The Lost Art of Listening (5 page)

escapism; we snap on the TV, treat ourselves to Ben and Jerry’s, or escape

into popular fiction about people whose lives are exciting. There is, of

course, nothing wrong with relaxing. But why do we turn on the TV even

when there’s nothing to watch? And why do we feel restless without the

car radio playing, even when it’s just noise?

We usually associate passive escapism with release from stress. While

it’s true that many of us feel used up at the end of the day, it may not be

overwork that wears us down, but a lack of understanding in our lives.

Chief among the missing elements is the attention and appreciation of

responsive selfobjects, people who care and listen to us with interest.

When the quality of our relationships isn’t sufficient to maintain our equi-

librium and enthusiasm—or when we’re not up to making them so—we

seek escape from morbid self- consciousness. We seek stimulation, excite-

ment, responsiveness, gratification—the same kinds of feelings that can be

had from a heart-to-heart talk with someone we care about. But without

the ballast of someone to talk to, some of us will continue to drown out

the silence, as though without some kind of electronic entertainment to

distract us, we may hear the low rumblings of despair.

Exercises

1.
Who is the best listener you know? What makes that person a

good listener? (Not interrupting? Asking interested questions? Ack-

nowledging what you’ve said?) What is being with that person like?

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THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

What can you learn from that person that would make you a better

listener?

2.
What do you hesitate to talk to your partner about? Why? What hap-

pens to those withheld thoughts and feelings? What are the conse-

quences of that withholding for you? For the relationship?

3.
If you improved the way you listen, who would you want to notice?

What conversations would you like to go differently?

4.
If people think you aren’t listening to them, what will they assume it

means? What will this lead to?

5.
If people think you are listening to them, what will they assume it

means? What will this lead to?

6.
The next time something is really bothering you, notice how you feel

about wanting to talk with someone. Does something hold you back?

What do you worry about? If you do share your feelings with someone,

what happens?

THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

How Listening Shapes Us and Connects Us to Each Other

2

…

“Thanks for Listening”

How Listening Shapes Us

and Connects Us to Each Other

We define and sustain ourselves in conversation with others. Recogni-

tion—being listened to—is the response from another person that makes

our experience meaningful. It allows us to realize our own agency and

authorship in a tangible way. But, as we saw in Chapter 1, the expression

and recognition so fundamental to our well-being is a mutual, reciprocal

process. Our lives are coauthored in conversation. So, if being recognized

through listening is to define and sustain us, it must come from someone

whom we in turn recognize. Striking a balance between expression (talk-

ing) and recognition (listening) is what allows us and the people we care

about to interact as sovereign equals.

If your life, or even a key relationship in it, is unbalanced—if it doesn’t

allow you sufficient self- expression and mutual recognition—you will be the

poorer for it. Listening is critical to the formation of a strong and healthy

self
and
to the formation of strong and healthy relationships.

What makes listening such a force in shaping character is the power

of words to match and share experience—or contradict and falsify it. What

is understood and accepted—“Yes, isn’t that wonderful!”—becomes part of

the social self, the self you own and share. What doesn’t get appreciated—

“You shouldn’t be feeling that way in the first place”—becomes part of the

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THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

private self, known but not shared, or disowned, kept secret, sometimes

even from yourself. Ominously, much of what fails to find acceptance

becomes part of the disavowed self, what psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sul-

livan called the “not me.”1 Some parents may be too anxious to tolerate

a child’s anger; others may be too embarrassed to tolerate their children’s

sexual feelings. Each of us grows up with some experiences of self so poi-

soned with anxiety that they aren’t assimilated into the rest of our person-

ality. Listening shapes us; not being heard twists us.

A young mother in denim was berating her little girl for wanting a

Barbie doll. It was a
stupid
thing to want; the child
should be ashamed of her-

self
; she
should
have more self- respect.
It was painful to hear. The sad irony of a mother hammering away at a little girl’s pride to teach her self- respect

was hard to escape. Should a mother let her daughter have a Barbie, like

all the other kids? That’s up to her; but she should respect her daughter’s

right to have opinions of her own.

Gradually, with cooperation between parent and child, a self is formed,

organized by language and listening, based in part on the child’s natural

experience, in part on the values imposed by the parents. The listened-to

child grows up whole and secure. The unlistened-to child lacks the under-

standing that firms self- acceptance and is “bent out of shape” by the wishes

and anxieties of others. This is what psychotherapist Carl Rogers meant

when he said that the child’s innate tendency toward self- actualization is

subverted by the need to please.2

What never gets heard affects more than the difference

between the socially shareable and the private; it drives

a split between the true self and a false self.

The seeds of listening are sown in childhood, in the quality of the

relationship between parent and child. Parents who listen make their

children feel worthwhile and appreciated. Being listened to helps build

1Harry Stack Sullivan,
The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry
(New York: Norton, 1953).

2Carl Rogers,
Client- Centered Therapy
(Boston: Houghton- Mifflin, 1951).

How Listening Shapes Us and Connects Us to Each Other
27

a secure self, endowing a child with sufficient self- respect to develop his

or her own unique talents and ideals and to approach relationships with

confidence.

That understanding builds self- assurance is hardly news. Most of us

can picture a mother with smiling eyes listening enthusiastically to a child

eagerly describing some triumph or a father comforting a sad-faced child

crying over some minor tragedy. And we all know how bad it feels to watch

a parent reduce a child to tears of humiliation for making a mistake. Of

course such scenes, repeated over and over, have an impact on a child.

What may not be so obvious is how early or how profoundly the quality of

listening begins to shape character.

How Listening Shapes Self- Respect

To begin with, the self is not a given, like having red hair or being tall,

but a perspective on awareness, and an interpersonal one at that. The self

is how we personify what we are, as shaped by our experience of being

responded to by others. Character is formed in relationships, and the vital-

ity of the self depends on the quality of listening we receive.

Among scientific findings with the most profound implications for

understanding the importance of listening is the work of infant researcher

Daniel Stern.3 Stern’s most radical discovery was that the infant is never

totally undifferentiated (symbiotic) from the mother.

Margaret Mahler’s influential theory of separation and individuation

was based on the assumption that we grow up and out of relationships,

rather than becoming more active and sovereign
within
them.4 But once

we accept the idea that we don’t begin life as part of an undifferentiated

unity, the question isn’t how we separate from our parents but how we

learn to connect. The challenge isn’t to become free of people, but to

make ourselves understood in relationship to them.

This view of the self as having a fundamental need for expression and

recognition emerged not only from the observation of infants but also in

consulting rooms, where psychotherapists hear the child’s cry in the adult

3Daniel Stern,
The Interpersonal World of the Infant
(New York: Basic Books, 1985).

4Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman,
The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant

(New York: Basic Books, 1975).

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THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

voice. The anguish of those who feel empty and alone, unable to connect

to other people, leads to the question “What does it take to make us feel

whole?” A large part of the answer is being listened to.

In charting the development of children, Stern identified four pro-

gressively more complex senses of self, each defining a different domain

of self- experience and social relatedness. Second only to the need for food

and shelter is the need for understanding. Even infants need listening

to thrive. “Listening” to an infant may sound somewhat stilted, but it is

precisely that—the quality of parental responsiveness—that plays such a

decisive role in making us what we are.

Let’s look now at the unfolding of these four senses of self to see how

listening shapes character.

“Here I Am.”: The Sense of an Emergent Self

(Birth to Two Months)

The infant’s need for listening is simple but imperative. With the sudden

pressure of physical need, life goes from lovely to all wrong. Hunger breaks

over the body like an angry storm. It starts slowly; the baby has a sense of

something going awry. Then fussing turns to full- throated crying as the

baby tries to hurl the pain sensations out and away. This crying serves as

a distress signal, like a siren, to alert the parents and demand a response

from them.

Being a parent at this stage is simple. As I recall, my wife and I, our

empathic sensitivities honed to razor sharpness by months of sleep depri-

vation, were flung into action by the slightest peep. Blessed with a dis-

position as placid as a howler monkey, our first little darling would ever

so gently summon us for her nightly lactose intolerance test. I, never the

insensitive father, was usually first to respond. “Honey,” I’d coo, grinding

my teeth to keep them warm, “do something!” At which my mate, ever

appreciative of my support, would hasten to the little one’s side to admin-

ister whatever first aid was required. Ah, parenthood.

Babies are cute and helpless, but their smiling, fretting, and crying

are commanding messages; they must be listened to. At this stage parents,

thinking primarily about satisfying the baby’s needs, may not recognize the

extent of the social interaction involved in the process. But even before

How Listening Shapes Us and Connects Us to Each Other
29

the baby achieves self- consciousness, parents invest it with their expecta-

tions and aspirations. From day one, they relate to the baby as both an

actual and a potential self.

Our impulse toward understanding is irresistible. Developmental psy-

chologist Aidan Macfarlane’s observations of new mothers talking to their

infants for the first time after delivery show that the mothers attribute

meaning to each sign and sound.5 “What’s that frown for? The world’s a

little scary, huh?” Mothers don’t really believe the infant understands, but

they assign meaning to what their infants are doing and respond accord-

ingly. In time, they create little formats of interaction, jointly constructed

little worlds. This is the child’s first culture.

Parents immediately ascribe intentions to their babies (“Oh, you

want that”), motives (“You’re doing that so Mommy will hurry up and feed

you”), and authorship of action (“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”).

In so doing, parents are responding to and helping create an emergent self.

Such motives and intentions make human behavior understandable, and

parents invariably treat their infants as understandable beings—that is,

as the people they are to become (just so long as they become the people

their parents want them to become).

Who we are and what we say triggers other people’s

response to us. That response and our connection to others

remain vital to our psychological well-being.

When babies are too young to talk, their parents have to understand

what they feel but cannot say. When a baby cries, the parents must figure

out what’s wrong. Does he want to be fed? Does she need a diaper change?