The Lost Art of Listening (34 page)

public speaking is to accept rather than fight their nervousness. “Good

morning. My name is so-and-so, and I’m a little nervous speaking in front

of such a large group.” Such candor makes listeners sympathetic. Most of

us know what it feels like to be nervous speaking in public. Even more

important, though, is the effort to accept your feelings as natural instead

of trying to fight them.5

There’s an even more important way that trying to resist feelings leads

to more reactivity. If you let someone know how angry you are by venting

your bottled-up frustration in an emotional outburst, you’re likely to come

across as attacking. If the other person responds with angry counterac-

cusations or just walks out, you may conclude that it was a mistake to talk

about your feelings. This conclusion leads to a control and release cycle.

You hold everything in until you explode. The solution isn’t more control

but less.

Speaking up sooner makes it easier to lower your voice.

Instead of “You never do anything around here,” try “I’m overloaded

with housework. I need more help.”

Don’t turn discussions into a
zero-sum game
, in which one person wins

(is right) only if the other loses (is wrong).

There is, however, a difference between expressing what you feel and

dumping your emotions. Recently I got into an argument with a woman

5Thinking about “communicating with people” instead of “speaking in front of them” will

shift your attention and help you calm down.

How to Defuse Emotional Reactivity
201

who was tired of her father-in-law’s belittling comments and planned to

tell him off. When I suggested she tone down her emotionality before talk-

ing to him, she blew up at me. “What’s wrong with getting angry?” she

demanded.

This woman had a reason to be angry. Her father-in-law’s cutting

remarks were hard to take. But if she allowed her upset to overwhelm her,

her complaints wouldn’t be voiced clearly and wouldn’t be heard. Unload-

ing her anger, rather than articulating her complaints, would allow her

father-in-law to dismiss her as “oversensitive” or “having a bad day.” I’m

not advocating emotional detachment. Anger helps preserve our integrity

and self- regard, but simply venting anger doesn’t usually solve the prob-

lem it signals. The distinction I’m trying to draw isn’t between emotion

and reason but between impulsive and deliberate action. There’s nothing

wrong with emotion, and there’s nothing wrong with telling someone off,

if that’s what you want to do. It’s not responding with feeling that makes

us feel childish and inept—it’s losing control.

Exercises

1.
For a week, keep track of the number of your communications that are

(a) critical or instructional, (b) avoidant, or (c) affectionate or lauda-

tory. To change the climate in a relationship, shift from (a) and (b) to

(c) and see what happens.

This deceptively simple exercise may be very difficult to do. But

trying it may help you begin to think more about how you’re coming

across to the people you care about.

2.
What kind of interactions make you lose your cool? Do you have trou-

ble with anger? Do you start to cry when you talk about your feelings?

Do you get flustered in arguments?

Find a reasonably safe occasion in the next week or so when you can

put yourself in a situation you usually become reactive in. For example,

if you have teenagers, you can predict that they’re likely to test the

limits of house rules; if you have little ones, you can expect them to ask

for treats. One of the easiest ways to identify situations that make you

reactive is to think about what situations you habitually avoid. Don’t

expect too much of yourself, just concentrate on getting through the

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GETTING THROUGH TO EACH OTHER

experience without losing your cool. (Hint: One way to avoid losing

your cool is to focus on drawing the other person out.)

3.
The next time someone overreacts, consider where that reaction might

be coming from. If you can do this during a confrontation, you’re a bet-

ter person than I am. But you can always think about a blowup later. You

get an A+ on this assignment if you can use that sensitivity to express

empathy for what the other person seems to be feeling. (Remember:

you can always seek the person out and make amends later.)

4.
You probably know people who could use some of the suggestions in

this chapter. Why not buy several additional copies of this book and

leave them scattered around in strategic places?

Part Four

…

Listening in Context

LISTENING IN CONTEXT

Listening Between Intimate Partners

10

…

“We Never Talk Anymore”

Listening Between Intimate Partners

It started innocently enough. She met him at an office party and all they

did was talk. But when Maureen got home and her husband asked if she

had a nice time, she found herself unwilling to mention Arthur, as though

he were a secret she didn’t want to lose by telling. The next day Arthur

called to invite her for lunch. One lunch followed another, and then there

were drinks after work. The following week they drove up to Thatcher

Park and talked as they watched the sun set over the valley below. Nothing

happened, unless you count the brief moment when Maureen’s glance left

Arthur’s eyes and dropped to his lips and a shiver ran through her.

It was at this point that Maureen consulted me. She felt on the brink

of something. Arthur was everything her husband wasn’t: successful, self-

possessed, but most of all he really listened when they talked. Telling me

this, Maureen was visibly nervous. Her eyes scanned mine, looking for

understanding, expecting perhaps judgment, or maybe permission to do

what she longed to.

When, I asked, did the passion in her marriage die? She looked away.

Then she wiped her eyes and said that her husband was a good person;

they’d just . . . grown apart. He never talked to her anymore.

My sympathies were with this woman. Life holds few choices as con-

sequential as the one between satisfaction and security. Still, I’d seen too

many stale marriages blamed on the other partner.

205

206
LISTENING IN CONTEXT

When I suggested she bring her husband to our second meeting, Mau-

reen was reluctant. She wasn’t looking for marital therapy, she said, and

she was afraid of Raymond’s finding out about Arthur. What finally over-

came her hesitation was her hope that if I saw what Raymond was like,

maybe I’d understand why she’d consider leaving him.

Raymond did come, and Maureen told him she was unhappy with

their marriage. He seemed sympathetic, as though accustomed to oblig-

ing, but not really engaged. He listened but didn’t say much. Only when

I asked about his work did Raymond become animated. We talked for a

few minutes until Maureen interrupted to complain that he never talked

to her about these things. Why couldn’t he share his feelings with her?

Raymond didn’t have a very good answer for that. I was encouraged. Here

was something to work on.

If two people can’t talk, I said, something’s wrong. Then I turned their

chairs to face each other and asked Raymond to talk to Maureen about his

work and what his concerns were. I told her to listen and help him bring

out his feelings.

Raymond talked about the anxieties of opening a new law practice in

the middle of a recession. Very little work was coming in, but he was con-

vinced that if he could hang on for another year or so, things would start

to turn around. Maureen broke in to say that things would never improve

until he got rid of that idiot Ernie, his partner. They argued for a minute,

and then Raymond shut up.

Here was one reason this couple didn’t talk. When Raymond talked

about what was on his mind, Maureen argued or advised; he protested fee-

bly, then folded his tent. Perhaps she was comfortable with conversational

give-and-take and he wasn’t. Maybe he couldn’t listen to her opinions

because he didn’t believe in his own power to decide what to do. In any

case, here was a concrete problem to address.

Before I could start to help these two sort out their relationship, I had

to talk privately with Maureen. I would propose a trial nonseparation, a

period of not seeing Arthur and putting her energy into improving the

marriage, so she could find out if it could be improved.

Maureen was relieved that I’d met Raymond. “Now you see,” she said,

“how bad our relationship is. It’s never going to change.” (Maureen was

a great believer in chemistry, that famous force of attraction with more

power to excite than endure.) Nothing I said about postponing any deci-

Listening Between Intimate Partners
207

sion until she’d waited a few weeks to see if the marriage could be improved

made any impact. She started seeing Arthur again that same week, and

when Raymond found out the following week, he was as forgiving as most

husbands.

Their divorce was finalized a year and a day after the one time I saw

them together, eleven months after Maureen’s affair with Arthur heated

up, and eight months after it ended. Maureen was left with the house, two

children, mortgage payments she couldn’t keep up with, and the memory

of that shiver.

Maureen viewed her marriage as a predicament, an entity, something

with a history, perhaps, but one that after a while takes on a life of its own.

Most of us feel this way at times. But a relationship is not a thing, not a

static state; it is a process of mutual influence. A relationship isn’t some-

thing you have; it’s something you do.

Couples who learn to listen to each other—

with understanding and tolerance—often find that

they don’t need to change each other.

The impulse to change things, to make them better, is a natural and

largely constructive one. But anyone who thinks of marriage as an infi-

nitely improvable arrangement is making a mistake. The ideal of perfect-

ibility breeds frustration. Many problems can be solved, but the problem

of living with another person who doesn’t always see things the way you

do isn’t one of them. Sometimes marriage isn’t about resolving differences

but learning to live together with them.

What Goes Around

When I was in the third grade, Miss Halloway used a stroboscope to show

us how light affects what we see. Late one winter afternoon when the

shadows were long she took out a small fan with a metal blade and plugged

it in. She turned on the switch, and the blade began to spin and then whir.

Then she turned on the stroboscope. As she adjusted the rate of flash, the

fan blade slowed down and then stopped. The blade looked so still and

harmless! How easy it would be, I thought, to reach out and touch it.

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LISTENING IN CONTEXT

The blade looks stationary, Miss Halloway explained, because the

stroboscope illuminates only one point in the cycle. As I came to realize

later, this is the same way we see our relationships.

The first thing to understand about couples is that
complementarity

is the governing principle of relationship. Behavior doesn’t take place in

a vacuum but in the context of relationships in which we act and react

to each other. In any relationship, one person’s behavior is functionally

related to the other’s. If at times we see only one point in the cycle—a

friend’s failure to call, for example, or a partner’s lack of interest in what

we have to say—that doesn’t mean that relationships don’t spin around in

a circle.

The greatest impediment to understanding in intimate relationships

is the injured feeling of unfairness that makes us look outside ourselves for

the sources of our disappointment. We can’t help wishing our mates would

be a little more interested in what we have to say and a little less defensive

about what we have to say about them. At about this time, the romantic

vision of marriage gives way to melodrama—the story of villain and victim

that unhappily married people tell themselves and, when things get bad

enough, anyone else who will listen.

Many couples expect too much of each other and see their difficulties

as more apocalyptic than they really are. The real tragedy of this tragic

view is that our ability to see what’s going on is compromised. Like Mau-

reen, we fix on the hurtful things our partners do and think of our troubles

as inevitable.

When all is said and done, marriage and its famous complications can

be illuminated by focusing on one thing: the basic pattern of interaction

between two people. Start with the hurtful things your partner does—the

avoidance or selfishness or irritability—but then ask yourself: What is the

complementary other half of this pattern?

It Takes Two to Tango