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]

Let's hear a story; or Can empathy help me get along with my mother in law?

A few months ago a reader of this blog asked me for advice; she wanted to get along better with her mother in law. I was intrigued, could I do this? Could empathy help?  

I'd like to share our correspondence with you. This will be a multi-part post, because her story is long and deserves a bit more of our attention. So here we go! 

 

Dear Growing Empathy,

I've been reading your blog for a while now, and I really enjoy it. Your method for developing empathy is very different from mine. I tend to construct empathy by imagining a person's circumstances and experience, and how those things might have shaped their choices and the moment they're in. This method has always worked well for me, and it's gotten me through some otherwise empathy-difficult situations in my life.  

But now it's failed me utterly. The problem is my mother-in-law.

I've been married for about 15 years. My in-laws and I have never been close; there is a lot of geographical distance, and we don't really have anything in common. But that didn't prevent my mother-in-law (MiL) and I from having a perfectly lovely relationship in the beginning. My MiL went out of her way to be thoughtful. For example, while the Dude I'm Married To (DIMT hereafter) and I were engaged, we happened to be visiting his parents on my birthday, and my MiL baked me a cake and gave me goofy little presents. It was very nice of her, and I was quite touched.

About 5-6 years ago, she started saying things to me that weren't, um, nice. Sometimes they were anti-Semitic (I'm Jewish; my spouse's family is very nominally Christian). I've been told I have the wrong nose, the wrong ancestry and the wrong upbringing. I always knew my MiL was a little uncomfortable with me being Jewish, but I figured it would vanish over time. That kind of discomfort is not that unusual for a woman of her age and background, and for a long time, her attitude definitively fell into the striving-to-accept track, not the you-are-inferior track.   

Her comments aren't always anti-Semitic. On our most recent trip, for example, we went to a restaurant after our flight landed. For some reason, my order was very late, so that I was still waiting for my food while everyone else at the table had theirs. 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. She went on in this vein for a good half an hour, and by the time my meal finally arrived, all I wanted to do was leave. It doesn't sound like much, but in the circumstances, her callousness shocked me: I was exhausted and hungry, but also seriously shell-shocked; my father had died unexpectedly less than a week before.  

I'd like to get her to stop, but I don't have a lot of options in that regard. I tend to be pretty direct about most things, and ideally, I would just ask her what's going on. But that approach isn't open to me in this case. DIMT thinks it unlikely that she'll admit it's even happening, and asking her would break several of the family's unspoken rules, which might make the situation worse.  

So far, what I've been doing, basically, is duck and cover: I minimize my time in her company, and she and I are never alone. This worked fairly well on our most recent visit but won't help in the long term.

This situation breaks my empathy method because I have no idea why it’s happening. Have I done something to offend my MiL? That's the most obvious explanation, but I don't know what I did, and asking would break protocol.  

I've tried to imagine events or circumstances in her life that might have brought about this reaction.  But since I only noticed the pattern over the course of years, I can't pin down a when, much less a cause.

Here's my question: 

All of this has eroded my empathy for my MiL down to zero, and, as I said, my system to rebuild it has failed. Because I have no understanding of why she's doing this, I have no empathy for my MiL. As a result, I have no desire to visit my in-laws, and so DIMT sees his parents less and less. I don't feel right about that, and I don't think it's fair to him. 

I also think that if I could seize back some empathy for her-- particularly in relation to me-- I would be able to cast her comments in a different light. They wouldn't be any less toxic, but they might bother me less.

So, Growing Empathy, can you help? Can you give me a way of regaining some degree of empathy towards my MiL, so the run up to every family visit isn't suffused with dread? 

-       Mother in Law Problem

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 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 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.

I saw an interview the other day that talked about how one of the greatest obstacles to empathy is fear. If we are afraid of each other; no matter how much we have in common or how much we might already trust each other - we cannot build empathy. It actually removes any previous connections we have made (reduces it to zero, as you said above). For example, if my next-door neighbor pulls a knife on me, it's really hard to look past the knife and see the person. I'm just scared they are going to kill me. 

If fear is what's going on then I see two ways to look at this; you can try to build empathy (to remove fear) or you can try to remove fear (so that empathy has a chance to grow). It sounds like you've already tried the former, and it hasn't worked. I also think (and this is just my opinion here) if you confronted her directly now, I think the fear would make it really hard to listen to whatever she had to say and to ultimately build a connection. 

Let me know your thoughts on this.

[to be continued]

Thought-provoking bedtime empathy reading - a link party for you

There has been so, so much going on in the world of empathy studies that I can share with you. Here are a few examples:

Empathy Dynamics in Conflict Transformation - The Manual

Professor Lynne Cameron has recently released her ebook. It's free as a downloadable pdf or from iTunes, or a few cents from Amazon for your Kindle.

Prof. Cameron has some very good ideas in this book; she defines empathy in two parts, automatic and controlled. Automatic empathy she describes as the moment of 'ouch'; when you see someone stub their toe and immediately feel the pain yourself.  Controlled empathy she describes as the pause for thought and a chance to reflect on the person you see before you, which is what I've previously described as conscious empathy. Her manual includes case studies of conflict resolution between groups in Nepal and Kenya. I found it to be an easy read (not technical) and well worth my time.

Paul Bloom - Against Empathy forum debate

Here we have Mr. Bloom, doing what he does so well. He reminds us that empathy is not an all-encompassing solution to fix the world's problems. Then he goes on to describe several situations and studies that point to how empathy fails us; failing us in social policy, failing us in relationships with doctors, failing us in relationships in general. He argues that empathy isn't the best use of our personal effort. Instead, as I understand it, he thinks we should focus on the other social-positive elements of our relationships with other people like (his phrase) non-empathetic compassion, kindness, and good-will towards others.

This is again, another excellent read and I highly suggest reading both his side, and the responses to this article in the comments section.

Janet