Sarah * and Phillip * have been married for 14 years and have two lovely children. Their lives have seen a significant increase in stress during the last four years. Phillip was laid off for nearly two years and Sarah had to increase her hours at her part-time job in an effort to "keep the ship afloat." Resentments began to accumulate like dirty socks hidden beneath their 12-year-old son’s bed. When they entered into marital counseling, they were fighting nearly every day, romance and sexual intimacy were nonexistent, and the children were becoming more rebellious.

They were proceeding through their fourth counseling session, doing the usual "blame game" with all the accompanying volleys of anger, accusations and shaming when a silence filled the entire room. It seemed to last forever. Tears began to well up in Phillip’s eyes as he shared his hidden feelings of inadequacy, rejection and frustration with his loss of employment and difficulty finding work. His sense of self-worth was at an all-time low and, at age 37, he was beginning to feel hopeless. He told his wife that he no longer saw himself as sexually desirable and therefore was afraid to initiate. Sarah appeared shocked and saddened to hear all this—she had no idea. It was as if a wall had fallen and they were looking at each other’s true selves.

Emptying is the process in which we become real to one another. In the children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, the stuffed animal rabbit became real not in perfection, but in its brokenness. It was then worthy of love. When we empty, we do two things well. First, we set aside the "blame game" and look for our own contribution to the problem. We seek the "grain of truth" in the other person’s criticism or feedback. We introspect and examine our own souls to find our responsibility. It is a worthy goal to become a person who asks the questions, "How much of this is about me?"

The second skill emptying requires is getting underneath our anger and speaking the primary feelings that precede it. There are four primary feelings that occur before anger: sadness, fear, inadequacy, and frustration. Anger is an "OK" feeling, but we need to know that anger is a secondary response to these other feelings, and that anger can be threatening to others. We need to modulate our anger and speak the primary feelings as much as possible. This is not an easy task for those who were told as children, "Don’t cry . . . Don’t be afraid . . . Don’t be insecure," etc. Some would consider such feelings as "weak," but as Paul writes, "for when I am weak, then I am strong" (II Cor. 12:10).