When your best friend or partner or kid snaps at you, it’s easy to frame them as difficult. Anna Elton, a marriage and family therapist in Palm Beach, Fla., would like you to consider a different story. “When you see anger, it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” she says. “Anger is the secondary emotion. The primary emotion could be sadness, could be disappointment, could be stress.” That’s where empathy enters the picture. Tapping into it helps you look past the surface to find out what’s actually going on underneath, Elton says.
Your empathy level is what decides whether you feel closer to someone after a hard conversation or whether you feel like you’re on opposite sides—or, as Elton says, being on the same team vs. “you against me.” Practiced over time, it changes how you show up in every relationship. You can get better at it with practice, and empathy will serve you well: it can help you end arguments faster or avoid them altogether.
Here are five easy ways to build up your empathy before or after your next disagreement.
Pretend like you’re talking to a child
Imagine you’re explaining a disagreement to a child. Walk them through what happened, suggests HJ Cho, a clinical social worker in Bridgewater, N.J. Try not to use loaded words, a drawn-out backstory, or language that casts the other person as a villain—and focus on explaining what actually occurred, including how you felt and what you were thinking.
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“We’re not projecting; we’re not catastrophizing,” Cho says. “We’re relaying this situation so it can be understood by all.”
The exercise works because forced simplicity surfaces a more neutral version of events: ”the one that has room for another perspective,” Cho says.
Trade places with your partner on paper
Pick a recent interaction that didn’t go well, and write a paragraph…
