Empathy

Following a hospital forum on doctor-patient relationship, I spent another whole day teaching the medical school graduates to practice empathy in communication. I taught them a good deal to recognize (and verbalize) the patient's emotion.

For those of you who believes that emotion is as obvious as an instant Twitter broadcast (or Facebook status update), you would have laughed out loud. If so, think twice after hearing behaviorist John Gottman's forecast of divorce probabilities. In piecing together years of research on marriage, John concludes that if the wife felt she was being heard by her husband the marriage was essentially divorce-proof. If that empathy was absent, the marriage foundered like a two-legged stool.

Ahem. Did I listen to my wife? Not always. Which is why, after the teaching, I went straight home and tried to hear what she said. She was away for work when I got home but I found three new gift books. My wife had just bought them for our daughter: When I'm Feeling Angry, When I'm Feeling Scared, and When I'm Feeling Happy.

I couldn't have been more flabbergasted; we get to learn our emotion since toddler age but can't seem to master it after a life time.