Empathize with people - not their problems.

Do you ever find yourself struggling to empathize with your partner, friend or co-worker about what they’re going through? As people, we all have different priorities and put meaning into different aspects of out lives. Therefore, it only makes sense that what is important to one person is insignificant to another.

Something that comes up a lot in therapy is people expressing that they are struggling to relate with their partner, friend or peer about what they’re going through. Either because it’s not something that they’ve gone through themselves or because it’s not something they can relate to.

This inherent difference in people can often to lead to conflict and interpersonal issues. One differentiating factor that might help in learning to deal with this is empathizing with the person rather then empathizing with the problem. For example, let’s say your partner is stressed out about a presentation they have to give at work but you can’t understand what the big deal is. It’s not that big of a meeting, the presentation is only 5 minutes and your partner knows what they’re talking about - why are they letting this get to them?

While one option is to get frustrated at your partners response, an alternative option is to look past the fact that they’re stressed out at the presentation and focus on the fact that they’re stressed out, period. Even though you may not be able to relate to what’s stressing them out, you certainly can relate to what it feels like to be stressed out.

In navigating how you respond, it might be helpful to focus on the element that you can relate to rather than focus on the element that you can’t.