Introduction
Imani and I were soaking our feet and simply relaxing from a long day (our in-home pedicures). We do this occasionally to slow down the inner traffic and voices in our heads. We take time to notice the energies of others, from the interpersonal engagement, and how others move through our bodies. We notice how our spirits feel taxed/stressed. For several moments, we sat in silence, simply noticing and scanning the sensation of the warm soapy water on our feet.
Imani then shared with me some of her experiences from the day. I listened attentively. Then I asked: “What was the highlight of your day?” I learned this question from her very early in our relationship. So, now it is one of our relational rituals of connecting with each and using our imagination to create conversation! At one point during her response to the question, I responded by saying: “I hear you saying . . ., is that right?” She smiled and laughed out loud and said, “yes babe, that’s right . . . and I’m not a client.”
We both broke out with a moment of smiles and laughter in a spirit of delight. I began to relax more—after all, I had just finished listening to 8 hours of clinical sessions. She appreciated that I heard her, and she helped me to relax. We continued our conversation and relaxed more as we soaked and cleaned our feet.
A Clinical Vignette
January 2024. A young couple enters my office, ages 35 and 36 and married for two years with twin sons. This was their fifth session, and I decided to ask the question that I asked in session one: “How have you decided to come into this space and place to nurture your relationship? What brings you in?” At this point, she says that “I long to be heard!” and he said that “I want to be understood!”
These themes around being heard and understood are essential elements in our art of communicating with each other. To be heard and understood by the partner is also a skill that must be acquired and learned—it’s not automatic as Thich Nhat Hanh expresses in his book, The Art of Communicating (2013). I learn this important skill not by simply taking a communication course (although this can assist in the learning process), but largely by learning to listen to my innermost self with both compassion and empathy. This kind of listening to and with myself fosters and deepens my ability and capacity to hear my heart and understand my own sufferings.
When a couple says that “I long to be heard” . . . and “I want to be understood,” they are each hoping that their suffering and pain is identified and met with compassion and empathy by the partner. But if each has not learned how to do this for themselves, it will be initially difficult to do it for the other. This is especially true in young marriage and can easily carry over into long term relationship.
On Compassion and Empathy: Movements Toward Being Heard and Understood
In this blog, compassion means the ability to experience affectionate positive energy and emotions for yourself and/or another, absent without negative energy or judgement. Judgement here means to project one’s own subconscious pain onto another, e.g., one’s partner. This suffering is often unknown to us in our conscious mind, which is how we project it out onto the other without even realizing that we are doing so. Judgement offers blame. Compassion embodies grace.
Empathy in this blog means the ability and capacity to allow yourself to affectively and emotionally be with the other person’s pain and suffering without taking the emotional energy into yourself. When she says: “I long to be heard,” he might say in response, “I see when it feels like I don’t hear you that it causes you pain or frustration or hurt or even anger...” empathy combined with compassion.
We see the art of compassion and empathy repeatedly in scripture. Jesus says: “suffer the children to come unto me and forbid them not, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Or when the woman, amid the crowd of people, who touched the hem of his garment: “somebody touched me,” Jesus says compassionately and empathically because he felt the suffering of this woman.
This gift of compassion lives in each one of us; we must nurture this gift and/or discover that this ability and capacity to be lives within our innermost reach! Both men and women have the predisposition to foster the art of compassion with myself, my partners, and then with others! Developing a habit of practicing self-compassion daily through prayer and meditation will enrichen our lives to a new spiritual and relational level.
We must, however, understand how we have arrived at this place of “longing to be heard,” and “wanting to be understood.” How did we get here? Is anyone to blame? Was it simply ‘sin’ that caused me to be in this human place of desiring to have my basic need met?
The Five Basic Needs as Spiritual Beings on a Human Journal
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness;” . . .So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Genesis 1:26-28 (NRSV).
“Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” Genesis 2:7 (NRSV).
“Therefore, a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” Genesis 2:24,25 (NRSV).
“Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth; when he had not yet made the earth with its fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.” Proverbs 8:23-31(NRSV).
Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah 1:4-5 (NRSV).
I draw a theme from the passages of scripture rather than attempting a broad interpretation of them! The central theme is that before we put on flesh and fluids and bone, we were already in the presence of and company with the Creator of Life. We were already connected with the LIGHT source—in short, we were with God in the beginning, as spirits.
Hence, we have always been around and my coming to Earth is no accident, no mistake, no miscalculation, no accident of human history. We wanted to be here! And as Stevie Wonder says in his poem AS, “. . .that God knew exactly where He wanted you to be placed!” (Songs in the Key of Life). Out of 20 to 300 million sperm cells, only one could fertilize an egg, therefore, you and I wanted to be here in this realm known as Earth!
Notwithstanding these spiritual and biological implications for our being essence, we are both human and divine! And while we are here in this realm, we must nurture all three components of our being—mind, body and spirit. We are here to learn what it means to be a human being.
Jim Amundsen, President of Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor Association (PBSPA) Albert Pesso and Diane Boyden-Pesso developed PBSP after spending years observing how human emotions were expressed in the body and in speech. They wanted to understand not only how emotions and feelings become outward behaviors, but also to learn how to manage and control the impact that emotional expression had on others. The Pessos were not psychotherapist; they were accomplished dancers who had a deep interest in the suffering and pain of human beings and developed a non-traditional approach to help people.
Expanding on Al Pesso’s thoughts, Dr. Curt Levang states that “we see the world through our history; that we never see the present as the present. The present is a tapestry of our memories.” (From slide presentation for training, Voices in Our Head).
Al and Diane highlighted and identified 5 Basic Needs that all human beings need to flourish in environments filled with so much working against the human species. What are these basic needs?
1. Place and Belonging. During the pre-natal, natal and post-natal process of the fetus development, there is need for the fetus to know that upon arrival into the environment for his or her dwelling, that the Ideal space and place is being established for his or her arrival. All primary caregivers have a roll in this preparation.
2. Nurturance. After arriving in this earthly realm, an ongoing need for physical and emotional nurturing is necessary by the caregivers, especially within the first 18 months while the totally dependent infant is undergoing an accelerated growth process, brain and body. The brain neurons are recording every action of and by the caregivers—every! (The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel a van der Kolk, MD, 2014).
3. Support. A continuous need of and for the first two basic needs is expanded from infancy through the toddler phase and well into puberty! This need, too, is indeed physical, emotional, and environmental as the young child develops (especially brain development—the seat of memory intake). A story is already under development.
4. Protection. This basic need is of high importance in that the child is most vulnerable during these early days and stages of development. The world or the environment can be a harsh place and in an Ideal space and place—or during these early stages—the child needs to emotionally and physically know that they are, indeed, covered by their caregivers. “Allow the children to come to me and do not hinder them.”
5. Loving Limits. Last, this basic need is essential in the early life development of the young child. Loving limits in this context refers that the parent(s) being emotionally attuned to the child’s emotional energies; it is about having containment around nuclear energies of the capacity to create (sexuality) and the capacity to destroy (anger) and parents need to help the child have safe boundaries around both. So, if a child is startled by a dark dream and is awakened in the middle of the night by its content, screaming and crying, in the Ideal scenario, the parent responds with calm and with reassurance to the child that they do not have to be afraid of these strong emotions. (How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Ph.D.,2017).
In the workshop, we will look closer at these basic needs and explore how our lives and subsequently our relationships are impacted based on how these basic needs were lived out in our early life development.
A Closing
We are created in the image of the Divine Light! We are spiritual beings trusting in God for our blessings and to provide for our needs on this journey. We have been given a mantle to be responsible human beings with agency to recognize that our human basic needs require attention from the cradle to the grave! I wonder if a deeper understanding of these five basic needs can provide a pathway for us to develop a keener sensitivity for “longing to be heard,” and “wanting to be understood,” a pathway to more compassion and empathy for ourselves and for others.
We are spiritual being having a human experience, learning from our own and other’s mysteries of what it means to be complex, not complicated, beings. And even as we are created in the image of the Eternal, we need each other, especially in our most intimate relationship (our marriages) to help each other foster the ongoing development of our basic needs. In short, this is what we are subconsciously looking for when we are choosing a partner for life. Rainer Maria Rilke says it best (The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, Edited and Translated by Ulrich Baer, 2005):
“Marriage is difficult, and those who take it seriously are beginners who suffer and learn! . . . In a good marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude and thus shows him the greatest faith he can bestow . . .
For this reason, the following has to be the measure for one’s rejection or choice: Whether one wishes to stand guard at another person’s solitude and whether one is inclined to position this same person at the gates of one’s own depth of whose existence he learns only through what issue forth from this great darkness, clad in festive garb.”