The Lost Art of Listening (22 page)

Listeners intent on talking speakers out of unhappy feelings or indepen-

dent inclinations won’t hear what others think because it might be threat-

ening. Even speakers who have something worthwhile to say may not

get heard if they make the other person feel criticized or misunderstood;

the listener is likely to become defensive or angry and counterattack or

withdraw, making listening the last thing on his or her mind. Misunder-

standing is perpetuated when each one broods over the awful things the

other one does and one or both of them eventually finds someone else to

complain to.

Subjects Too Hot to Handle

Married couples famously have trouble talking about money, sex, and chil-

dren. The problem with these subjects isn’t differences of opinion but the

emotional reactions those differences trigger. Even though both partners

might be equally reactive, they may show it in different ways. One may

press for more reasoned analysis, while the other may feel shushed and

press for more emotional honesty. Each is sensitive to slights, hurts, and

criticism. Some people’s radar is so good that they pick up these signals

even before they’re sent.

After Don and Shannon have a blowup, he becomes distant. After

a while, he calms down and tries to make amends. He says he’s sorry for

what he said. But she never apologizes. She either accepts his apology or, if

she’s really mad, takes it as permission to say more about what he did that

upset her. Don’s least favorite version of this is “You
always
do that, and I

hate it!”

Finally, Don told Shannon that he truly was sorry when they argued

and often could see his part in it, but it really bothered him that she never

apologized. “It’s like everything is my fault, like you don’t have any role in

our problems. It’s not fair.”

Shannon blew up. “What am I supposed to say, ‘It’s
my
fault you’re

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THE REAL REASONS PEOPLE DON’T LISTEN

so grouchy’? ‘I’m sorry
you
don’t like my driving’? ‘I’m sorry the baby was

sick’?” At this Don threw up his hands and walked out of the room.

What makes it so hard for some people to apologize? Guilty con-

sciences. In her heart of hearts, Shannon blamed herself for everything that

went wrong in their relationship. She blamed herself for Don’s moods (if

she was
really
a good wife, he’d be happy); she blamed herself for not enjoy-

ing sex with him more (she must be inhibited); she even blamed herself

when the baby got sick (if she were a better mother, nothing bad would ever

happen to her child). She came from a family that specialized in blaming.

The result was extreme sensitivity to anything anyone might say that trig-

gered her own inner self-blame. That’s the nature of reactivity.

We’re most reactive to the things

we secretly accuse ourselves of.

“How Come You Listen to Everybody But Me?”

Husbands and wives often complain that their mates never listen to their

ideas but come home and announce that they just heard something very

interesting—and that something is precisely what their partner has already

told them. Recently, for example, when Marilyn told her husband that

she’d decided to see a friend’s chiropractor about her back, he hit the ceil-

ing: “I’ve been telling you to see a chiropractor for years! Now all of a sud-

den when your precious friend Mary Elizabeth tells you, you listen. How

come you never listen to me?”

Marilyn was taken aback by her husband’s outburst. But even if she’d

known what to say, her husband didn’t stick around to hear it. He stormed

out and slammed the door. Later, she did answer him at length, in her

head, where most of us make our best comebacks.

True, he
had
told her to see a chiropractor. But she hadn’t asked his

advice. When she complained to him about her back, she wanted sympa-

thy, not advice. He was always telling her what to do. Why couldn’t he

just listen?

When Marilyn told me about this episode, I thought her assertion

How Emotionality Makes Us Defensive
127

that she wanted sympathy, not advice, from her husband was true as far as

it went, but that it was missing something. It turned out that when her hus-

band gave advice, it was usually in an intense, pressured way —his response

to the anxiety her complaints generated in him. She usually ignored his

advice, not just because she wasn’t in the market for advice but because it

was delivered with an emotional pressure that made her defensive.

This is typical of how messages get deflected. It isn’t the content that

makes people deaf; it’s the pressure it comes packaged in. A speaker’s eager-

ness or anxiety is often felt by listeners as pressure to make them wrong

or to change their way of thinking. As if it weren’t hard enough to tone

down one’s own reactivity, doing so is often made even more difficult by

the condition of the relationship.

How Some Speakers Make Us Hard of Hearing

We’ve all had experience with listeners whose emotional reactivity makes

them defensive or argumentative instead of hearing what we’re trying to

say. An equally important barrier to understanding is the speaker’s emo-

tionality. A speaker who talks in a highly emotional way makes listeners

anxious and therefore hard of hearing.

Some people have no idea how pressured and provoking

their tone of voice is; they come at you like a bad dentist.

The hardest people to listen to are those who treat us with dictato-

rial disregard of our feelings. The pressured speaker may not know how

he comes across, but his urgent, anxious tone of voice, emphatic hand

gestures, or conclusion of every other statement with “Right?” (implicitly

demanding agreement) makes us feel backed into a corner.

A Charged Atmosphere

The emotional climate between speaker and listener has a lot to do with

the quality of understanding that can pass between them. If the atmo-

sphere is calm, especially if it has a history of being calm, the listener can

usually hear what the speaker is trying to get across. But if there’s anxiety

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THE REAL REASONS PEOPLE DON’T LISTEN

in the air—or even just intense feeling—the listener may be too tense to

take in what’s said. The listener may be anxious about being blamed, or

pressured to change, or proven wrong. Speakers who trigger such feelings,

venting emotion in a way that makes listeners feel backed against the wall,

may not get heard, even though they have something important to say.

It’s the way hard things get said that determines whether or not they get

heard.

The emotional state of a relationship depends not only on the way

individuals express themselves but also on the extent to which they remain

differentiated as individuals.

A differentiated individual is a mature and autonomous person who

knows where his or her skin ends and other people’s begin. In emotionally

undifferentiated relationships anxiety becomes infectious and the partners

increasingly reactive to each other, especially on hot subjects. Among

some couples money is such a charged issue that sparks fly at the first men-

tion of it. A mother who is poorly differentiated from her child may be

so threatened by the childish retort “I don’t love you!” that she either

rescinds her rules or gets into a pointless discussion that begins with “But

I love you.” A more well- differentiated parent doesn’t feel so threatened

by her son’s or daughter’s protests. Such a parent has enough distance to

realize that “I don’t love you!” means “I’m angry that you won’t let me

have my way.” Differentiation is achieved by learning to separate what you

think from what you feel—and by learning to be yourself while respecting

other people’s right to be themselves.

When boundaries are blurred, individuals become emotionally fused

and almost any agitation from the speaker will make a listener reactive. As

differentiation decreases, individuality is less well defined, and emotional

reactivity becomes more intense. Poorly differentiated and highly reactive

people tend to come across as either emotionally demanding or avoidant.

An “independent” husband may be aware of his “dependent” wife’s

emotional reactivity but blind to his own. He sees her dependence because

she shows it directly. When she objects to his wanting to go off by himself,

he says, “You’re so dependent! Why don’t you develop some interests of

your own and quit hanging on me?” She cries and accuses him of being self-

ish. As far as he’s concerned, she’s emotionally immature. She’s so depen-

dent that he can’t even complain without her getting hysterical. What he

doesn’t see is how dependent
he
is on her feeling positively toward him,

How Emotionality Makes Us Defensive
129

so much so that he’s unable to hear her complaints as an expression of her

feelings. He hears what she says only as a threat to himself and a constraint

on what he wants to do. And so he goes off and broods in self- righteous

resentment about his wife’s inability to respond to him without reacting

emotionally.

Gail had to talk to Leon about needing help around the house. She

knew it was a sore subject because they’d both grown up with the expecta-

tion that housework was something wives did. But, damn it, with both of

them working and the kids to look after, their family couldn’t afford the

luxury of a wife. For three months since starting her new job, Gail had put

off asking Leon for help because she didn’t want to start a fight. But she

was finding it impossible to get dinner on the table before the kids started

getting cranky, and so she just had to talk to him.

So that night after dinner Gail told Leon how unfair it was for her

to have to do all the cooking and cleaning now that she was working. As

she spoke, the anger and frustration she’d been sitting on for three months

came pouring out.

Leon, who knew he wasn’t doing his share, listened as Gail talked

about how hurt she was that he hadn’t offered to help. But as she went on

about all she had to do and how little he did, Gail started talking faster and

more pressured, waving her arms as though her words couldn’t keep pace

with her feelings. Leon listened with growing upset.

What started out as a legitimate request turned into a tirade. Instead

of listening and feeling like cooperating, Leon felt attacked and got defen-

sive. “Why do you have to go on and on about everything? And why do

you have to exaggerate so: You do
everything
, and I do
nothing
. Who earns

the real money in this family?”

That did it. Gail burst into tears, and Leon, who couldn’t take it any-

more, stormed out of the room and slammed the door. Gail was left alone

crying in the living room, feeling how unfair it was that Leon was too self-

ish to care about her.

Sometimes a speaker’s emotion generates anxiety in the listener, mak-

ing it particularly difficult for the listener to be the receptive vehicle that

the speaker requires. When it comes to telling your side, particularly in a

relationship with a history of tension, the best way to be heard is to tone

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THE REAL REASONS PEOPLE DON’T LISTEN

down your emotionality. Even if you don’t make the mistake of blaming

the other person, he or she may feel attacked if you express yourself in an

anxious or pressured manner. The trouble is, sometimes it’s hard not to.

We don’t recognize the impact of our tone of voice, because

we hear what we feel like, not what we sound like.

Elise gets annoyed because Jay takes the other side of almost every

issue she brings up. This is a common complaint. Most subjects are com-

plex enough to have two sides; when someone points to one side, we have

a natural tendency to think of the other. The trouble is, it doesn’t feel

good to say the cup is half empty only to be told “No, it’s half full.” Jay’s

tendency to take the opposite position made Elise feel not just disagreed

with but negated.

Once she commented that the neighbor’s porch railing looked to be

in bad shape and might break; someone might get hurt. Jay looked at the

railing—which was in halfway good shape—and said, “I don’t think so;

it looks okay to me.” When Elise said, “I hate it when you disagree with

everything I say,” Jay felt attacked. “Must I agree with everything you say?”

he demanded. Like many reasonable married people, they discussed the

issue without raising their voices or hearing each other.

Elise could understand Jay’s feeling that it wasn’t fair to have to agree

with everything she said, but that wasn’t what she wanted. She just wanted

her feelings to be acknowledged. He heard that, sort of, but didn’t know

what he was supposed to do. “If you say the railing looks like it’s going to

break, and I don’t think it is, how am I supposed to know that you’re just