There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don’t mean for yourself and for the family ’cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning—because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ’cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.13
Fortunately, loving and liking often do go hand in hand. But when they do not, we can love the people we do not like—we can will them good. Genuineness reminds us not to feign affection when it is not felt. No one is helped by an insincere expression of liking. Because we are human, there will be times when we cannot will love for specific other persons. In those times, I generally choose to avoid that person during the period when I am not able to love him.
Acceptance Is an Important
Expression of Love
Acceptance is best defined as an attitude of neutrality toward another person or persons. When a person is accepting, he offers an atmosphere largely uncontaminated by evaluations of the other’s thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. The other person can cry or laugh or be angry—and even if his behavior is disliked, he is accepted. For that reason, I sometimes call acceptance “in-spite-of-love.” I can often provide an atmosphere of neutrality for the other in spite of the fact that his behaviors and outlooks may not correspond with my values, and may even conflict with them.
Every person stands in need of acceptance. No one is perfect. Everyone has fallen short of what he could be. Each has failed to fulfill his responsibilities at times. Each of us has done things that are hurtful to ourselves and others. When I am different from others, or less than my best self, acceptance by another helps me realize that despite my inadequacies and eccentricities, I can be loved as I am. Acceptance nourishes constructive self-love and helps mobilize my resources to maximize my potential.
As I endeavor to be more accepting, I find it helpful to be aware of several facts about human nature:
No one is perfectly accepting. Human beings are finite creatures. Some measure of nonacceptance is part of what it means to be a member of the species Homo sapiens. We are people, not gods.
Some people tend to be more accepting than others. A number of factors, including early experiences in one’s family and possibly even one’s genetic inheritance, influence a person’s general level of acceptance.
The level of acceptance in a person is constantly shifting. Thomas Gordon points out that changes in one’s self, in the other person, and in the environment cause fluctuations in one’s level of acceptance.14 When a person is rested, unhurried, and happy, for example, he is more likely to be accepting than when he is unhappy, tired, tense, and rushed. Instead of striving for the impossible goal of total consistency in human relationships, it is more feasible to strive for congruence with one’s inner feelings and responsiveness to the situation in which one finds himself.
It is natural to have favorites. When a person tries to express love equally to all his children, friends, or students, he often ends up relating on the basis of the lowest common emotional denominator. Or he offers a phony niceness and friendliness to those he likes least—thereby increasing the distance in those relationships.
Each of us can become more accepting. Some of the skills described in this book help people increase their level of acceptance. It is important to remember, however, that no one can become perfectly accepting and that some people, as a result of family environment and many other factors, have a head start in the ability to be accepting.
Pseudoacceptance is harmful to other people and to relationships. Some people pretend to be accepting of another’s behavior but are merely playing a role. They may be playing the role of a “good parent” or a “good teacher” or a “nice guy.” They try to show acceptance, but inwardly they feel nonaccepting. When a person feels nonaccepting inwardly, he or she may say they are not irritated by the other and that they are happy about the relationship. But their nonverbals communicate the truth. The look in the eyes and the tone of voice shout one’s nonacceptance so loudly that the verbal expression of acceptance is drowned out. The person feigning acceptance ultimately communicates nonacceptance. If one cannot become genuinely accepting of another person, it is better to admit it openly. Though conflict may occur through such honesty, reconciliation can also be achieved and a meaningful relationship ultimately established.
Lastly, acceptance is not synonymous with approval. I can accept another person’s feelings and still not approve of his behaviors. It is possible to be accepting and confrontative at the same time.
Respect: Another
Core Element of Love
Genuine love respects what Buber refers to as the “elemental otherness of the other.” It recognizes the sanctity of the other’s privacy, it supports his self-direction, and it fosters greater potency rather than greater dependency on the other’s part. Love maintains a reverence—a distance—in the relationship.
Real love is not intrusive. It does not violate the privacy of others. It does not try to force its way into the inner sanctum of another’s personality.
Parents are often tempted to pry into their children’s lives. They would like to prolong the period of self-disclosure that is typical of many young children. But children have a psychological need to develop a private life. They need to keep some things secret from their parents and others. When their child becomes more closed to them, parents often become frustrated or irritated. They typically ply the child or teenager with many questions. Some even turn into detectives and watch stealthily from a hiding place to see what their child is doing and with whom he is doing it.
This tendency to push into the secret places of another’s life is not limited to the relationship between parents and children. Spouses often intrude on each other’s privacy, teachers on their pupils’ private lives, and managers and supervisors on the personal domain of their employees; counselors sometimes force their way into areas that their clients are not yet ready to disclose; and so on.
The development of each person’s individuality hinges on his ability to keep self-selected parts of his life secret. The Swiss psychotherapist Paul Tournier has written a marvelous small book entitled Secrets, in which he says:
To have secrets, to know how to keep them to one’s self, to give them up only willingly, constitutes the first action in the formation of the individual…. To respect the secrecy of whoever it may be, even your own child, is to respect his individuality. To intrude upon his private life, to violate his secrecy, is to violate his individuality…. Every man, to feel respected as an individual, needs to feel absolutely free to say what he wishes and to keep as a secret what he wishes.15
Genuine love does not trespass on the secret places of another’s life.
Real love supports the other’s self-direction. Genuine love persistently refrains from possessiveness, domination, or the imposition of values. It allows and encourages the other to be “himself in freedom.” The questions Carl Rogers raises for psychotherapists are relevant to us all:
Do we respect [the other person’s] capacity and his right to self-direction, or do we basically believe that his life would be best guided by us? To what extent do we have a need and a desire to dominate others? Are we willing for the individual to select and choose his own values, or are our actions guided by the conviction (usually unspoken) that he would be happiest if he permitted us to select for him his values and standards and goals?16
Genuine love fosters great potency in the other. It diminishes his dependency. It does not conspire with his weakness, but calls forth the other’s strength. Love holds back fr
om “helping” another when that “help” is likely to diminish the other’s responsibility for his own life. Some of the most successful work with drug-dependent persons carefully avoids many of the things that therapists, teachers, parents, managers, and others typically do that diminish the strength, resourcefulness, and self-esteem of others. David Deitch describes the attitude engendered in the early Daytop program:
I will relate to you in a manner that benefits the dignity of man. It means that I refuse to act as though you are fragile, or crippled, or damned. I will, instead, regard you as capable of fulfilling your aspirations, and I will expect you to try to be productive.17
Love is being present with another person in his time of need. But love does not do for the other person those things that are his to do for himself. True love is a highly disciplined caring that resists the many enticing ways of helping that tend to enfeeble the other.
Love maintains a reverence—a distance—in the relationship. People commonly think of love as closeness—and that is certainly an important aspect of love. But distance is needed, too. As H. Richard Niebuhr says:
Love is reverence: it keeps its distance even as it draws near; it does not seek to absorb the other in the self or want to be absorbed by it; it rejoices in the otherness of the other; it desires the beloved to be what he is and does not seek to refashion him into a replica of the self or to make him a means to the self s advancement. As reverence love … seeks knowledge of the other, not by way of curiosity nor for the sake of gaining power but in rejoicing and wonder. In all such love there is an element of “holy fear” which is not a form of flight but rather deep respect for the otherness of the beloved and the profound unwillingness to violate his integrity.18
Warmth: “Love” Tends
to Generate “Like”
A person may accept me and treat me with respect but still not like anything about me. Acceptance and respect may or may not be accompanied by warmth. I may be able to survive on an interpersonal diet of acceptance and respect, but it will take more than that for me to flourish. If I am to blossom, I need some warm, positive, emotional contact with people. I crave having my uniqueness noticed and valued. Appreciation—and to a much greater degree, affection—provide that warmth.
When there is little or no liking between people, respect and acceptance can often be willed. Once we accept and respect a person, he tends to be more himself with us. As we get to really know him, feelings of liking often follow. Willed love leads to liking much of the time.
One of the ironies of human relationships, though, is that people often tend to be less accepting and respectful of those they like most (and/or with whom they have intimate ties, such as husband/wife, child/parent, etc.) There is a tendency to try to impose our values on, and to be more judgmental and less respectful or accepting with, precisely those persons whom we like most. Our intimate relationships need the disciplined will of love as well as the warmth of liking.
EMPATHY
Empathy is the third key quality that can enrich interpersonal communication.
Two centuries ago, John Woolman walked barefoot from Baltimore to Philadelphia. He did it to receive in his own body some measure of the pain that black slaves suffered when they were forced to walk barefoot over long distances. By putting himself in the slave’s place, he better understood what slavery meant to the slave. He had empathy.
An executive of a steel company in Cleveland resigned his position and applied for work as a day laborer in another city. Some of his friends thought his behavior was “bizarre.” Subsequently working side by side with laborers, experiencing their life as fully as he could, he gained a very different perspective on worker’s problems. He then entered the field of labor relations and became a recognized authority partly because of his ability to understand the laborer’s plight. He had empathy.
Richard Watson Guilder served on a New York City commission dealing with tenement housing. He wanted to understand the plight of families burned out of their homes and to discover the cause of the many fires that destroyed that type of housing. He had a fire department gong placed in his bedroom. Every tenement fire in the Lower East Side was reported on his gong so that he might personally inspect the blaze, meet the people, and investigate the causes. He had empathy.
At the close of the Civil War when many in the North felt a passionate hatred for southerners and wanted to impose a punitive peace, Abraham Lincoln tried to serve the whole country “with malice toward none, with charity for all” How did he avoid the vindictive spirit that was so common in the North? One clue comes from his statement to a friend: “I have not suffered by the South,” he said. “I have suffered with the South. Their pain has been my pain. Their loss has been my loss.” He had empathy.
The word empathy comes to us as a translation of the word used by German psychologists, einfühlung, which literally means “feeling into.” It is the ability to understand another person pretty much as he understands himself. The empathic person is able to “crawl into another’s skin” and see the world through his eyes. He listens to others in a nonprejudicial, nonjudgmental way. He hears the other person’s story as the other chooses to present it and notes the special significance the story has for the other.
The Apathy-Empathy-Sympathy
Continuum
I find it easier to understand empathy when I see it on a continuum that ranges from apathy to sympathy (see the following table).
Apathy Empathy Sympathy
“I don’t care.”
“Looks like you’re really feeling down today.”
“You poor thing …”
“That’s your problem!”
“Sounds as if you were really hurt by that.”
“I feel just dreadful for you!”
Apathy is defined in the dictionary as “a lack of feeling or a lack of interest or concern.” When I am apathetic, I am uninvolved. Usually I send a nonverbal message which means something like this:
“You go your way, and I’ll go mine. I wish you no harm, but I’ll give you no help. I don’t care to be burdened with your problems or lifted by your joys. Do me the favor of leaving me alone.”
In modern urban society, it is impossible to really relate to all the people we meet. Some selective apathy is required for psychic survival. Otherwise, our interpersonal circuits would become overloaded, we would “blow a fuse” and be shut down interpersonally for a while, or we would drain our interpersonal energy and all our relationships would glow less brightly.
While selective apathy is necessary, many people are inappropriately apathetic. Some are reclusive and hide from contact with virtually all people. Some are exclusively task-oriented and only interact with others when it furthers one of their goals. Others are with people a great deal but avoid feeling-level interactions. Excessive detachment from other people and from their feelings results in a dwarfed and stunted existence.
Sympathy lies at the other end of the continuum. Sympathy is an overinvolvement in the emotion of another person or persons. Sympathy can so undermine the strength and separateness of the “helper” that he is incapable of helping when he is most needed. I have seen sympathetic people so overcome by the grief of another at a funeral home that the bereaved had to console his supposed comforter.
Sympathy is defined as “feeling for” another person in contrast to empathy, which is “feeling with” the other. Sympathy, though it does not come from a position of strength, is often condescending. It frequently conveys an “Oh-you-poor-thing” attitude. It weakens its receiver just when the person most needs to maintain his own strength.
There is a strong tendency for sympathy to sink into sentimentality. Sentimentality is the inappropriate experience and enjoyment of one’s emotions. In this regard, Tolstoy wrote of the wealthy Russian ladies who cried at tragedies enacted at the theater but were oblivious to the discomfort of their own coachmen sitting outside in the freezing cold.
Apathy, when it is prevalent in signif
icant relationships, can be very destructive. Consistent undiluted sympathy, I believe, is even more harmful than apathy. The condescension of pity and the inappropriate experience of emotion that is sentimentality are harmful to both the sympathizer and the object of his or her emotional binge. Sympathy, however, is seldom expressed without some empathy present. To the degree that empathy is involved, the experience of sympathy/empathy can be partially constructive.
Empathy is walking with another person into the deeper chambers of his self—while still maintaining some separateness. It involves experiencing the feelings of another without losing one’s own identity. It involves accurate response to another’s needs without being infected by them. The empathic person feels the hurt of the other but is not disabled by it. He senses the other person’s bewilderment, anger, fear, or love as if it were his own feeling, but he does not lose the “as if” nature of his involvement. When a person loses the ability to separate his own feelings from the feelings of another person, he is no longer empathic.
Empathy is hard to describe because it is made up of components that seem to be opposite and contradictory. Empathy is a close identification with another person—but if the identification becomes excessive, it is no longer empathy. Empathy is a kind of detached involvement with the feeling world of another person or persons.
People Skills_How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts Page 35