The Lost Art of Listening (9 page)

truth to that, he insisted that she was a critical and controlling person.

“She’s always telling me what to do,” he said. “She won’t leave me alone.”

If these protests remind you of a teenager complaining about his mother,

you’re onto something about transference.

Whenever Walter’s wife asked him to do something for her, he felt

like she was bossing him around. The burden of being cast in the role of

a controlling mother is familiar to many women. What to do? This is a

tough one. One solution is for the woman to take into account her man’s

tendency to overreact by carefully avoiding anything that might sound

like a complaint. In fact, Walter’s wife tried to do just that. Knowing how

hypersensitive he was, she’d refrain from asking him anything for weeks

at a time. But eventually taking care of the house and yard would get

too much for her and she’d complain that she needed him to take some

responsibility for the chores. Having waited so long made it hard to keep

the annoyance out of her voice. He’d feel scolded and resentful, and the

cycle would start all over again.

How Communication Breaks Down
47

Another solution is to borrow a technique from Harry Stack Sulli-

van, founder of the interpersonal school of psychoanalysis. Sullivan was

famous for being able to work with severely disturbed patients, many of

whom had paranoid delusions (perhaps the most extreme form of projec-

tion). Whenever Sullivan feared that a patient might be projecting cer-

tain expectations onto him, he’d make what he called “counterprojective

comments,” explicitly disavowing the role being projected onto him. The

point of such comments was to reassure the other person, and so saying, for

example, “I’m not your mother!” in a scolding voice would hardly qualify.

A more reassuring way to disavow the role of critical mother might be to

say “Honey, I don’t mean to be critical, but would you do me a favor and

not put the cats in the washing machine?”

Transference is usually thought of as distortion. But maybe it also has

to do with what the speaker needs from the listener at that moment. Thus,

for example, a woman chatting about a program she saw on TV may not

impose any particular needs on the person listening to her. On the other

hand, if the same woman has just been in an auto accident, she may proj-

ect onto the listener her need for an empathic selfobject experience. In

the first instance, she may enjoy the listener’s sharing a similar experience,

whereas in the second she may not want to be interrupted except to have

her feelings acknowledged.

Countertransference
, the psychoanalytic term for the complexity intro-

duced by the listener, refers to how the listener’s subjectivity distorts his

or her experience of the conversation. Like transference, countertransfer-

ence isn’t simply distortion, because our expectations actually shape and

reshape our relationships. The woman who expects men to talk only about

themselves may inquire more than she discloses, thereby confirming her

expectations. The man who expects to find his wife’s account of the day

uninteresting may fail to ask the questions that might make it interesting

to him; as a result, he gets out of the conversation pretty much what he

puts into it.

Dorothy suggested to her brother that they should ask their mother

what kind of funeral arrangements she wanted for their father. Ron

responded angrily, “Well, I can’t just drop everything and fly across the

country. I certainly can’t stay for a week to sit shivah. I have things

to do here and people are counting on me.” Dorothy had had no such

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THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

expectations of her brother and wondered why he had to get so angry at

her.

Countertransference: The listener has an emotional reaction

that interferes with hearing what’s being said. When

listeners are in the grip of countertransference, mature

responses, like empathy, perspective, humor, wisdom, and

concern for the other person, are distorted through the

prism of the listener’s emotionality.

Although the terms transference and countertransference don’t really

tell you anything you don’t already know, they may remind you that lis-

tening can be disrupted by either the speaker or the listener. Actually,

distinguishing between the two (unless
you
misunderstand something
I’ve

said) is somewhat arbitrary. The communicative process is always
inter-

subjective
—that is, it reflects the actions and interactions of both parties’

subjective realities.

The principal forces contributing to the listener’s filter are the lis-

tener’s own agenda, preconceived notions and expectations, and defensive

emotional reactions.

The Listener’s Own Agenda

In the summer of 1992, Ariel Dorfman’s play
Death and the Maiden
, starring

Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss, and Gene Hackman, drew large audiences

on Broadway. This play of ideas in the guise of a political thriller takes

place in a country that might be Chile in the immediate aftermath of a

corrupt dictatorship. The setting is a beach house on the night that the

lawyer, Gerardo (Richard Dreyfuss), is asked to investigate political crimes

of the recent past, including the rape of his wife, Paulina (Glenn Close).

When Roberto Miranda (Gene Hackman) gives her husband a lift home

after his tire blows out, she recognizes his voice as that of the doctor who

raped her. Paulina gets a gun and ties the doctor to a chair. But her hus-

band doesn’t believe her. How could she recognize the man who raped her

from just his voice? He can’t believe that the good Samaritan who stopped

to help him on the road could be the evil man who did such terrible things

How Communication Breaks Down
49

to his wife. She assures him that she could never forget that voice. Still her

husband can’t believe her. The play turns on the wife’s desperation and the

husband’s incredulity. The ending is ambiguous.

I first heard about
Death and the Maiden
from a patient who took it as

an allegory of a husband’s failure to listen to his wife, despite the urgency

of her appeal. She knew how the woman felt. I replied that as a metaphor

for misunderstanding the story was one-sided, stressing as it did only the

husband’s failure to listen, rather than also dealing with the wife’s failure

to make herself understood. I wasn’t familiar with the play, but I wanted

my patient to quit blaming her husband for their problems and begin to

see their communication as a process that took place between them. It

wasn’t until later that I realized that I was recreating a similar story: a

woman was trying to tell a man something—in this case that the play was

profoundly disturbing and that it reminded her of not being listened to by

her husband—and the man wasn’t listening.

When I finally got around to reading the play, I responded the same

way my patient did. It’s a powerful story about a woman desperate for

understanding and desperately not understood.

I didn’t listen to my patient with the best of intentions. Oh, I heard

what she said all right, but I was too eager to teach her a lesson about lis-

tening to really understand what she was saying—that the play was upset-

ting and reminded her of her own situation. My response, “Yes, but . . . ,”

had the effect of making her wrong and me right. Failures of listening often

take that form.

To listen well, it’s necessary to let go of what’s on your mind long

enough to hear what’s on the other person’s. Feigned attentiveness doesn’t

work.

Remember Roger, whose friend Derek grew distant after he got mar-

ried? Roger might have been able to talk to Derek if he’d concentrated

on saying how he felt, without blaming Derek or forcing him to explain

himself. If you can express your feelings without trying to compel anything

from the other person, you’re more likely to get heard—and more likely to

hear what the other person is feeling.

For years, Wayne had trouble listening to Janice’s complaining. She

was always unhappy about something, and he always felt that she expected

him to do something about it. Therefore, because he felt threatened by her

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THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

complaints, Wayne listened only reluctantly. In fact, when Janice really did

want Wayne to do something she would make that perfectly clear. The rest

of the time she just had the sense that he wasn’t interested in her feelings.

When Janice’s mother developed Parkinson’s, something shifted in

the couple’s relationship. Now when Janice talked about the problems she

was worried about, Wayne could sympathize because it was clear that he

wasn’t responsible. He could sense her vulnerability and he felt good about

being able to listen and comfort her.

What shifted wasn’t the result of anything either of them did deliber-

ately. Wayne became a better listener once he realized he wasn’t respon-

sible for doing anything about Janice’s feelings, and she became easier to

listen to when she expressed her feelings of vulnerability more directly.

Too bad it took a crisis to make clear what had always been the case.

Wayne wasn’t responsible for Janice’s feelings, and when she expressed her

feelings more directly, he was able to listen. I’ll discuss later what you can

do to bring about this shift toward mutual understanding, whether you’re

a listener who gets defensive or a person who has trouble getting people to

listen to your feelings.

Preconceived Notions

By the time we emerge from adolescence, most of us have become self-

protective. We know where our naked nerve endings are and don’t often

expose them. We open ourselves selectively and, like any creature with a

soft underbelly, retreat from unfriendly encounters. Sometimes, however,

it’s too late to pull back inside our shells. When the pressure of emotion

makes us open ourselves to someone we think we can trust, failed under-

standing can be as bruising as a mugging.

When his son told him he was dropping out of college, Seth did his

best to hide his disappointment. Still, he was upset and needed someone

to talk to. Hoping that his brother would understand, Seth gave him a call.

It wasn’t easy for Seth to talk about his feelings, so he started out mak-

ing small talk. After a few minutes Seth told his brother that Justin had

dropped out of school and that he was very discouraged about it. There

was a pause, and then his brother went on to talk about something else.

Seth was stunned. How could his brother be so unsympathetic? With great

How Communication Breaks Down
51

effort, he confronted his brother, saying “Didn’t you hear what I said?” His

brother replied that he had never thought of Seth as someone who needed

emotional support.

Here was a chance for the brothers to share a deeper understanding; if

they would only open up and listen to one another, they could reestablish

the closeness they’d had so many years ago. But it didn’t happen.

The expectations with which we approach others are, as we shall see,

just one of many ways we create the listening we get. Nor can the process

be reduced to the behavior of the participants—the words—and therefore

always be improved by “skills training” or pretending to take an interest

or other calculated strategies. (Conversation can, of course, be reduced

to a behavioral analysis, but only by trivializing the feelings of the people

involved.) Dialogue takes place between two people with not just ears and

tongues but hearts and minds—and all the famous complications therein.

Having an understanding attitude doesn’t mean presuming

to know a person’s thoughts and feelings. It means being

open to listening and discovering.

Emotional Reactivity

As I mentioned in the Introduction, we all have certain ways of react-

ing emotionally within particular relationships. The closer the relation-

ship, the more vulnerable we are to hearing something said as rejection

or attack, even if it wasn’t meant that way. Because of the dynamics of

the relationship or what we’ve learned to expect, we get defensive, which

makes it impossible to listen to and understand what the speaker meant

to say.

A simple “Have you taken the garbage out yet?” might be taken as

a rebuke by someone whose parents never expected him to do anything

right. His response might be an overreactive “Can’t you leave me alone

for one second!”

It’s not always the listener’s defensiveness, of course, that gives rise to

heated reactions. Sometimes it’s the speaker’s provocation.

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THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

“Why do I always have to ask you three times before you do anything?”

when it really means “Would you please take the garbage out?” will almost