The Lost Art of Listening (32 page)

urge to flare up in the face of their provocations, the more self- possessed

and unflappable you’ll become in all the rest of your relationships. When

it comes to emotional reactivity, your parents are the final exam.

Remember Peggy from Chapter 5? She was the woman whose moth-

er’s negativism provoked her into shouting matches. Peggy learned to see

how her mother’s negativism triggered her own rage—and how expecting

it made her hypersensitive. Seeing this pattern was one thing; changing it

was another.

When Peggy decided to stop trying to change her mother, she began

to realize that her mother wasn’t really a mean person, just someone who

prized togetherness so much that she was threatened when people acted

independently. This simple shift in Peggy’s view of her mother made it a

lot easier for her to listen the next time she heard her mother criticizing

someone in the family for doing something different. However, she also

found that simply remaining silent only made her seethe. So instead of

just holding her tongue or criticizing her mother (for being critical!) she

started to say, as calmly as possible, that she could see how her mother saw

it but she didn’t agree.

At first Peggy’s effort to clarify where she stood, rather than criticize

her mother, was lost on her mother. “Oh, so you think I’m all wrong, do

you?”

Much to Peggy’s credit, she was able to maintain a calm, nonreactive

position, even if her insides were churning. She listened until her mother

was through and didn’t contradict her or fight back.

When Peggy finally did speak, she said, “No, Mom, you’re not hear-

ing me. I’m not saying you’re all wrong. I don’t think that at all. You have

a right to your opinion. I’m just saying that my opinion is different, that’s

all.”

In the ensuing months, as Peggy continued to make an effort to speak

up calmly when she disagreed with her mother’s uncharitable opinions,

she tried to make it clear that she was declaring her independence but not

any lack of love or respect. On the contrary, as she learned to overcome

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her inability to tolerate her mother’s criticism, the two women began to

get closer. Peggy still occasionally slipped back into blaming and distanc-

ing, but not for long, and when this happened, instead of thinking of her

mother as impossible and herself as helpless, she realized that she was just

getting reactive again. That made it easier to control.

She and her mother still argued from time to time, but now Peggy

spoke up before her annoyance reached the boiling point. That and the

fact that instead of criticizing her mother she made a point of simply clari-

fying where she stood made the arguments much less toxic.

After things calmed down between her and her mother, Peggy decided

to work on her relationship with her father. Growing up, she’d thought

of him as distant and unapproachable, a large and benevolent shadow at

the edge of the family circle. She remembered him sitting silently behind

the newspaper while she and her mother fixed dinner or chatted at the

breakfast table. Now she longed to be closer to him but didn’t know how

to go about it. How do you talk to a shadow? After she’d married and had

children, she made a concerted effort to get closer to him. He’d listen

politely when she told him about the children’s latest doings, but as soon

as she said anything about her job or her friends, his eyes would drift in

the direction of the television, or he’d suddenly remember something he

had to do. As far as Peggy was concerned, he might as well have slapped

her in the face.

What Peggy felt as rejection from her father was in fact anxiety about

intimacy. Her efforts to get closer to him took the form of pursuing a dis-

tancer, a pattern she also played out with her husband.

Intimacy has levels of intensity, from simple contact, to chatting

about neutral subjects like the weather, to semipersonal topics, to personal

conversations about things that are important to you, to talking about

your relationship. Everyone gets anxious at some point on this progression;

precisely where depends on you and who you’re with. Peggy’s father just

happened to be one of those people made anxious by even mildly intimate

conversations. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his daughter; he just didn’t

know how to talk to her.

To get closer to her father, I advised Peggy to spend a little time alone

with him—which meant gently pulling him out of hiding behind the tele-

vision and away from the grandchildren—and moving the conversation

very slowly from one level of intimacy to the next, stopping as soon as

How to Defuse Emotional Reactivity
191

either one of them started to get anxious. Pushing her father past his com-

fort zone would only trigger his distancing reflex and leave Peggy feeling

like a fisherman after the big one got away.

Peggy lowered her expectations and decided simply to spend some

time with her father, during which she would keep the conversation light.

Her primary concern would be to avoid becoming anxious or making her

father feel that way. She found her father remarkably receptive to this new

nondemanding approach and on her next visit hoped to move the conver-

sation to a slightly more personal level.

She had complained that her father showed no interest in her life,

but now she realized that she hadn’t demonstrated much interest in his. I

suggested that she try an opening that most people will respond to: “What

are you working on these days?” Peggy’s father welcomed his daughter’s

interest, and he reciprocated by showing more interest in what was going

on in her world. Once or twice when she tried to talk about something

that made her father uncomfortable—like how his retirement money was

holding out—he did his old disappearing act, and Peggy once again felt

rejected. But she didn’t dwell on this feeling, and it didn’t last long. Her

father never did become the kind of man she could really confide in, but

he was after all her father, and she loved him. What’s more, now that she’d

come to terms with his reticence, she realized how much he loved her.

“I’ve Tried to Change Things with My Parents,

but It Hasn’t Worked.”

Systems are tenacious, resistant to change; or to put it in more human

terms, your parents have a long history of relating to you in a certain

way. If you try to change that, you will be tense and their reaction will be

intense. Have a plan when you visit. Remember that when you reenter the

family’s emotional force field, your ability to think about what’s going on

is impaired. So do your thinking beforehand. Formulate reasonable goals.

When you try a new way of behaving, start with small steps.

The people close to us don’t have any tricks up their sleeves. Their

actions surprise us only because we keep looking for them to do what we

wish they’d do. They do what they do. Once you learn this, you can stop

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being surprised and upset. You can let them be who they are. You might as

well; they will anyway.2

A relationship matures when you can allow the other person to be

who he or she is. If your mother criticizes everybody
and
you can’t accept

this, your life may be dominated by your attempt to stop her (and every-

body else, for that matter) from criticizing anything or anyone. Once you

can let your mother be a person who’s critical—in other words, accept that

she is who she is—you don’t have to fight it or organize your life around

it.

Once you accept that people are who they are,

you can stop trying to change them—and stop overreacting

when they do what they’ve always done.

Peggy’s more relaxed approach to her parents didn’t stop her mother

from being critical or her father from being withdrawn, but it did make

Peggy a whole lot less reactive to them—and to the other people in her life

who touched the same raw nerves.

Learning to listen without overreacting is an exercise in accepting

that each of us is different and separate. You can even learn to enjoy the

differences. Formerly “difficult” and “disagreeable” people begin to soften

perceptibly as soon as you let them be who they are.

Why Emotional Reactivity Increases

as Relationships Evolve

In the early stages, most relationships are fairly comfortable. People can talk

and listen without too much tension; otherwise the relationship wouldn’t

get very far. Such harmony, however, is time- limited. Relationships, like

unstable chemical compounds, tend to deteriorate. Once a relationship

becomes heated with emotional reactivity, it may have to be cooled down

with emotional distance— avoidance of one another or at least of poten-

tially upsetting subjects. But if the two parties are closeted together or try

2One of my patients once told me without irony that her father “could be a wonderful per-

son, if only he were different.”

How to Defuse Emotional Reactivity
193

to discuss emotionally charged issues, one or both of them may start spill-

ing over with anxiety.

One person may act to preserve harmony by giving in and doing all

the listening. The other person may be unaware of the disparity. But it

takes two to preserve this inequality. The mistake the placater makes is to

confuse self- denial with self- restraint. The latter strategy allows both peo-

ple to win; the former makes losers of them both. But as long as one person

is cowed by the other’s emotionality, and the other continues to express

himself in the same old way, both of them are preserving the unhappy

equilibrium.

The emotional climate in a relationship varies from hot to cold, tur-

bulent to stable, and safe to unsafe. The presence of unresolved conflict

makes for storminess. Some relationships, for example, are dominated by

friction over togetherness versus independence. Anything said about who’s

going to do what with whom can trigger the anxiety over this conflict.

When someone opens up on you with a mean mouth or listens with

only feigned interest, it’s natural to blame his or her personality. When

someone erupts at something you say, it’s impossible not to blame this out-

burst on him or her. But reactivity, like everything else in a relationship, is

interactional. The only part of the equation you can change is your part.

Trying to avoid or control other people

doesn’t resolve your reactivity.

A listener’s oversensitivity festers and flourishes with preoccupation

about giving too much or getting too little. Unfortunately, this listener’s

reactivity makes people avoid him or her, which increases the listener’s

alienation and exacerbates his or her reactivity. As their emotional com-

posure decreases, people rely more on other people to provide their sense

of well-being. This dependence inflates expectations and escalates reactiv-

ity.

To cut down on reactivity, respect your right to be yourself

and other people’s right to be themselves.

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GETTING THROUGH TO EACH OTHER

Self- possessed people aren’t easily threatened by loss of their own

emotional integrity, and so their relationships are flexible. Periods of close-

ness and distance are tolerated. Each is free to be close or pursue their own

interests. Neither is threatened by the other’s needs. Denying one’s own

emotional reactions, blaming those reactions on others, and avoiding or

pursuing others to reduce anxiety are emotionally driven processes that

rob relationships of flexibility. The point isn’t to deny your feelings but to

choose how to react to them.

Mature listeners take responsibility for their own responses. Instead of

thinking “So and so is impossible,” they hear what is said, feel their reac-

tions, and then decide how to respond.

“Hearing” someone who doesn’t open up means recognizing that he

doesn’t want to say much. If the reticent person is someone you care about,

you may feel shut out. But if you react to that feeling by pressuring the

other person to open up, you are projecting your own anxiety and making

him or her feel threatened.

Pressuring someone to open up isn’t listening. You may really want to

hear what’s on his mind, you may think you can help, you may believe it

would be good for him and the relationship if he talked more; but pressure

is pressure.

The best way to approach emotionally reticent people is to make con-

tact without pushing. Openness without pressure helps relax the assump-

tion that it isn’t safe to open up. Respecting the integrity of the emotional

boundary that allows you to be yourself (someone who wants to get closer)

and the other person to be himself or herself (someone who wants to go

slow) keeps anxiety from escalating.

Releasing yourself from slavish and unrewarding obligations helps