Re:How to Avoid Empathy Burnout
by onion2k on Sunday April 10, 2016 @03:57AM
(#11465361)
As a logical, clear-thinking engineer, I recognize that if my wife is emotional and needs to vent, that the best way to improve her mental state is to listen and give emotional support and ask her if there's any way I can help.
Alternatively you could listen all the time and that way your wife wouldn't have to reach a given threshold where she's emotional enough to take the actions that you notice. People have emotions all the time; we only describe people as "emotional" when they've gone past the point of being typical. That doesn't mean you should ignore them before that point. It'd be much less stressful for your wife if she could take about things before she was emotional about them.
This is why the logical approach fails - it's illogical to bottle up problems until they're much bigger, but that's exactly what we do.
Re:How to Avoid Empathy Burnout
by philwelch on Monday April 11, 2016 @01:22AM
(#11469786)
I mean, sometimes people just come home emotional. I don't really want to dissect my marriage on here or anything--my point is that there is nothing illogical or non-logical about dealing with other people's feelings.
Alternatively you could listen all the time and that way your wife wouldn't have to reach a given threshold where she's emotional enough to take the actions that you notice. People have emotions all the time; we only describe people as "emotional" when they've gone past the point of being typical. That doesn't mean you should ignore them before that point. It'd be much less stressful for your wife if she could take about things before she was emotional about them.
This is why the logical approach fails - it's illogical to bottle up problems until they're much bigger, but that's exactly what we do.