The Lost Art of Listening (51 page)

forms personal and professional relationships (which it does) but can also

bring understanding across the gender gap, the racial divide, between rich

and poor, and even among nations. All that may be true, but if I’m going

to indulge in the unearned right to preach, maybe I should confine myself

to matters closer to home. After all, I’m a psychologist, not a philosopher.

Having read this far, you’ve probably been reminded of some things

you already knew but perhaps also come to see that listening is even more

important and difficult than people realize. The urge to be heard is so com-

pelling that even when we do listen, it’s usually not with the intent to

understand but to reply. And, as if that didn’t make listening hard enough,

at times of heat and conflict it takes a real effort to overcome, or at least

restrain, the reactive emotionalism that jolts us into anxiety and out of

sympathy with each other.

Few things can do as much to bring mutual understanding to your

relationships as responsive listening— hearing and acknowledging other

people’s thoughts and feelings before voicing your own. You can make

responsive listening a habit but, like any new habit, it takes practice.

One of my least favorite remarks has come from certain individuals

in therapy to improve their relationships. They’ve complained. I’ve lis-

tened sympathetically. Then I’ve suggested things they could do to start

giving and getting the understanding they say they long for. Then comes

The Comment: “Why does everything have to be so artificial? Why can’t

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Epilogue
305

we just talk to each other?” I hate that! They
were
talking, and it wasn’t

working.

It’s annoying when people say that it’s unnatural to hold their response

until they’ve acknowledged what the other person has to say, because this

protest seems so stubborn and self- defeating. But the thing that really

annoys me about this comment is that it’s true: good listening
doesn’t
come

naturally.

Listening is a skill, and like any skill it must be developed. But although

listening can be looked at this way—as a performance—it can also be looked

at another way, as a natural outgrowth of caring and concern for people.

* * *

Caring about people doesn’t require a lot of thought; it’s something

you feel. Caring about others almost automatically impels you to act with

consideration for them. This consideration isn’t wholly unselfish, because

caring about someone means that your well-being is tied up with theirs.

When a bad thing happens to someone you love, something bad happens

to you as well. But
showing
that you care, suspending your own interests

and making yourself receptive, isn’t always easy.

Listening a little harder— extending what we do automatically, extend-

ing ourselves a little more—is one of the best ways we can be good to each

other. Attending a little harder to other people—enough to hear their feel-

ings, enough to consider their point of view—this takes a little effort.

Caring enough to listen doesn’t mean going around selflessly available

to everyone you encounter. Rather, it means being alert to those situations

in which someone you care about needs to be listened to.

* * *

Ironically, our ability to listen is often worst with the people closest

to us. Conflict, habit, and the pressure of emotions makes us listen least

well where listening is most needed. As we move outside the family circle

to those we care about but don’t live with, we tend to be more open, more

receptive, and more flexible. It’s not—as we’re sometimes accused of —

that we care more about our friends than about our family but that these

relationships are less burdened with conflict and resentment.

You won’t get far with your efforts to listen better without running

into the problem of your own emotionality. Listening better requires not

only a greater openness to others but also a greater awareness of yourself.

Do you express yourself in a way that makes listeners anxious and defen-

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Epilogue

sive? If so, what can you do about it? (If the answer is nothing, then that’s

the improvement you can expect in the listening you get.) Under what cir-

cumstances do you become reactive and give advice or interrupt or make

jokes instead of listening?

* * *

Concern for other people is an instinctive expression of the best part of

us. Unfortunately, frustrations at home and a sense of powerlessness in the

wider world mean that we don’t always act with generosity and concern.

* * *

Everywhere around us we’re encouraged to claim our victimhood and

right to bitterness. This feeling of injured entitlement can be understood

as a product of insufficient emotional nourishment. People who are hungry

for attention are suffered, shunned, or shamed. Others let them know in

some way that their need to be heard is excessive. And where does that

leave them? Hungry for attention. And so the problem of listening, like all

human problems, is circular: inadequate appreciation makes us insecure in

ourselves and less open to others. The listening we don’t get is the listen-

ing we don’t pass on.

Our inability to get the attention we crave leaves us feeling power-

less—a feeling reinforced by living in a world marked by economic decline,

crime, pollution, and bureaucratic ineptitude. So it’s not surprising that

we’ve lost faith in our capacity to make a difference. Public disillusion

and private disappointment deplete and discourage us. We feel put upon

and let down, and so, naturally, we turn our resentment outward and our

sympathy inward.

When you feel beleaguered and insecure, it’s natural to think about

looking out for number one. Unfortunately, self- absorption is self- defeating.

Trapped in self- consciousness, we become polarized and resentful. Sadly,

anger and despair have fueled a decline in concern and a retreat to the

dead end of preoccupation with ourselves.

You can’t simply reverse the process of misunderstanding, but you can

realize that relationship problems are circular, and circular patterns can be

broken—if someone is willing to make the first move.

The great reward of making that move is that listening allows us to be

open, generous, and connected; to touch others’ lives and to enrich them

and us in the process. Listening— empathic listening— promotes growth in

the listener, the one listened to, and the relationship between them.

Epilogue
307

That better listening enhances our own well-being is the natural per-

spective of psychology, in which all human behavior is seen as motivated

by the agendas of the self. But when you narrow down human relations to

a collection of selves, and the self to the early conditioning of the child,

what you have left is fixed characters, and you’re stuck with them.

It’s a dogma of American life that all actions are motivated by self-

interest. But this dogma is false. The tendency to view our lives on the

planet from the perspective of individualism obscures the larger view that

we are part of systems within systems: the family, the extended family, the

community, the nation—vast networks of associations. The truth is that

looking inside ourselves can show us only part of the reason for feeling

empty and unfulfilled.

Should the idea of self- interest include interest in others? Yes. Benev-

olent self- interest goes hand in hand with interest in others. But is it only

a matter of enlightened self- interest to take an interest in other people?

Trade-offs have their place in the conduct of life. But it would leave

too much out of the story of human affairs to give an account of related-

ness to others only in terms of utilitarianism.

Caring about other people, which takes shape in political justice, the

relief of suffering, and the love of family and friends, is fundamental to our

sense of who we are and what makes our lives hang together. Pressures that

block or obscure this impulse reduce, even damage us.

Respect for human dignity doesn’t mean only feeling sympathy for

others or doing for them. It means respecting them enough to listen to

them, to hear and appreciate their voices—to view them as subjects, wor-

thy of hearing, not just as objects of our needs.

Listening to others is an ethical good, part of what it means to have

just and fair dealings with other people. Listening is part of our moral com-

mitment to each other.

* * *

Listening better to those you’re closest to is easier when you remem-

ber that we are separate selves. Openness and autonomy are correlated. If

you are to have the courage to be yourself, to stand squarely on your own

two feet, then you must accept that other people are entitled to their own

point of view. The idea isn’t to separate yourself from others but to let

them be themselves while you continue to be yourself.

Learning to listen involves a paradox of self- control: controlling your-

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Epilogue

self and letting go of control over the relationship. It’s like letting someone

else drive. To listen, you have to let go.

Trying harder to understand another person’s perspective takes effort,

but it isn’t just a skill to be studied and practiced. Hearing someone is an

expression of caring enough to listen.

One of the things I’ve hoped to do in this book is to help restore a

sense of balance to the way we think about relationships. First because

seeing our relationships as mutually defined enables us to change what we

get out of them by changing what we put into them. And second because

recognizing that we live in a web of relationships, which give meaning and

fullness to our lives, may inspire us to a little more generosity and concern

for other people.

Does talk of rebalancing relationships and rediscovering concern

sound a little pious? After all, you probably picked up this book to learn

a little more about listening, not to read a sermon on benevolence. Sorry.

But maybe the sympathy for other people that we’re born with is some-

thing we have to remind ourselves to express from time to time.

We all believe in fairness and respect for the rights of others. We

believe in compassion and justice and that everyone has a right to be

heard. Of course these standards are regularly violated. It remains that

they are valid standards. And they do from time to time galvanize us to

action—as when we somehow manage to listen instead of arguing in the

midst of a heated discussion or when we remember to take a little extra

time to hear what’s going on in someone’s life.

The obligation to listen can be experienced as a burden, and we all

sometimes feel it that way. But it is quite a different thing to be moved

by a sense that the people in our lives are eminently
worth
listening to, a

sense of their dignity and value. One thing we can all add a little more of is

understanding— respect, compassion, and fairness, the fundamental values

conveyed by listening.

* * *

As I said at the beginning of this book, the reason we long so much

to be listened to is that we never outgrow the need to communicate what

it’s like to live in our separate, private worlds of experience. Unfortunately,

there is no parallel need to listen. Maybe that’s why listening sometimes

seems in short supply. Listening isn’t a need we have; it’s a gift we give.

Index

Inde

Index

Index

Inde

Acceptance of others,

unshared thoughts and,

self-respect and, 30

191–192, 232, 266–267

39–41

unshared thoughts and, 39

Accommodation, 179,

Arguments.
See also

Attunement, 35, 254–255.

248–251

Disagreement

See also
Attention

Acknowledgment

alleviating, 119–124

Autonomy, 277–278, 307

cutting someone off and,

complaining without

Avoidance, 40, 155–156, 179

162

fighting and, 225–230

disagreement and,

defensive reacting and, 179 Bearing witness, 15–18

146–149, 228–230

disagreement and, 146–149 Being heard

gender and, 149–150

gender and, 149–150

asking for support and,

overview, 86–87, 146–147

listening to children and,

153–154

relationships and, 228–230

256–257

checking to see if the

via bearing witness, 15–18

listening to teenagers and,

person is busy and,

Active listening, problems

274–277

171–172

with, 90

overview, 117–126

within families, 235–251

Advice giving.
See also

reasons for, 119–120

office communications

Criticism

Assumptions in listening, 96,

and, 299–301

asking for, 106–107,

158, 159–166.
See also