Repair: Responding to a Lack of Empathy
When you are in a close relationship and the other person does something that doesn't meet your needs, you may want to repair the disconnect you experience. Naturally, you hope that the other person will see the pain they stimulated in you and want to offer care and empathy for your experience. If the other person has the resources to do this, repair and healing can happen relatively easily. But what happens when the other person is not willing or does not have the capacity to offer you empathy?
You likely notice a sense of hopelessness, desperation, anger, or demand. In your mind, you might even be thinking that you deserve an apology from this person. Of course, your own attachment to the idea that they have to give you an apology and offer empathy stimulates more reactivity in both of you. In fact, you may be so attached to this idea that you can't imagine another way forward. This thought, in turn, stimulates more reactivity.
This is a painful place to be. When you imagine that you can only move forward with healing if they do what you want, you suffer. You suffer because a part of you knows that you cannot control them and you resent the sense of “power under”, impotence, and uncertainty that you might experience as you wait for them to apologize.
In the consciousness of Mindful Compassionate Dialogue and Nonviolent Communication, one of the most empowering understandings is that your needs can be met with a variety of strategies. This includes your needs for healing and connection. When in a moment of challenge, hurt, or grief, you forget the power of many strategies to meet a need, your world becomes smaller, and you lose your own sense of agency. When you lose your sense of agency you will find yourself in reactive habits such as pleading, demanding, or attacking. This is not the “you” you want to be.
Of course it is ideal, when someone does something that doesn't meet your needs, that they are willing and able to offer empathy for your experience and commit to doing it differently next time so that everyone's needs can be considered. This is the most common and basic form of repair.
There are many reasons someone might not be able to offer you empathy for the impact of their actions on you. They may be hurting about needs unmet because of your actions and are waiting for you to apologize. They may have shame about what they've done and are defending against their own shame by avoiding repair. They may not be able to sort out the difference between “being right” and noticing an action that meets or doesn't meet needs. Thus, they imagine that offering empathy or an apology is saying that their action was wrong, and therefore their needs are invalid. They may even not have realized the impact of their action on you. Whatever their reason is, it doesn't need to hold you hostage.
You can move forward with your own healing and receive empathy from someone else. You may need empathy not only for the original action of the other person, but also for the grief you feel about not receiving an apology and empathy directly from them. Once you have received empathy and experience healing in your own heart, your perspective will naturally expand. With more resources, you will have greater flexibility about how you approach your relationship with the original person. A number of options might occur to you, such as:
Offer curiosity about what was going on for them when they did that which didn't meet your needs
Invite someone else to help with the repair dialogue
Silently send them love
Set a life-serving boundary so that the same behavior cannot occur again
Offer honest expression, which will no doubt be more connected and clear than any original attempt
The essential thing to remember here is that your willingness to let go of the strategy of first receiving empathy from the person who behaved in a way that didn't meet your needs, opens up new possibilities. You maintain your own sense of agency as you decide how you want to continue with that relationship. At the most basic level, you decide to invest more resources in creating a safe and supportive space to reconnect with that person or you decide to invest less resources and set more clear boundaries to take care of your needs in future similar situations.
Practice
Take a moment now to reflect on your relationships. Is there a relationship in which you are insisting (this could be internally) that the other person offer empathy or an apology? If so, are you willing to find a way to receive support and empathy from someone else as a first step?