Missing Each Other by Edward Brodkin & Ashley Pallathra

Author:Edward Brodkin & Ashley Pallathra [Edward, Brodkin & Pallathra, Ashley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2021-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

BALANCE BETWEEN OURSELVES AND OTHERS

In addition to trying to understand others, coming to understand yourself can also really improve the quality of your connections. Taking the time to reflect on yourself, your life experiences, and your past relationships can help you to better understand your own strengths and vulnerabilities and your own style of relating to other people. Do you tend to be an introvert, an extrovert, or some combination? What kinds of interactions come more easily for you, and what kinds are more difficult? Have your relationships, romantic or otherwise, tended to fall into certain patterns? Do they tend to begin, progress, or end in a certain way? Do you tend to blame things on others a lot, or do you take all the blame and responsibility on yourself? What situations tend to trigger an emotional reaction in you and set you off? By coming to understand yourself, and what you “bring to the table”—by looking at these aspects of yourself with some kindness and tolerance, as you would view a dear friend—you can gain a greater understanding of what happens between you and others, and work toward improving the quality of your connections. Gaining perspective on yourself can be very challenging though. It’s hard to see yourself with clarity. And sometimes there are things that we feel ashamed of, that we’d rather not see in ourselves. Sometimes, feedback from people you really trust, like friends or other loved ones, can help. And psychotherapy with a skillful therapist can be a great way to come to a greater understanding of yourself.

Attunement involves not just cognitive empathy for the other person, but also keeping in mind both the other person’s and your own feelings and perspective too, even if there is disagreement.32 Part of “understanding” involves processing both the information you glean from listening to the other person and the information you get from listening to yourself; trying to disentangle which thoughts and feelings come primarily from you, from the other person, and from you “resonating” with the other person as you listen to them. Understanding means you recognize that your two perspectives are interdependent—as you elicit thoughts and feelings from each other in your interaction—and yet you recognize they are distinct. Attunement does not mean trying to reconcile the two different perspectives of you and the other person in order to make one, merged “right” perspective, nor does it mean losing yourself in the other person’s perspective. Sometimes understanding one another requires stepping back and gaining a “30,000 foot” perspective. Ideally, we want to use cognitive empathy to imagine someone else’s perspective without losing sight of and respect for our own thoughts, feelings, and values. While empathy is really important, it’s problematic when it goes too far such that you completely lose sight of yourself. The ideal balance for understanding is similar to the type of balance we promote in Chapter 3, where your goal is to listen attentively to another person while still being aware of yourself and your own thoughts and feelings.

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