccurate, and it can interfere with great listening. Listen to learn. As long as she is still talking to you, there is hope for healing. If she shuts down, you cannot get the answers you need to clean up this mess.

While you are listening, look at her and give evidence that you are listening. Maintaining eye contact, nodding your head, saying “uh-huh” or “OK” when you think you better understand her pain can be good signs of your active listening. Remember, active listening cleanses the wound. Passive listening can be interpreted as not caring and shut down the whole healing process.

While listening to understand how you have hurt your loved one, do not argue, defend or correct any misperceptions on her part. You are listening to understand the hurt from her perspective, not to share your perspective. She is the one who is wounded, and you are trying to help heal the emotional wound. There may be a time later in the process for you to share your thoughts, even your wounds, but not now. Wounded people don’t want to hear the problems of their first responders.

What Are You Feeling?

Listening for feelings is an art form in itself. Therapists spend much time in graduate training programs to develop this skill. For now, stick with the basics. If she says she feels hurt, unappreciated, taken for granted, insulted, or unloved, remember that. If she doesn’t tell you specifically how she feels you will need to imagine how she feels, begin to empathize with how she feels. If you cannot discern any of her feelings at this stage of your skill development, it’s probably safe to stick with “hurt”.

It may be most obvious that she is feeling angry. Remember that all that noisy anger is a shield protecting hurt feelings underneath. The louder the anger, the thicker the shield, the more feelings there are to protect. The absence of anger can be a sign that there are no longer sensitive feelings that need protecting, a potentially bad sign for the relationship. Begin to see anger as a sign of hope; she still has feelings that need protection. But anger is secondary to the hurt, and you need to remain focused on the hurt.

How Can I Help?

Embedded in every human complaint is a request. Most people complain rather than ask for what they want. In listening to your loved one, you want to discover what she wants from you in the future. In the simplest form, she may just want you to stop saying or doing whatever it was that caused this wound. As in understanding feelings above, you may need to imagine what she is asking for if she is not explicit. The better you do at this, the better the resolution at the end of this healing process. If you can discover or interpret a constructive step you can take in the future to prevent these hurts, you can come out of this healing process more of a hero than a schmuck.

After actively listening to your loved one, after uncovering the answers to these questions, and after allowing her to decide when she has said what she needs to have heard, you may cautiously move on to the next step. If you move on prematurely, you will likely hear your loved one begin talking more about her hurt. Somehow you have given her the impression you didn’t hear it all. There’s still dirt left in the wound. Continue to listen until the wound is clean.

In Healing Hurts 3 we will take the information you gathered in these steps and move on to the next step in the healing process: Empathize. Stay tuned.

You’ve just hurt the one you love. She has put up her emotional shield of anger to protect from being hurt again. This is not the way you thought this discussion would end. But here it is, painful, perhaps ugly, and in desperate need of repair.

It is at these times that we are most naturally inclined to withdraw. After all, who wants to approach a fire-breathing dragon, even if it is one of our own creation. Most of us run from the prospect of getting scorched by the flames of this now emotional beast. We may part somewhat gently: “I’m sorry. Let’s talk later.” We may part more neutrally, not wanting to expose ourselves emotionally: “Whatever!” Or we may make the grievous mistake of parting with reciprocal anger: “I can’t talk to you when you’re angry!”

The problem with withdrawal at times of hurt is that it does nothing to heal and usually aggravates the situation. It feels natural to withdraw in order to cool things down, and from the standpoint of our own emotional safety, it makes sense to run from the dragon. But it doesn’t help.

Worse than withdrawal is defending our hurtful statements, trying to explain what we meant to say, or worse still, countering our loved one with hurts of our own. All of these actions serve to aggravate the hurt and distract from the essential need at this moment, to begin the healing of the hurt we inflicted.

Paradoxically, what love requires of us, what emotional healing requires of us is the courage to stay to listen. If you want to help your loved one begin to heal from the pain you inflicted, even unintentionally, you must stay to listen. Put on your emotional armor if you must, or get ready to emotionally dodge the coming feedback so you don’t take a retort right between the eyes, but stay, to listen, out of love.

The primary purpose of this listening, the start of cleansing emotional wounds, is to hear and understand the feelings of your loved one. You may, out of accurate empathy, have a good idea of how she feels at this moment. You may understand that the anger is a shield, a reflexive protective covering, and that underneath is the hurt, the vulnerable emotional belly so carefully guarded by anger. But this is not the time for you to talk, or worse, offer insights such as those presented here. Now is the time to listen.

Listening is the first step of the LEAP process for healing emotional wounds in relationships. LEAP is an acronym for four vital steps in this healing process: Listen, Empathize, Apologize, and Plan. To do this effectively, we must understand the steps involved and practice them to perfection. Stay tuned for Healing Hurts 2.