Marriage On the Rocks?

By Kim Cooper

The role of empathy in healing your marriage

 

If you are in a troubled marriage you have come to the right place to start healing your emotional life. Today I would like to share with you a dream I had recently;

“Walking along an unfamiliar street at night I saw a man writhing in pain on the footpath. Scared  to offer assistance at first I assessed the situation as best I could from a safe distance and after spending a moment watching this man’s total mental and physical anguish, perceived that he offered no threat to me.

I moved in closer then and looked around to find someone to help.  A middle aged asian man was walking towards us, and I beckoned to him.  A bystander, at first he put up his hand showing he was afraid, just as I had been at first, and that he did not wish to become involved.  I said simply “I think he is having a stroke” and he then came over and helped me carry the writhing man into the nearest establishment, which from outside looked like a restaurant.

Once inside we saw that we had in fact entered a strange kind of hospital that was slightly lower than street level and had floors above and below.  All of the staff were women and the matron on the desk looked a bit like Liz Hurley playing the devil in Bedazzled.  She said “Oh yes we will help him”, but from her laugh and the evil mischief in her eyes we knew that she really intended on torturing him.

Sitting in the waiting room and wondering how to escape, I couldn’t help notice the women all around us. Some were old fashioned nurses looking authoritative and stern with long narrow skirts down to the ground and their hair pulled back tight in high nurses hats. Others had all begun dance steps in preparation for an erotic dance class and I realised they would soon be all taking their clothes off. I thought, “Oh no, once that happens this poor man won’t feel able to ask anyone here for help.”  I then looked towards the stern nurses again and thought them clearly in league with the evil matron.

The scene then shifted, taking us (myself and the asian man helping me) further down into the building complex, where to our surprise there was an up-market and sophisticated shopping mall. 

An instant later we were outside again looking up towards the upper levels of the building and wondering how we would rescue the poor man we had unwittingly delivered up to be tortured. Without entering the building I could see what was happening inside; the matron had our protagonist hooked up to a machine and when the nurses turned the dial to ‘1’ he lost the ability to talk, to ‘2’ he lost the ability to think, and to ‘3’ he entered a nightmare hallucination.”

I believe this dream was showing me the ways humans can block expressing empathy to each other and particularly how women can do this to men in their lives when their relationship (or their man) is in need of healing.

My interpretation of this dream …

At the beginning of the dream the asian man and I were naturally cautious and fearful of becoming involved until we assessed the situation more closely. This kind of fear is natural and healthy but we both soon overcame this and empathy began to rule our actions instead. Once inside the ‘hospital’, the women — while pretending to be there to help the suffering man — were either oblivious to his condition or intent on torturing him instead. The dream laid this out in stages, which later were labelled 1, 2 and 3 on the dial of their torture machine …

The woman who gives too much and tries to please

• Do you put yourself forward in a sexually seductive way when you should see that really your husband needs some understanding?
• Do you do things to please your husband but then use those favours to create a debt he apparently owes you?

When women put men in debt in this way it takes their man’s ‘voice’ away and stops him feeling able to confide in his wife and ask for the help he really needs.

In my dream this was symbolised by the girls about to start the erotic dance class. Men like sex for sure – but a naked woman is not someone a man feels he can confide in or talk to and just like women, men need emotional connection and understanding. Women can try and silence their husbands in this way when they are scared that if he speaks his truth it might be that he really wants to walk away.

As terrifying as these kind of conversations can be (where a man expresses his doubts and negativity), sometimes this can be the beginning of a better marriage and not the end. If you can be compassionate and interested and let your husband express his doubts without arguing or you trying to convince him to stay, his feelings may very well change. A good thing to say in these situations is “I am sad you feel that way – but I guess you must be feeling pretty bad.” The less you argue the less you will give him to resist and this will help him be able to voice what he is feeling in a way that may help his feelings to change.

“But often our husbands will not find the courage to express their true doubts and fears (even if we ask) and instead will remain aloof and find excuses to be angry and upset with us instead. Wives can then become  fearful because of the doubt they see on his face and obsess and accuse rather than really try and put themselves in their husband’s shoes.”

The woman who gives too much and tries to please doesn’t have the courage to offer understanding when her man has doubts and instead she may fall back on all she will claim that he owes her and use emotional manipulation trying to keep him by either becoming angry or distressed and sad.

She may also use sex or other methods of trying to please him and in doing so attempt to create an even greater debt that he owes her. This might succeed in silencing his negativity (until he really gets mad), but it will make her much less attractive as a person that he really feels he can trust and talk to.

The Stern Authority Figure

 

Once a man feels in debt to his wife in a way that stops him being able to express his true thoughts and feelings, this is the time stage 2 can set in. Although he stops voicing any negative feelings towards her, she can still sense his doubts and negative judgements.

If she has not grown up with emotionally intelligent role models, it may be easier for this wife’s fragile ego to pretend something is wrong with him or missing from his heart rather than let any of those negative judgements or doubts come to air.

A woman can then decide she must take over the authority in his life and set about trying to either ‘fix him’, ‘teach him a lesson’ or reject him emotionally before he can reject her further.

This wife subverts her feelings of rejection and anger into a cold authority role. For him to avoid the emotional manipulation we saw in stage one, he now must submit and not only stay silent but also stop thinking for himself.

This wife may also try and psychoanalyze her husband and decide he has a mental illness and try and figure out what drugs he should be on. (It is at this point many women find our site at www.NarcissismCured.com where we validate the lack of love they are experiencing in their marriage, while also making them aware of their own codependence and how they are playing a role in emotionally driving their husbands away.)



This doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with him or that the problems are all her fault. The point is that she only sees that he is not loving her and meeting her emotional needs rather than seeing he has problems and concerns of his own. She acts as though being in love is the solution to everything rather than putting herself in his shoes and feeling any true empathy for him.

I have sometimes said to women in this situation “Maybe the problem is that he doesn’t like you very much at the moment?” and see if they can even consider this as a reason for his behavior. I have met women whose husbands tell them straight out they don’t love them anymore and instead of listening and trying to be brave and put themselves in their husband’s shoes to gain some understanding, instead they will argue and tell him why he is wrong to feel that way and insist that his lack of compassion for her is a sign he is mentally ill.

This might sound cruel of me, but the truth is if we cannot even consider that our partner not liking us might have something to do with their lack of compassion for us, without going to pieces – there is probably no place left for an honest relationship to begin. We all hate each other sometimes and the only sure thing about feelings is that when we are allowed to express them and we are taken seriously, usually they will change.

This is not the same as allowing yourself to be verbally abused. There is a big difference between someone being upset or angry and a person trying to scapegoat their short comings and inadequacies on you rather than looking at these in themselves. This is going to take some wisdom on your part. When things get rough is your partner being honest about their negative feelings towards you or are they dumping on you because they are feeling inadequate about themselves?

Most important is how you respond. Do you try and read how they are feeling and show empathy and understanding or do you become defensive and retaliate and allow things to spiral downwards into a fight?

There are many articles in our members area for dealing with verbal abuse and there are many situations when the best thing to do will be to learn how to effectively end a conversation and walk away. First however I think it is very important that in defending yourself you don’t block your partner being allowed to express their true doubts and fears or you be ready to honestly try and guess what those doubts and fears might be (in an empathetic way) if their insecurities run too deep to talk about.

The Bitter Nightmare

 

This is where where my dream entered the madness of the up market shopping mall and on the torture dial where the man’s hallucinations and nightmare began. The hallucinations of this ‘nightmare’ begin when we ignore the insecurity and pain our partner is experiencing and expect that we can fill the emotional hole our relationship has left in us with material excess and diversions instead. Bitterness, envy and greed set in and even if financially affluent, nothing material will ever fill that hole inside that really wanted to be loved. No amount of food, drugs, or material diversions will ever be enough and our emotional life, now filled with bitterness and resentment, becomes a living hell.

This nightmare is also usually beyond what we are capable of maintaining or sustaining, and no matter how financial, eventually we find ourselves sliding into debt and despair.

This leads to the evil matron in my dream; sly and mocking she represents the way women can hold resentment and grudges against men in a way that (because we feel hurt and rejected by men) we use to try and regain our self esteem in ways that finally take all of a man’s power away.

You often see this wry mocking attitude portrayed by women in ads on television. He will be trying to do or say something, but she will be rolling her eyes and mocking him to the audience while making a joke of how stupid he is. Here is one of numerous examples of that kind of ad

and the article I found this ad featured in “Dumb Men Commercials”: We Still Lose, which explains how this attitude really does nothing to empower us as women. What is missing from my dream is the role of an empathetic, understanding or compassionate woman role model.

If you have read much of my work you will have run into the authoritative nurse I often talk about as a positive character. I don’t want to confuse her with the nasty authoritarian nurse in my dream and so let’s get the two different images of nurse (one disempowering and one healing) quite clear …



The Stiff Autocratic ‘Nurse’

 

• Mainly interested in her own ‘systems’ and agenda that give her power and authority over her husband. This will mainly consist of her expectations of what she thinks he would do for her if he were whole and well.
• She is obsessed with finding things wrong with him to justify him not loving her the way she believes he should.
• Authoritarian but easily disempowered (and made angry) by his pride, deceit or stubbornness.
• Only interested in empathising with him emotionally if she believes there will be a direct payoff in it for her.
• When he finds pleasure in anything that is not to do with her she will be hurtful and tell him he is wrong.

She may also be obsessed with analysing his actions and words and trying to make him see how wrong he is to not feel attracted and loving towards her. She may do this by telling him he is wrong and trying to make him feel guilty or by trying to teach him a lesson by her threatening to leave. This often backfires when he doesn’t seem to care if she leaves and this only makes her hurt and anger worse.

 

The Loving Empathetic ‘Nurse’

I am using the term nurse here because I am talking about how this woman behaves when her husband is needing empathy or emotional support.

• Genuinely interested in her husband’s well being.
• Kind and compassionate but able to tell what is real and important as opposed to when her husband is being proud, deceitful or stubborn.
• Assertive enough not to engage in immature nonsense from him.
• Emotionally intelligent and listens to genuine complaints but doesn’t take his negativity too personally.
• Self Aware enough to be comfortable in a supportive empathetic role.
• Interested in his hopes, dreams and feelings that don’t directly involve her.
• Inspires trust in her emotional stability, knowledge and leadership ability.

The biggest problem with this whole scenario is that so many women are insecure, negative and emotionally ‘sick‘ too; that rather than being able to help our husbands when they are feeling insecure or unworthy instead many of us get caught trying to ‘fix’ him in order that he will then love us right and ‘fix’ us in return. The ‘fix’ in this case is usually seen as love and attention, but the truth is that love and attention on their own don’t always make everything right.

I know I expected this from Steve for many years and even when he was honest about his wound (he hadn’t gone to college and had no tertiary job training and felt unable to support us); for the first 10 years of our marriage I really didn’t help him with this and expected him to help my emotional insecurity instead.

Get Well Quick So You Can Take Care of Me!

So there is a real danger here for women getting started on our program which is this … Don’t think you are going to be able to ‘fix‘ your husband emotionally so that ‘hey presto’ he will then be able to love and fix you in return! It won’t work that way and you will be entering this work with the totally wrong expectations.

Because if you want to take an emotionally intelligent path to a better marriage, as unfair as this may sound; you are going to need to work on building trust with him while you become more emotionally intelligent about loving and caring for yourself.

And if you are a man and you are ready to do the work of changing your relationship, the same thing applies to you.

You cannot build trust in helping someone if really you are just waiting for them to help you in return. This will make you impatient and cause you to lack judgement in what your partner truly needs from you. This misunderstanding shows up most clearly in how many women I hear from who say that challenging their man is the pillar (in the Love Safety Net Work Book) they are having the most trouble with.

I think this is because many women see challenging their man (which is BTW the fastest way to build attachment and trust) as being able to get him to do what they want him to. This is NOT what challenges are about.

Get the Diagnosis Right

Instead, challenging your partner is about you being able to accurately diagnose the real cause of your partner’s insecurity… and if you have identified it correctly it will probably be something they appreciate you offering them encouragement and support with.

In my case with Steve I got over my past resentment (the evil matron); dropped trying to be more sexy and seductive (the girls doing the erotic dance class); stopped trying to be the ‘authority’ in his life (The Stiff authoritarian nurse); and instead put myself in his shoes and started seeing that his lack of professional training was really hurting his self esteem. I put myself in his shoes and found empathy in my heart for him and even when there was very little in it for me in the short term, I challenged Steve to learn a book keeping program (because it was something he could do from home and he had always been good with numbers) and even lined up his mother to help him with it and encourage him. I then left him alone and gave him space and time to get started on it himself (getting our taxes sorted out) with her help.

That was a big change for me and helped Steve much more than all the time I had spent previously talking to him and trying to get him to feel for me.

Then as Steve became less insecure about himself, he did eventually begin feeling for me more but that took quite some time and it wasn’t my objective in helping him. Instead my objective was to truly help him start feeling better about himself.

Get Our WorkBook at Half Price

Today I am going to give you a chance to buy The Love Safety Net Workbook for half price (download only) and encourage you to start with the last chapter and see if you have got your ‘diagnosis’ right by looking through the gap finder exercise.

If you are looking at the gaps in your partner that bother you the most you are not doing this exercise right.

Instead look at your own gaps first and then think about the ones in your partner you believe are really hurting them and making them feel insecure about themselves. Hounding and pestering isn’t challenging a person, so please try and remember the kind, smart and warm hearted nurse and really spend some time putting yourself in their shoes and finding some true empathy before you make any kind of start.

You will need to be ready to heal yourself too and so if you haven’t already, please check out 10 Steps to Overcome Codependence and Your Blind Spot. The world doesn’t need any more spiteful sassy know-it-all women, temptresses or stern authoritarian officials. Instead what we are short on are caring confident wives and mothers who are ready to show true compassion and wisdom in healing ourselves and healing our families. 

For a limited time only please use this discount code: lsnspecialoffer in our check out to receive a half price discount on The Love Safety Net WorkBook. (download version only).

Kim Cooper