By Judi Light Hopson, Emma H Hopson and Ted Hagen/Tribune News Service
Is your marriage feeling more and more stressful? Do you worry that divorce is on the horizon? Or, maybe you and your co-worker just had a major argument. Relationships can explode when lack of understanding leads to quarrel after quarrel.
However, relationships can suffer when you don’t have quarrelling going on. Perhaps your marriage just feels blah. There’s no stress. It’s just that there’s no spark or close feeling. It feels kind of dead.
Or, maybe you don’t dislike your co-worker. You just can’t connect. You can’t get a creative spark going between you. You simply tolerate each other.
No relationship can grow or feel good without a healthy exchange of feelings.
In fact, couples may fight to establish a connection when they aren’t sharing feelings in a healthy way. Subconsciously, they decide to share unhealthy anger or aggravation versus no feelings at all. If no emotions whirl around, both parties may feel the relationship will die.
Each person must relate to the feelings of the other or they will have a stagnated relationship. It certainly cannot blossom further.
It can be hard to have a relationship with someone when you cannot, well, relate to this person. In other words, you cannot feel anything they are feeling. Or, they cannot feel any sensitivity to what bothers or excites you.
Husbands who can relate to their wives’ feelings, for example, usually find it harder to cheat on their wives. Why? These men can imagine the pain they’d be causing. Husbands who don’t bother to discover what their wives are feeling may or may not choose to cheat. But, if they do cheat, these types of husbands cannot instantly grasp the hurt they are causing.
No one can learn sensitivity overnight. It is an acquired psychological art. We all must actively work at it. Our world as a whole needs to embrace human sensitivity. Without it, our world will become an unbearable place.
In fact, lack of sensitivity toward the feelings of others is already rampant. Bullies in high schools, the workplace, and on the world’s battlefields leave an ocean of hurt on our planet. Plenty of people cry themselves to sleep every night.
In order to stop feeling for others, you must learn to freeze your own emotions. That’s why self-care and taking good care of your own emotions is healthy and not at all selfish.
``Some executives I coach seem hard toward the feelings of their employees,’’ says Jeff Brunson, a career coach from Tennessee. ``I help them see the importance of valuing the feelings of other people from every standpoint. Employees who know their bosses don’t care about them will not give their best. Everybody loses.’’
Here are some tips for helping other people stay sensitive and sane:
Remind your friends and co-workers to honour their needs. Simply state: ``Take time out to relax today’’, or ``Call me if you’d like to talk after work”.
Share your own hurts with others. If you pretend to have all of the answers, you are not doing the world a favour. When you share your own vulnerabilities, you are helping other people do the same.
Go out of your way to listen to a stressed person. Sure, it can be tough to listen to griping and groaning. But, offering support to a friend means he will do the same for you when you need it.
State your philosophies on kindness to others. Advocate for sensitivity and do it shamelessly.
For example, an executive in our area often tells us, ``My philosophy is that if my wife is happy, my life will be happy. Happy wife equals happy life.’’
Hate, hurt and stress are growing by leaps and bounds in our world. If we all believe that sensitivity toward others takes too much time, we are killing the kindness we all need.
``We all need to practise extreme sensitivity toward others,’’ says a psychologist we’ll call Rob. Rob says that he seldom sees married couples in counselling who are extremely sensitive and kind toward each other.
``Counselling always, in my experience, involves one partner trying to wake the other up. One is clued in to what’s good, what’s right. The other is resisting change, resisting sensitivity.’’
Sensitivity toward other people increases options for changing any hurtful situation in the home or at work. Not caring about the feelings of others and turning one’s attention to selfishness increases the odds that our world will grow sicker.
♦Judi Light Hopson is the executive director of the stress management website USA Wellness Cafe at www.usawellnesscafe.com
Emma Hopson is an author and a nurse educator. Ted Hagen is a family psychologist.