Kate's Nuggets

Use Sympathetic Joy to Improve Your Relationships
Episode 34

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk about sympathetic joy.

Sympathetic joy may not be a phrase that you are familiar with. It is an English translation of a word that's used in Buddhism. It is a phrase I like to use because the only other word that I know of in the English language that really gets to this idea is compersion, which is a word that I find hard to use in everyday life.

So, I like to use sympathetic joy. But if you would prefer to use compersion, please go ahead because they're both pointing at the same thing.

In the last episode, I talked about compassion and I talked about the difference between empathy and compassion being that empathy is a general word for feeling with somebody.

And compassion is a specific part of empathy that is empathy when someone is suffering. Sympathetic joy is the flip side. Sympathetic joy is empathy feeling with somebody when they are joyful. So you might call it empathic joy or empathetic joy, but whatever you call it, this ability to be joyful because someone else is joyful and to delight in someone else's delight is a true gift to relationships. It's possible that if this was the only thing you committed to doing in your relationship, you might build an upward cycle of positivity and connection and love that opened the heart to all of the other things that are possible when our hearts are open.

Because when our hearts are open, we feel connected to ourselves, to each other and to the world, and we have access to our creativity and our resourcefulness and can solve to the best of our ability the other challenges that we have in our lives, whether it's getting a job, putting food on the table, getting the chores done, or building a computer system.

The challenges in getting to a place of sympathetic joy for others are that it can be hard to separate our needs from other people's needs. It's very easy to react to seeing somebody having a success from our own sense of lack, from our own craving for what they have, for our own disappointment in our own lack of success.

When we see other people having things that they're joyful about and we are not joyful ourselves, that gap between where we are and where we want to be for ourselves can make it hard for us to be joyful on their behalf. And what I want to offer is that sympathetic joy as a practice can actually create for ourselves that sense of joy that we want to have even when we don't have the outward success to celebrate that is what they are celebrating. And it may be temporary. It's not lasting because it's not our own joy, but it's still joy. We also can get in the trouble of being uncomfortable with somebody else's joy if we don't understand why they are joyful.

We may not understand why a particular thing gives someone pleasure, and we may have been shamed in the past for getting pleasure from things that other people thought were unworthy of having that response. This is a discomfort with how people are different. Different people delight in different things. Just because you delight in one thing and I delight in something else, shouldn't pull us apart unless those things absolutely can't be accomplished simultaneously because what brings me delight is interfering with your delight.

There's no reason we can't find a bigger perspective of delighting in things we don't understand. But for many of us, and this is particularly true for people who were validated as children, for being quick to understand things, when we don't understand things, it can make us anxious. Not understanding triggers a "what am I not getting?" So, these places where we don't understand each other's joy and there's shame in it, these are among other things, categories of things that get the label guilty pleasure.

The pleasures that we have that truly are pleasurable for us except that they come with some baggage of somebody else telling us they didn't get why it was pleasurable. And so part of the practice of cultivating sympathetic joy is actually the practice of confronting those other voices that tell us that our own pleasure is guilty or innocent. Some pleasures, there are people who take pleasure in inflicting harm. There's a moral judgment there where shame is appropriate. But if your pleasure isn't actively harming somebody, there's no need for a moral judgment.

I have a client who had a slightly different experience of the difficulty with being joyful for each other when you don't understand. This client and their partner had difficulty because they work in different arenas and their successes at work were often very technical applications of expertise the other didn't have. So, one would come home from work and have had a great success and would be delighted, and the other would be wanting to understand the success because love drives people to understand each other.

And so my client and their partner would try and understand each other, but they didn't have the technical expertise to actually be able to understand why this particular success at work had created so much joy and the practice that they had to undertake in order for delight at work not to turn into friction at home when one person tried to understand and failed to understand and got frustrated and killed all the joy in the moment.

The practice they had to undertake was being comfortable in their own not knowing and simply delighting in the fact that their partner was joyful to simply celebrate that they had a good day and they had a successful accomplishment because our partner being happy makes us happy without any sense of understanding. This is a particularly personal topic for me because a lack of sympathetic joy is part of what destroyed my marriage.

Now, a marriage falls apart for a multitude of reasons. And I would not say this was the only cause, but it certainly was a contributing factor. I am far more extroverted than my ex-husband, and I was more skilled at making friends outside the family when we moved to a new place and I would go out to have a social evening with friends that were my friends, they weren't our friends, and I would go out and I would have a really good time and then I would come home and for whatever reason, and I'm not going to make up stories about why, he would not delight in my delight.

Over time that not delighting in my delight actually grew into resentment that I was going out and having a good time and not being home. And once that started happening, I started going out and then I would delay coming home because in my experience going home meant that I was going to get faced with that resentment and it was going to take the joy away from me.

And I wanted to prolong the joy as long as I could. And this of course meant that I would stay out later and later and later. And that would mean the resentment in my ex would build and build and build. And every time that happened, we had an escalating negative cycle in our relationship. And at the time, I did not have the relationship skills to recognize what was going on and to choose to change my behavior.

So I obliviously went along doing my part in escalating the cycle, and eventually the wall that I hit when I got home was so hard that I couldn't bear facing that wall. So I stopped going out at all. So I stopped infusing the joy into my life in order to avoid what happened when I got home. And so it took a decade for the cycle to play itself out to that point.

But over the course of a decade, the lack of sympathetic joy when I came home delighted after going out to an event that he didn't want to go to in the first place was ruinous. And that's why this practice is important. So how do we practice sympathetic joy?

One way of doing it is to acknowledge that it is the opposite or an flip side, a different approach to empathy than compassion practice. So, we could use the loving-kindness practice that I talked about in the last episode in this context too. We could bring ourselves to a calm, restful state and imagine wishing ourselves joy. And then we could wish for someone who is kind to us or has been kind to us wishing joy on their behalf, tapping into the part of us that genuinely wishes the best for them. And then we can practice with someone who's neutral to us, someone we see on the street or someone we are served by at a store wishing them joy in whatever brings them joy, simply because joy is good, letting it delight us.

And then of course, we could stretch ourselves and see if someone who is a challenge for us, if we can practice opening our hearts to the point of wishing them joy for themselves.

Now, one of the nice things about wishing people joy for themselves is quite often when other people are more joyful, they're less challenging for us. So this has a positive feedback cycle. Imagine for instance, that you are partnered with somebody that you don't understand very well. You think very, very differently from them. And so trying to understand each other gets you into quagmires.

What if you just had a practice of when you see a spark of joy or happiness or delight in them, you let yourself be happy on their behalf without understanding just because happy people make you happy. You're happy when other people are happy. And then your happiness might infect them and they might be happy because you're happy even though they don't understand why you are happy.

And then that little bit of happiness increase that they have, you get happy from it and they get happy from that. And there's a positive upward spiral. When we do these practices, what we're really trying to do is wire into our brains a default wishing joy for other people, a default delighting when other people are delighted.

One of the things that I really like to do as a practice of sympathetic joy is literally doing a happy dance when the people that I know express delight or joy in something. Getting it into our bodies reinforces it in a way that makes it really land and come home and become part of who we are and how we are in the world. In terms of making it a default setting getting into our bodies really helps. The flip side of practicing sympathetic joy is practicing undermining the things that can interfere with sympathetic joy.

So practicing being with our own sense of lack and our own discomfort without judgment, with self-compassion and stretching our patience and willingness to stay in a non-reactive relationship to our own lack so that we can have less anxiety around our own lack, so that when we're in that moment where we don't have what we want and somebody around us has something that is making them happy, if we are less reactive and less attached to our own discomfort, there's space for us to see clearly the delight or joy or happiness that others are experiencing without coloring it with our own experience. And that separation allows the two to coexist simultaneously. We can be aware of our own reality and feel whatever it is we feel about our own reality and simultaneously delight in their happiness. I'm happy for you. Now we have to be really careful with the words.

Many of us have an experience of people saying, I'm really happy for you in a clipped, short, terse way where the non-verbals, the tone and the intention behind the words are, I know I'm supposed to say that I'm happy for you, but I'm really not. And human beings are made very agitated when the words and the actions don't match and we can tell that they don't match.

When our words and the non-verbal communication are at odds with each other, we are read as untrustworthy because we're out of alignment. We're out of alignment with ourselves and we know it. So we don't like each other. So we don't like ourselves as much as it would be good too, because we see ourselves as deceitful. We know that we are not trustworthy. We feel ourselves telling untruths and the people around us read the untruths and they know that we are not trustworthy.

Before you say, I'm happy for you, you need to tap into the part of yourself that actually is happy for the other person. So, if you find yourself in a situation where the social expectations are that you say you're happy for somebody, before you let those words come out of your mouth, take a moment and tap into the part of yourself that is genuinely happy for them.

Don't let the part of you that is jealous or worried about your own success or any of those things, speak the words. Wake up the part of you that is genuinely happy for them and say the words with that part of you. Two things will happen. One, they will believe you because you are in that moment aligned. And also, you will strengthen the part of you that genuinely delights in other people's happiness. I'm not suggesting that you in any way, shape or form, deny holding a boundary when other people's happiness is actually at the expense of meeting your needs.

And I am not suggesting that you deny that there are parts of you that are dissatisfied, that are highlighted when you see other people accomplishing things that you want or getting things that you would like to have in your life.

You get to have your challenge and your lack. You will just enjoy your life more and have better relationships if you can genuinely separate your situation from somebody else's situation so you can delight in their delight and you can have sorrow for their sorrow and with their sorrow, both of those, all of that empathy without giving up your knowing about how you are feeling.

If you are not used to separating in this way, it will take practice, it will take time, and it will take practice and you will get better. And this is something that becomes a virtuous cycle. The more you practice, the better you feel, the more incentive you have to practice.

Therefore, you practice more, therefore you feel better, therefore you have more incentive to practice and so on and so forth. So the trick is, whenever you remember, practice sympathetic joy. And if you need reminders to practice sympathetic joy, find a way of getting them in your environment so that you remember.

I wish you joy.

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.