68. Empathy and commitment

How can you ultimately apply this principle of equal treatment? 

Let’s take the example that you are in a couple with someone who is coming out of a breakup and who is therefore not yet completely ready for a relationship. You feel that the person is still in mourning and still has trouble turning the page. So showing empathy toward this person would mean that you understand their situation, you understand their difficulty, you understand this person’s need to go slowly. You respect the moments that are the unavoidable emotional waves in a breakup. And above all, you give them the time to grieve. Self-empathy in this case would be to ask yourself the question okay, until when? I am able to give the other this time to stay in a phase of uncertainty without hurting myself. 

The goal is to have a rather honest answer toward yourself and to check whether the answer you gave yourself, the timing you gave yourself, is really your true timing, you can often see that through the magnitude of your emotional waves in the face of the other’s emotional unavailability. If for example you tell yourself I feel completely able to give him six months. But if every time you feel him withdrawing, every time you feel him taking distance, you are in panic mode, it means that clearly, the deadline you gave yourself theoretically in your head is something theoretical and not an effective deadline that you can truly hold toward yourself because you are already paying the emotional price. 

A second scenario for commitment would be for example your partner is going through a difficult period, they may have, I don’t know, lost their job, be grieving the death of someone, they may have a mental health problem, depression, burnout etc… Because of this difficulty in life, they are unable to invest energy and time in the relationship. So in this aspect, you can tell yourself I want to commit to my partner. We got married for better but also for worse. I want to be present for my partner, to be there and to support them through this difficult trial they are living. So that would be the commitment you want to show toward your partner. Practicing the same toward yourself would be to ask yourself the question : “From what point do I feel that I am giving too much for the relationship, that I am giving too much for my partner and that I am forgetting my own personal balance ?”  Because in the end, when someone goes through a difficulty like that, the worst that could happen is that you also feel bad and so you are no longer even able to support the person etc… The application of this commitment to yourself in this scenario is to have a bit of a preventive attitude and to tell yourself okay to what extent am I able to give, to what extent am I able to support my partner and to do it wholeheartedly, in an energy of abundance without it coming at the expense of my own balance, at the expense of my own strength, at the expense of my own energy and my own stability.

Another example would be if there is an expatriation project and the couple agrees that the person who has the expatriation contract will work while the other partner will mainly take care of the children. It can be a commitment that the couple decided together. Let’s take the case where the person who stays at home regrets their decision. The application of commitment to yourself would be to tell yourself okay, but does this decision that I ultimately made beforehand, that I had never experienced before, does this commitment that I made toward my couple, toward my husband, make me happy or not? Does it go in the direction of my development and my personal life projects or not? Until when do I want to sacrifice my deep desires for fulfillment to respect a commitment I agreed to before ultimately living the experience. And there, committing to yourself would be to tell yourself okay, I accept that a priori I made a commitment and that I made a mistake, that I realized ultimately that this commitment was not exactly what I wanted, and to face renegotiating the terms of the commitment, to dare to have a difficult discussion to find a better balance. By the way, not forgetting yourself completely for a relationship can seem selfish at times in the short term but personally if you completely forget yourself in a relationship you risk accumulating a lot of frustration. And this frustration is felt indirectly in the couple and often explodes later in the form of a crisis so it is not necessarily a solution either. I will do a podcast episode where I will talk about this emotional bank account.

I would like to give another example of empathy. If the partners have different rhythms, for example one partner would already like to move in with the other, the other is not in too much of a hurry, or one partner would already like to get married, but the other finds that it is still a little too early. In this case showing empathy would be to say I want to respect the other’s rhythm, I want it to come from him, for him to really want it, for it to be a natural unfolding on his part. And self-empathy would be to tell yourself but to what extent am I forgetting my timing and from when am I obliged to respect my need to move forward and ultimately to put this wish to respect the other’s timing on the same level as respecting my own timing.

So the last example would be to say well, at the moment we are at, we became a couple. In fact, I had a job as an employee, a stable job, a stable income that created a certain level of safety in the couple. And then at some point, the need or the wish to create an activity, to launch your business, to become an entrepreneur comes. The commitment to yourself would be to respect this wish to create, this need to realize your professional dream versus and not to give up your dream, by not launching what you really want to launch, just out of fear of the other’s reaction or the other’s worry, or the other’s aversion to taking risks. The commitment to the other would be to commit to a certain level of safety for the couple, for example by setting a clear trial deadline, by having enough savings to contribute your share of the budget in the couple.

So I hope that this episode has given you keys to manage to do this thread off. Ultimately, between how I want to be with the other and how I also want to include myself in the equation.