Seeing through the Eyes of Your Partner

From: Dr. Frank Gunzburg

Both partners are responsible for making the relationship work. This doesn’t mean they have to do the same things, act the same way, or feel the same way in any given situation. What it means is that both of them feel responsible to the other for their needs in a particular situation.

This means being able to balance your own needs with the needs of your partner. By now you should have a fairly good idea of what you need out of the relationship. We did a lot of work on that area in Section 4.

However, starting to understand the needs of your partner can be a trickier process. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between what we think our partner needs and what they actually need.

In Section 6, I will present a series of communication exercises in which I will ask you to discuss your needs in each of the 10 critical dimensions of a relationship with your partner. First, there is a step you need to take toward understanding your partner’s needs: see through the eyes of your partner.

In many cases, people get so wrapped up in the way they see things in a particular situation that they fail to look at the same set of circumstances from another person’s point of view. When this is done in the context of a relationship, it means that one partner is ignoring the perspective of the other partner. Doing this is an easy way to end up in one of the minefields we discussed above.

It is particularly difficult to try and see things from another person’s perspective when you are dealing with something as difficult as an affair. Neither partner particularly wants to see things from the other partner’s perspective because to do so is painful. Nonetheless, it is a necessity.

Whether you are the cheater or the injured person in the relationship, it is important that you learn to see things through the eyes of your partner. To help you in this process, I ask that you do a short visualization exercise.

Think about the most recent experience you had with your partner in which you were angry because you simply “couldn’t understand what they were thinking.” Slowly bring this scenario to mind.

Once you have the situation firmly in your mind and you are sufficiently calm, switch to your partner’s perspective. Literally imagine what it would be like to see through their eyes. Temporarily drop into their body, seeing through their eyes, hearing through their ears, feeling from inside their body, and thinking from inside their mind.

Once you look at this situation as a movie and then from the perspective of your partner, try and look at the situation from above, with a bird’s eye perspective. You have already experienced several perspectives on the scene. Now imagine that you can see it from above, looking down almost as though you are omniscient and can understand all of the various ways of seeing this situation. What is different? What changes for you from this perspective? Do you have a different understanding of your thoughts or feelings or your partner’s thoughts or feelings?

As a last step in this process, drop inside your own body and experience it from your own perspective. Has anything changed in terms of the way you view this situation now that you have experienced these alternative perspectives? Would you behave differently in this situation knowing what you know now?

When you have completely investigated this scenario from each of these perspectives, slowly bring yourself back to the present. Take a few moments to look around the room, take account of your surroundings, and refocus your awareness on the here and now.

If you face difficult, negative emotions when doing this exercise, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Those emotions could give you some interesting information that you hadn’t previously considered about your partner’s experience. You might have to do this exercise a few times on different memories before it will make a difference in your behavior toward your partner.

In addition to working on memories in the past, I recommend that you do this every time you feel like you can’t understand why your partner is doing what they are doing. Seeing things from your partner’s perspective might help you understand what you are responsible for in your relationship.

Dr. Frank Gunzburg is a licensed counselor in Maryland and has been specializing is helping couples restore their marriage for over 30 years.

For more information about forgiving your partner and working through the past, please visit http://www.howyouforgive.com/

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