Creating Harmonious Relationships: A Practical Guide to the Power of True Empathy - Andrew LeCompte

Creating Harmonious Relationships: A Practical Guide to the Power of True Empathy (eBook)

Andrew LeCompte (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
254 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-9887483-3-5 (ISBN)

In Creating Harmonious Relationships: A Practical Guide to te Power of True Empathy, you will learn how to •build loving intimate relationships •develop and maintain friendships •positively influence people at work •turn conflict into understanding Andrew LeCompte has helped thousands of people to communicate more effectively and more lovingly. In this book he presents 'true empathy,' the key to understanding and communicating with people. With it you will experience the joy and contentment of harmonious relationships.

With a master's degree in Humanistic Psychology in Organizations, and practical life experience, Andrew LeCompte developed a deeper method of interpersonal communication, which involves tapping into each person's emotions and what they are most hoping for. He then taught empathic speaking and listening skills to couples and to people in schools, colleges, civic groups, legal practices, hospitals, pharmaceutical and financial corporations. As President of the Let's Talk training group he led leadership, management, and organizational development programs. Countless boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, have used this way of talking with each other to enhance their relationships. Creating Harmonious Relationships: a Practical Guide to the Power of True Empathy shows, step-by-step, how to form better connections. The first edition of this book sold out and was later translated into Turkish. The long-awaited revised edition will be released on January 24, 2024!

Creating Harmonious Relationships: a Practical Guide to the Power of True Empathy, Revised Edition, is empowering in a heartfelt way. It teaches the reader how to communicate wisely and effectively with other people. The basic technique is easy to grasp, and it is taught in a step-by step manner. It teaches how to listen in a way that invites the other person to open up and disclose what is really bothering them while also encouraging them to turn what might be their negative complaint into a positive hope. This is the use of "e;true empathy."e; It is particularly useful in defusing an argument when emotions are running high. "e;True empathy"e; involves first acknowledging the other person's feeling state, as in "e;Are you upset because ?"e; This guess shows concern for the other person's feeling state and invites their correction. They might say, "e;I'm angry at you because you've only been criticizing my idea."e; Then you guess at what their positive hope might be that is behind their feeling criticized. You might reply, "e;So you're angry because what you really want is some positive support."e; Then they will supply what their hope is, in this case probably involving some kind of help. This defuses their emotional energy. Hopes are a key concept in interpersonal communication. We are all motivated to get our hopes met. Hopes are such things as to be heard and understood, to be accepted. These are connection hopes. We also have freedom hopes such as to be free to express our creativity and to be treated with honesty. Hopes are positive needs that can be met without infringing on someone else. They are at the heart of effective conflict resolution. This method of communicating is the culmination of techniques that have been practiced and refined over many decades. Thousands of people have learned and benefited from the first edition of Creating Harmonious Relationships: a Practical Guide to the Power of True Empathy. The book was sold out and the much awaited Revised Edition is now here.

Introduction

Difficulties in Relationships

Think of a relationship or a conflict you had with someone that ended unhappily. What bothered you the most about it? Remember what the other person did. What were you thinking and how were you feeling? If you’re like most of us, you’ve agonized about these painful relationships and wondered what went wrong. You’ve blamed the other person, and in your secret heart you’ve blamed yourself.

Still, you’re a compassionate person, and, even though your feelings were hurt and you said things you regretted, deep down you really cared about the other person and wish things had gone better. If you could rewind the great videotape of life and repair the damage, you would.

Now, you are determined not to repeat the same mistakes. You work hard to keep your relationships healthy and fulfilling, struggling with issues as they appear in your daily life. Here are some of the situations you might be encountering:

•Each time you and your spouse have to make a decision involving conflicting needs, you feel like you get the short end of the stick. When you both are upset and need support, when there’s a choice of where to go together for a long weekend, or who needs a new car, you feel that your contributions are not acknowledged and that you’re getting less. As a result you begin to feel bad about the relationship and yourself.

•Your boss criticizes something you worked hard on, after you stayed late and used your own personal time. You’re left feeling unfairly judged and angry. You worry about your future with this company.

•A friend complains to you continually. When you talk on the phone you find yourself timing her to find out how much time she takes up in the conversation. You like her, but you start resenting the relationship because you feel like you don’t matter.

•Every time you decide to make a major change, such as switching your career so you can do the work you love, your parents tell you you’ll never succeed, and they advise you to go for the steady pay check instead. You’re disappointed not to receive the love and support you’d been hoping for and wish you’d never told them anything.

The question is: How can you make sure you don’t end up with another painful relational conflict or loss? This is a core issue because we’re questioning our essence—whether we are good or bad. We conceive a self-image from how we are in our relationships, and this conception determines every aspect of our lives.

Recognizing the importance of this question in my own life, I embarked on a twenty-year search to find real answers. In the last five years I succeeded, finding and refining a simple but powerful way to understand and empathize with people that went beyond all other methods. The results are contained in this book. Here is my story…

How I Learned to Communicate

I know about ineffective communication from personal experience. My family boasted a doctor father and a mother who was powerful in local politics. Both had lively and critical intellects. Back then, however, we were inept at talking about our feelings, so certain experiences dominated my awareness. My father’s outbursts of rage terrified me, and my most vivid early memory is of being paddled with a board in the garage. On the basis of such encounters I determined that I was a bad person. In the isolation of my childhood I didn’t know there was another way of relating.

I honed my critical skills, and in high school my talent for pointing out other people’s deficiencies earned me the nickname, “the cynic.” I remember saying loudly into the hush just after a kid dropped his tray in the cafeteria, “Smooth move, bowels.” I felt a glow hearing the laughter around me, but that kid hated me.

I wanted a pretty girlfriend, convinced she would save me from my aching sense of inadequacy. Her love and unfailing support would bring me the security and happiness I craved. I never came close. I was too shy to talk to girls I liked, never mind asking for a date. I soon learned that bourbon took the edge off, and kept my dreams alive in romantic fantasies.

My friendships with men didn’t fare much better. I had a good friend, Ray, for a while in college. We got an apartment together, but he started doing unacceptable things, like leaving dirty dishes in the sink. One day I had enough and, not knowing how to confront him, I piled the dishes, greasy frying pan and all, onto his bed. Later I decided he just wasn’t good enough and moved out.

With hindsight, I see I wasn’t just a poor communicator, I was also unconscious of what was going on inside me. I lived in reaction to other people and used addictive behaviors to mask my inner pain.

I felt closer to my older brother, Tony, than to anyone else in my family. When I was nineteen, Tony died by suicide. My parents came to be with me at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. But, typically for my family, we didn’t grieve. That night I shared a hotel room with my father. Lying in bed, I thought about how whenever my brother came to the house the first thing he would say was, “Is Andy home?” I really missed him. Remembering our close connection, I let out a few moaning sobs.

My father said, “Andy, are you alright?”

From lack of experience connecting at a feeling level, I took his question to mean that crying made him uncomfortable and said, “Yeah, I’m OK,” and stopped.

Repressing my grief took its toll. I got a severe case of infectious mononucleosis and developed an ulcer, neither of which was diagnosed for months. I lived a thousand miles from home and was convinced I was dying. Then I began to have panic attacks. Waves of terror would surge through me and I’d immediately have to get to a safe place. I told no one about these attacks, fearing I was insane and would be locked in a mental institution. I waited it out for a year and a half, as the attacks slowly lessened.

Although I didn’t have friends, I was fortunate to be a good student. I obtained a B.A. in History at the University of Wisconsin and an M.A. at the University of California, winning several fellowships. Happiness in relationships, however, eluded me.

The first positive change to my way of life came in the early 1970s. At the urging of a girlfriend, I began to meditate. Meditation allowed me to become aware of my thoughts. I saw that my mind generated thoughts all by itself and that there was a conscious me who could observe these thoughts. This gave me a new perspective on myself. I realized I had a choice; I could decide which thoughts I wanted to entertain. I didn’t need to let myself be controlled by my initial feeling-reactions to other people.

Not long after beginning to meditate, I realized the way I had been living was not bringing me happiness, so I quit my doctoral program in history and began to read psychology. Two authors in particular, Carl Rogers and Viktor Frankl, had a profound influence on me.

In On Becoming a Person Carl Rogers describes the healing power of “unconditional positive regard.” He validated something most of us know from personal experience, that it feels incredibly good to be listened to and understood by someone who sees only the good in us. His ideas resonated deeply in me. I wanted personal confirmation that I was a good person, and I wanted to experience this in my relationships with others.

I had a negative attitude about life. Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, said “the last of the human freedoms [is]– to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…. It is this spiritual foundation – that cannot be taken away – that makes life meaningful and purposeful.”

I wanted to find that same meaningful conviction. But I knew there was a difference between simply reading Frankl’s words about choosing one’s attitude and personally integrating that truth. Frankl gained his knowledge the hardest way imaginable: surviving three years in Auschwitz while his father, mother, brother and wife all died at the hands of the Nazis. Frankl explained that there are other ways besides suffering to discover the meaning of life. I was intent on finding meaning in as direct a way as possible.

I entered the most intensive experiential psychology training program I could find. I participated in individual, couples, and group psychotherapy. I taught assertiveness training, transactional analysis, and parent education, earning a second Masters degree in humanistic psychology and organizational development. I then took a series of jobs training executives to manage people effectively.

I became successful and was asked to join the Executive Board of my chapter of the American Society for Training and Development. In the late 1980s I began to consult independently. Although I was highly skilled professionally, my personal life was a series of disasters; my marriage was a good example.

In my psychology program, I fell in love with a woman who was forthright in her humanistic convictions. Yet once I married her, I found I had little ability to articulate my feelings or hopes in personal, intimate situations. I...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	1.9.2024
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Partnerschaft / Sexualität
ISBN-13	979-8-9887483-3-5 / 9798988748335

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