Putting myself in your shoes - staying open

A friend the other day asked me, "What does it mean to put yourself in someone else's shoes, and what does that have to do with empathy? Does it help to put yourself inside someone else's head; and how could you really do that, since you don't know their thoughts?"

We went back and forth, trading ideas and trying to understand each other. In the end, we concluded that by "putting myself in someone else's shoes" I meant that I try to imagine what someone else's life is like. I do this for a specific reason, to leave myself open to building connections with people.

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I (and I think most of us) categorize people automatically. I hear a voice and I think "Oh, that person is black" even if I've never met them.. I see someone dressed in a certain way and I think "Oh, that person is poor" even though I know nothing about them, their life or their situation. I believe that these thoughts are unstoppable; I have them because of experiences I've had, my life, the conversations I've heard and the things I've been taught. I call these "closed" thoughts - if I already know who you are and I already know you are different from me; what else is there for me to know? Why would I be curious about your life? Why would I bother to ask what makes you happy and sad? I already know everything about you from these labels and categories. You are fat. You are sick. You are (insert race/gender/class here).

Being "open" is about knowing I'm going to have these thoughts, but to not let these thoughts stick in my brain. Without them I have the space to make better choices. Sometimes being open is about letting these thoughts go. It's about being calm and relaxed, by using meditation or prayer. When I don't have time for that (which, in a house with kids and a fairly busy life happens more often than I'd like) then I try another way - distraction. Just like waving a shiny toy in front of a crying baby stops the tears; I look at you and imagine as many other possibilities for your life as I can to stop my mind's assumption train in it's tracks.

My point here (and yes, I have one) is that if I'm not closed, I'm open. If I can build a desire in myself to learn about you, I am open to building a connection with you. I'm opening myself up to find out who you really are.

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Today, like some days, I'm watching the people around me and making up little stories about them.

I see two white ladies in their thirties both wearing blue sweaters, ordering their drinks at the local coffee bar. They are talking and seem to know each other. One has very baggy pants and clothing, with short hair and a slightly larger than average jowl line. The other is wearing a more revealing outfit, from this angle I can see the curve of her buttocks as they fill out her jeans. I think "Oh, they are friends, and one of them is the 'neat' one in the relationship, and the other one is the 'sloppy' one."

I hear myself, I catch myself having these thoughts and I try to use distraction to stop it. I start to imagine; maybe, maybe they are sisters on their way to a family event. Or, maybe they didn't come here together, but instead just ran into each other on their way to enjoy a spicy steamed milk and coffee drink, Maybe like me this is an ordinary day of an ordinary week for them, and this is just one step on their morning path.

I'm getting into a groove now, and I push my envelope just a little further outside of what I would consider 'normal'. I pretend something really good; maybe one of them just won the lottery! In that case, they are meeting because this is her lawyer, and she wants to talk about how to spend her winnings. Or, I pretend something sad; maybe one of them is here to tell the other about her mother, who just told them she has cancer. Maybe maybe maybe.

The point behind my exercise is I try to come up with several stories, each one a little more unexpected than the next. Each one a little further away from my first assumption about who they are and what they are doing.

By putting myself in someone else's shoes I'm imagining that their lives could be similar to my own, or I'm imagining that they could be vastly different. It's a way of letting go of categories. It's a way of allowing myself to see all the possibilities in life, and to grow my own curiosity about other people.

Janet

Let's hear a story [part III]; Can empathy help me get along with my Mother-in-Law?

Welcome back - and now I bring you the riveting conclusion! This has been a three-part discussion between us (Growing Empathy, or GE) and our friend MiLP (Mother-in-Law Problem). As always, please share your reactions in the comments section below, or on twitter or facebook.

You can catch up on the first part here, and the second here.

As a reminder, MiL is short for her Mother-in-Law, and DIMT is short for "Dude I'm Married To", otherwise known as her husband.

[GE] I assume that after this conversation you still want to build empathy with your MiL. If not, feel free to ignore the rest of this letter. :)

[MiLP] It's not so much that I want to build empathy with her, it's more that I want to get myself out of the way, so that I'm not preventing my spouse from having a relationship with her that isn't about me and this problem.  And I figure empathy is a way to do it.

[GE] I believe that building empathy means trying to see someone else's perspective. One way to do that, as I've read, is to engage the other person with a curiosity about who they are as people and why they do the things that they do. If you cannot talk directly to MiL and ask her the questions you want to ask; can you talk to DIMT? Would he be willing to help you to understand her perspective? Perhaps talking about the things she's done in her life, the ways she's interacted with people in the past, can help you to see things through her eyes. 

[MiLP] I can't talk directly to my MiL right now.  She's hundreds of miles away, we never talk on the phone, and she's in the middle of a huge move-- it isn't the time.  But DIMT and I talked about it, enacting a conversation in which I'm his new girlfriend and he's telling her what his parents are like.

That was an interesting, and eye-opening, bit of role-playing. DIMT's initial description of his mother made me say, "She sounds kind of awful." All his initial descriptors emphasized the negative: she's bossy, insecure, difficult to deal with, intolerant, she never really listens, etc. (Yes, apart from me, DIMT does have his own issues with his mother.)

Still in character, I replied, "So what you're telling me is that she's horrible and I'll hate her."

DIMT: She's not horrible.

Me: Okay, but that's not what you're telling me.

After that, DIMT started talking about some of the things he actually likes about his mother, her sense of humor, her interest in science, etc.  It made both of us realize that my problem with the whole antisemitism thing really did influence how he feels about her. Not entirely-- she is a difficult woman, very much in the mold of Lady Catherine de Bourgh-- and it makes DIMT not want to connect with her.  But I certainly have poured a fair amount of poison into the well, alas.

That's okay.  Now that we know it happened, we can fix it.

[GE] Something else I've done in the past when I'm having trouble understanding someone else's perspective is to actually pretend that I am them. My friend says something to me, and I don't understand how they are feeling. So I repeat what they just said to myself, in my head, imagining that I just said it. 

Please indulge me for a moment, and let's take what you said above as an example of this. You said, "My MiL's response to this was to tease me, telling me that the restaurant was singling me out, that they were deliberately snubbing me, etc. " Let's say you and I were out at dinner. My tofu lettuce wraps were late, and your pork lettuce wraps came out very quickly. You said to me, "Oh, the restaurant is singling you out, they are deliberately snubbing you." The key is to imagine yourself saying this and asking yourself, why would you say those things?  How would you say those things, what would you be feeling? 

Would you be able to understand her perspective?

[MiLP] No, not via this method.  DIMT and I tried this today, with two examples-- the restaurant one, and one of her actually anti-semitic comments.  And it just didn't work.  I mean, with the restaurant one, I get that she was trying to make a joke because she was uncomfortable because my food was late.  She said as much at the time.  And I would probably have empathy for that with somebody else-- the whole family was clearly really uncomfortable about death, about the fact that my dad had just died, and I get that.  But the whole anti-semitism thing made it impossible for me to give her that kind of break in this regard.

Trying this with one of her actual anti-semitic comments was actually hilarious.  DIMT and I couldn't stop laughing, which was not necessarily a good thing, since we were in a fast-moving car.

It went like this:
DIMT: So give me an example of what my mom actually said.  Play her.
Me:  Okay, so we were sitting on the porch, I was reading or on my computer or something, and she was doing a crossword or something, and she made a passing comment about her nose.  (Some background.  My mother-in-law is obsessed with her nose. It's a genetically dominant trait, DIMT has it, his siblings have it, his uncles have it, his cousins.  When my niece was visiting, she was mistaken for our daughter, because she and DIMT look so similar-- they have the same nose. It's a perfectly nice nose, a bit broad, maybe, but not something you'd notice if my MiL wasn't totally obsessed about it, seriously.  She talks about it a lot as an unfortunate trait, and tends to invent histories whose fault it is.  As you are soon to read.)

Me:  So the thing she says about her nose is this: That the only explanation she has for it is that it must be a holdover from some Russian genetics that got mixed into the purely Swedish genetic stock.  That's where she thinks the nose came from.
DIMT (repeating my original response): MiL, I know a lot of people of Russian descent; I'm of Russian descent; none of our noses look like yours.
Me: Okay, so much for that theory!  (Then we spent a few minutes cracking jokes.)
DIMT: No, you have to say exactly what she said.  That's the point of this exercise.
Me (trying again): Well, maybe you have the wrong kind nose, the wrong kind of ancestry.
DIMT: Okay, so how did you feel when you said that?
Me: I didn't feel much of anything.  A little affronted, I guess.
DIMT: That was probably it.  She hates being argued with (she really does), and just wanted to shut you down as quickly as possible.
Me: By saying something anti-semitic?  That's sandblasting a soup cracker, a bit!

The only thing we got out of it was that my MiL has no filter.  Now, there are people in this world whom I love and adore who have no filter, and it doesn't matter-- I still love and adore them.  My MiL is not among them, and I don't think she ever will be.  She's not an interesting or engaging enough person to make the lack of filter loveable.  

That said, I think I'm done with this exchange.  What I really wanted to get out of it, I've gotten-- I have a clear perception of how I've created distance between DIMT and his mom, which will hopefully give me enough foresight to avoid doing it more in the future.  I don't think that means that DIMT and his mother will be skipping off into the sunset together-- she is a really difficult person and I don't know that they will ever be close.  He just can't really talk to her about the really important stuff in his life, because she can't listen.  That's sad.  The least I can do for DIMT is not add to the distance.  And I think that's where I am.

Thank you for your help!  Couldn't have gotten here without you!

- Mother-in-Law Problem

Let's hear a story [part II] - Can empathy help me get along with my mother-in-law?

Last week we heard from our friend who has a “Mother-in-Law Problem”. You responded, and some of you asked our friend to confront her MiL (Mother-in-Law) directly.

To catch up or revisit last week's post, click here.

As a reminder, DIMT is short for "Dude I'm Married To", otherwise known as her husband.

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[GE] Dear Mother-in-Law Problem,
 Thank you for sending your question. I want to help; so I'd like to start by trying to build empathy for you. :)
 

I can't imagine what you and your DIMT are going through, it sounds like a really difficult situation. You've said that you really want to be able to have more visits with your MiL and the family in general, and you want this because of your relationship with your DIMT. It also sounds like you don't want to be near your MiL, because she might hurt you again. Overall I'm hearing that you are afraid of her; you are scared that being near her will be uncomfortable and even painful. Let me know if that's right.

[MiLP]    So I read this, and it all made sense, until I got to the part about fear.   And that had me scratching my head.  I'm not afraid of my MiL.  She makes me angry.  But the thought of being around her doesn't make me shrink inside, it just makes me roll my eyes.
 

And then I thought, "Are you sure? Maybe you're afraid of her and you just don't want to acknowledge it!" 

So I asked DIMT, and he agreed, I'm not afraid of my MiL. Fear of her isn't a factor here.

This led to a very long conversation between DIMT and I. The upshot of the conversation was this: My relationship with his parents is mediated through him. His relationship with my parents is mediated through me. Neither of us would want to be so close to the other's parents that it would disrupt our marriage, and both of us tend to let the other take the lead in terms of how we, as a couple, interact with one or the other's parents.

As first this realization felt really strange and not good, but then we talked about it some more and realized it was okay.  Neither of us has particularly much in common with the other's parents, and the relationship between DIMT and his mother is way more important than my relationship with DIMT's mother.  That's normal - for us, the opposite would be weird.  If my MiL were my best friend, that would be strange and confusing for DIMT.

This dynamic heavily influences my options, because I am reluctant to do anything that DIMT doesn't want me to do.  He is very, very reluctant to have me directly address the problem-- to "break protocol", as it were.  There is no way of doing that, he thinks, without eliciting a negative reaction from my MiL-- shouting, resistance, upset, etc.  DIMT hates these things, and his mom has a history reacting this way.  (And yes, I recognize that I'm in part agreeing with you, in that this is where the fear in the whole situation lies; it just isn't my fear.) 

Don't be too disheartened that you misidentified the underlying emotion, though.  I hadn't realized what the actual underlying emotion was either, until I started doing this exchange with you!

[GE] Dear Mother in Law Problem,

Wow, I was so glad to read your letter. If just listening to me guess at what you were feeling helped you to have a long in-depth conversation with DIMT, that's fantastic. It sounds like you and DIMT reached some new understandings in how you all relate to each other as a family.

I assume that after this conversation you still want to build empathy with your MiL. If not, feel free to ignore the rest of this letter. :)

I believe that building empathy means trying to see someone else's perspective. One way to do that, as I've read, is to engage the other person with a curiosity about who they are as people and why they do the things that they do. If you cannot talk directly to MiL and ask her the questions you want to ask; can you talk to DIMT? Would he be willing to help you to understand her perspective? Perhaps talking about the things she's done in her life, the ways she's interacted with people in the past, can help you to see things through her eyes. 

Something else I've done in the past when I'm having trouble understanding someone else's perspective is to actually pretend that I am them. My friend says something to me, and I don't understand how they are feeling. So I repeat what they just said, in my head, imagining that I just said it. 

Please indulge me for a moment, and let's take what you said above as an example of this. You said, "My MiL's response to this was to tease me, telling me that the restaurant was singling me out, that they were deliberately snubbing me, etc. " Let's say you and I were out at dinner at one of our favorite restaurants. My tofu lettuce wraps were late, and your pork lettuce wraps came out very quickly. You said to me, "Oh, the restaurant is singling you out, they are deliberately snubbing you." The key is to imagine yourself saying this and asking yourself, why would you say those things? How would you say those things, what would you be feeling? 

Would you be able to understand her perspective?

[to be completed in part III]