The Lost Art of Listening (6 page)

Does he want to be held? (Imagine the baby’s feelings. What a chasm sepa-

rates her from these two giant, nervous creatures nature has assigned as

her waitpersons. Would they ever catch on?) When the baby grows up and

learns to talk, she becomes better at putting her needs and feelings into

words. Better, but not perfect. Sometimes we all need a little help making

ourselves understood.

5Aiden Macfarlane,
The Psychology of Childbirth
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1977).

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THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

Infants are helplessly dependent on their parents. When the parents

are absent, angry, or otherwise unresponsive, the child is alone and terri-

fied; he feels the bottom dropping out of his whole world. This primal con-

nection to others begins as a matter of life and death, over which we have

little control when we’re infants. Gradually we become aware of our own

half of the equation (some people more gradually than others).

Okay, so it’s been a while since you depended on your parents to hear

your cries and recognize that you were a person with needs and feelings.

What significance does this stage of dependence on being heard have for

us as adults?

Unlike infants, we don’t have to be listened to in order to know that

we are persons— existential agents who are initiators of actions. But what

listening does provide for us as adults is an opportunity to articulate and

integrate deeper layers of ourselves. Attention and appreciation on the

part of a listener create an interpersonal experience in which we open

up and experience a fuller version of ourselves. The experience of being

listened to promotes an unfolding of aspects of experience that may have

been closed off because they were never vitalized by being shared and

acknowledged. For an infant, being listened to helps confirm that he or she

is a self. For an adult, being listened to helps that developmental process to

continue— enabling us to provide a fuller account of ourselves and a fuller

acceptance of our multidimensional selves.

Adrienne had been going with Phillip for three years when she met

Cliff. She hadn’t made any promises to Phillip, but they’d been together so

long that she didn’t really feel okay about seeing another guy. After about

a month of wondering what to do, she finally talked to her friend Judy.

Judy had been married long enough to know that you never know

how relationships are going to turn out. So when Adrienne told her about

Cliff, she just listened. She asked a few questions, like what did Adrienne

want, what was she afraid of, and what did she hope would happen, but

mostly she just allowed Adrienne to talk.

Adrienne didn’t make any final decisions as a result of that conversa-

tion, but she did get a lot clearer about what she wanted. She knew she

didn’t want to be alone, but she wasn’t ready to get tied down, either. Phil-

lip was a genuinely nice guy, but she wasn’t really in love with him. Cliff

was more exciting, but she wasn’t sure he was the kind of person she could

How Listening Shapes Us and Connects Us to Each Other
31

count on. She was happy to have Phillip in her life, but since she didn’t

think she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him, she wasn’t willing

to close off other options. If she saw Cliff occasionally without breaking

up with Phillip, there might be complications, but she was willing to risk

them.

Sometimes in injury or illness we revisit our childhood feelings of

dependency. At times like these our need for other people is self- evident

and we experience their response to us as validating our experience or

not.

When Valerie got one of those migraines that struck without warning,

she told her husband that she couldn’t go out to dinner because she had

a headache. He said he was sorry she didn’t feel well and suggested that

she take some aspirin and lie down. Aspirin didn’t work for her, and she’d

rather stay downstairs and put an ice pack on her forehead. Shouldn’t he

know that by now? Valerie was glad not to have to go out, but she felt that

her husband’s suggestion to go upstairs and lie down was just pushing her

away. He liked going out to dinner with her, liked having her go to the gym

with him, liked having her listen to his problems and accomplishments, but

it didn’t seem like he was willing to be with her when she didn’t feel well.

Most of us eventually grow up, but we never outgrow the need to be

taken seriously—to have our feelings recognized.

“Hey, Look at Me!”: The Sense of a Core Self

(Two to Seven Months)

Between eight and twelve weeks, infants become gregarious. The social

smile emerges; they begin to vocalize and make eye-to-eye contact. When

the baby looks up and smiles and coos, or splashes in the bath, or giggles

with delight, how could you
not
love her? Surely, we would like to think,

all parents respond intuitively to such communications. Unfortunately,

that isn’t so. Some parents are so preoccupied, depressed, or otherwise dis-

tracted that they ignore their babies. And, perhaps more common, many

parents respond to their babies not as little people with their own rhythms

and moods but as foils for the parents’ needs.

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THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

Every infant has an optimal level of excitement. Activity beyond

that level constitutes overstimulation, and the experience becomes upset-

ting; below that level, stimulation is, well, unstimulating. Parents must

learn to read their babies. By taking their children seriously as persons,

responding to the children’s feelings rather than imposing their own,

parents convey acceptance that children take in and transform into self-

respect.

The next time you see an adult interacting with a baby, notice the

difference between responding in tune with the child’s level of excitement

and imposing the adult’s emotions on the child. When you see a parent

with blunted emotions ignoring a bright-eyed baby, you’re witnessing the

beginning of a long, sad process by which unresponsive parents wither the

enthusiasm of their children like unwatered flowers.

Having quite enough unwatered flowers at the office, thank you, I

wasn’t about to have any around my house. I remember tiptoeing into the

baby’s room at eventide, right about the time she was dozing—or pretend-

ing to. What my masculine intuition told me she really wanted was not

rest but to be hurled violently up to the ceiling and then come crashing

toward the floor—like a skydiver without a parachute—only to be plucked

from the jaws of death by Daddy. Whee!

Too choked with joy to speak, the little mite showed her pleasure

by widening her eyes like saucers while her face turned a lovely shade of

blue.

Excessive enthusiasm may be less depressing, but it isn’t necessarily

more responsive. We’ve all seen grown-ups at it—“baby love”—the ful-

some tone of voice, the honeyed words, the endless marveling and exclaim-

ing. When babies are little, it’s almost automatic; babies are so animated

themselves that they drive up the intensity of our response. But when this

adult enthusiasm exceeds the baby’s own, the result is a jarring discontinu-

ity. Loving parents share the moods of their children and show it.

It isn’t exuberance or any other emotion that conveys loving

appreciation, it’s being understood, and taken seriously.

How Listening Shapes Us and Connects Us to Each Other
33

The baby whose parents tickle and poke and jiggle and shake her

when she’s not in the mood is as alone with her real self as the baby whose

parents ignore her. This imposition of the parents’ agenda is, in what

psychiatrist R. D. Laing so tellingly called the “politics of experience,”

the mystification in which the child’s reality gets lost.6 Not being under-

stood and taken seriously as a person in your own right—even at this early

age—is the root of aloneness and insecurity. In the words of psychoanalyst

Ernest Wolf, “Solitude, psychological solitude, is the mother of anxiety.”7

Eleanor appreciates getting flowers from her children on Mother’s

Day but wishes they’d find time to call more often.

Ted tells Katie that he’s worn out and wants to stay home and watch

a movie on TV. Katie says that maybe he’d feel better if they went out for

a walk.

Nikki tells her father about an older colleague at work who often

interrupts her at staff meetings. She doesn’t want to make a fuss, but she

wants to be able to finish saying what’s on her mind. Her father tells her

that the next time he does that, she should tell him to shut up, she’s not

finished. Nikki thanks him and changes the subject.

What these examples have in common is that when people respond

to us in terms of their own preferences rather than tuning in to ours, it feels

like they don’t really know us, don’t really get who we are—aren’t really

listening.

“Honey, I’m Cold. Don’t You Want a Sweater?”:

The Sense of a Subjective Self (Seven to Fifteen Months)

By about one year of age the baby realizes that she has an inner, private

mental world, with desires, feelings, thoughts, and memories, which are

invisible to others unless she makes an attempt to reveal them. The pos-

6R. D. Laing,
The Politics of Experience
(New York: Pantheon, 1967).

7Ernest Wolf, “Developmental Line of Self- Object Relations,” in Arnold Goldberg, ed.,

Advances in Self Psychology
(New York: International Universities Press, 1980).

34
THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

sibility of sharing these invisible contents of the mind is the source of the

greatest human happiness and frustration.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a baby who hasn’t yet learned to

talk, and you want a cookie. What do you do if you see the cookie but it’s

out of reach? Simple. You get your mother to read your mind.

Mind reading may sound extravagant, but isn’t that what commu-

nication boils down to? The baby must gain Mother’s attention, express

what’s on his mind, and do so in a way that Mother receives and under-

stands the message.

“I want a cookie” is a simple message, easily sent and easily received,

even without words. When it comes to more complicated messages, babies

(like you and me) may have to work harder to express themselves—and

hope their listeners will work hard enough to understand.

The possibility of sharing experience creates the possibility for con-

firmation of the self as understandable and acceptable; it also creates the

possibility of intimacy, fulfilling the desire to know and be known. What’s

at stake is nothing less than discovering what part of the private world of

inner experience is shareable and what part falls outside the pale of com-

monly accepted human experience.

Being listened to spells the difference between feeling

accepted and feeling isolated.

The possibility of sharing mental states between people also raises the

possibility of misunderstanding. For example, babies are remarkably eager

explorers. Sitting on Mommy’s or Daddy’s lap, a baby may probe the par-

ent’s mouth or nose with a finger or tug at a strand of hair to see if it will

come loose. The parent who takes this exploration as an act of aggression

may get annoyed and attribute hostility to the baby. If so, the parent may

follow up this feeling with a rebuke, a slap, or some rejection of the baby,

who had only been doing what comes naturally at this age.

The misunderstood baby is confused by the parent’s lack of under-

standing, upset and frightened by the rebuke.
Maybe it was a mistake
, the

baby thinks. Then, if the baby repeats the exploration, to clarify the confu-

sion or to evoke a different response this time, the baby may now do so with

a more energetic assertiveness. Now the parent will assume that his or her

original misunderstanding was confirmed: the baby
is
being aggressive.

How Listening Shapes Us and Connects Us to Each Other
35

If this situation is repeated, the parent’s false interpretation may

become the infant’s (and later the child’s) official and accepted one: explo-

ration is aggression, and it’s bad. The baby may come to see himself as

aggressive, even hostile. Someone else’s reality has become his. Misunder-

standing undermines not only our trust in others, but also our trust in our

own perceptions.

The word for sharing experience is
intersubjectivity.
The reason for this

fancy term where an ordinary word like
communication
might do is to keep

us from forgetting that understanding is a joint achievement: one person

trying to express what’s on his or her mind, the other trying to read it.

Reading a child’s mind begins with
attunement.