The Lost Art of Listening (8 page)

Unshared thoughts diminish us, not only by making us less authentic

and less whole, as we’ve discussed, but also by eating at us. Repression is

not like putting something away on the closet shelf and forgetting about

it; repression takes a constant expenditure of energy that slowly wears us

down.

13Anthony Storr,
Solitude: A Return to the Self
(New York: The Free Press, 1988).

14In this electronic age, some solitary people retreat to online chat rooms to practice speak-

ing to a safe audience.

How Listening Shapes Us and Connects Us to Each Other
41

The feeling of not being understood is one of the most painful in human

experience. Not being appreciated and responded to depletes our vitality

and makes us feel less alive. When we’re with someone who doesn’t listen,

we shut down. When we’re with someone who’s interested and respon-

sive—a good listener—we perk up and come alive. Being listened to is as

vital to our enthusiasm for life as love and work. So is being a good listener.

Understanding the dynamics of listening enables us to deepen and enrich

our relationships. It involves learning how to suspend our own emotional

agenda and then realizing the rewards of genuine empathy. When our own

listening becomes blocked by the emotions that others arouse in us, we

conspire to produce our own isolation. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Exercises

1.
Is there someone who would love to have you listen more attentively?

What gets in the way? If you were to listen more closely to that person,

how would it affect your relationship? How would your listening affect

how the person feels about you? How would your ability to empathize

affect that person’s feeling of well-being?

2.
Make a list of things that might be worth
not
listening to. These

might include always turning the radio on in the car, spending time

with people you don’t like, snapping on the TV instead of looking out

the window, grabbing something to read every time you have a spare

few minutes, compulsively listening to music rather than to your own

thoughts.

3.
Think of someone you avoid telling certain things because of the way

that person typically responds to you. Plan in advance to make a gentle

comment about that tendency the next time he or she does it.

N.B. Be prepared to respond without emotionalism if the other per-

son takes umbrage at your comment. The purpose of this exercise is to

get you to practice calling people on their annoying listening habits

without turning it into a big confrontation. In commenting on their

response to you, focus not on what they are doing wrong but on how

you prefer to be responded to.

THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

How Communication Breaks Down

3

…

“Why Don’t People Listen?”

How Communication Breaks Down

Ellen was finding it more difficult than she’d imagined to stay home all

day with two small children. She had planned to go back to work after the

children were born but decided that it was more important to be at home

with them until they started school. What she missed most about working

was having people to talk with. Listening to who wanted a cookie and who

had to go to the potty got pretty tedious by the end of the day. Ellen’s hus-

band was surprisingly unsympathetic. He helped put the kids to bed and

spent time with them on weekends, but when he came home after work he

didn’t even pretend to be interested in Ellen’s account of her day. She was

hurt, and she was angry.

“I know Greg works hard and wants to rest. But I work hard too. All

I want is a few minutes of adult conversation. But if I dare to interrupt

his precious six o’clock news to try to talk to him, he just gets mad. It

isn’t worth it, and I’ve had just about all I can take.” Her eyes were full of

tears.

“Did You Hear What I Said?”

Why don’t people listen? There’s no shortage of easy answers to that ques-

tion. Most focus on the listener. (Husbands are notoriously unsympathetic

listeners.) Ellen’s explanation for Greg’s unavailability wasn’t completely

42

How Communication Breaks Down
43

critical—“I know he needs time to unwind”—but it was, after all, focused

entirely on him. His lack of listening was
his
doing.

In fact, listening (or the lack of it) is a two- person process. According

to Greg, it was frustrating to talk with Ellen about the kids. “She’s always

complaining. She says they won’t leave her alone, even when she goes to

the bathroom. But she encourages it! She won’t let them alone to play by

themselves, and she refuses to take any time for herself. And the thing

that really bothers me is the way she always sides with the younger one.

Everything Terri does is cute; everything Cody does is wrong. If I try to say

anything, even very nicely, she starts crying and says I’m picking on her.

So I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut.”

Ellen felt neglected because Greg wouldn’t talk to her, but her con-

tribution to the problem was not being open to his point of view. The fact

that Greg’s position differs from hers, and may even be critical, makes it

hard to hear. Unfortunately, when two people are in conflict about some-

thing important, unless each is able to at least acknowledge the other’s

point of view, the result is likely to be an emotional cutoff.

Greg felt discounted because Ellen complained about a problem of

her own making (as he saw it) and wouldn’t listen to his opinion. And

yet Greg manages neither to listen nor to get his point of view across. If

he could separate listening from advising, perhaps Ellen would get some

sympathy for her feelings, and then he might be able to communicate his

perspective more effectively. Of course it’s difficult for him to set aside his

own feelings long enough to listen to his wife’s, especially on a subject that

he feels so strongly about. But maybe that’s not a good enough excuse for

a husband and father’s retreat.

When people don’t listen to us, we can’t help feeling it’s their fault:

they’re selfish or inconsiderate. (When
we
don’t listen, it’s because we’re

bored or tired or don’t like being talked down to.) The truth is, listening

is a complex process. Even though failures of listening all end in the same

painful experience of not being heard, there are many reasons people don’t

listen.

Several years ago a young couple came to me complaining of difficul-

ties in communicating. When I asked what the problem was, the husband

said, “It’s my wife; she’s boring.” (Who says men are reticent with their

feelings?) Restraining my urge to react to this nasty crack, I asked him to

explain. The man was a lawyer, working as a campaign advisor in a guber-

44
THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

natorial election campaign. His days were filled with strategy sessions,

speechwriting conferences, meetings with the candidate, television inter-

views, arranging appearances across the state, defending attacks from the

opposition, and planning counterattacks. When he came home at night,

his head spinning from the excitement and frustration of the crusade, he

mumbled a greeting to his wife and collapsed onto the couch with a drink

and the newspaper.

When I asked why he wasn’t more eager to talk over the events of the

day, he said his wife wasn’t interested. She was a graphic design artist and

not at all, he contended, concerned about politics.

She protested that although she might not know a lot about politics,

she
was
interested in him and what he was doing. He wasn’t convinced.

I asked him to think of someone who he
knew
was interested in the

campaign, someone with whom he could talk enthusiastically. Imagine, I

told him, how different you are with that person. He allowed as that might

be true. Then I asked him—just for an experiment—to come home for one

week and pretend that his wife was that interested person, the person he

found it so exciting to talk to. He agreed to try it.

The next week they returned beaming. “Guess what?” he said. “She’s

not boring anymore.”

This young lawyer’s uncommunicativeness could have been taken

as just another example of men’s silence. Are men emotionally illiterate?

Trapped in doing— working, playing, achieving—do they have no lan-

guage of feeling? Such stereotyping ignores the interactive nature of com-

munication and the powerful role of expectations. When people don’t say

much, it’s less likely that they have nothing on their minds than that they

don’t trust the other person to be willing to hear it. My suggestion to this

man—that he pretend his wife
was
interested— encouraged him to break

his silence. But it was his approaching her with enthusiasm, taking inter-

est in talking to her, that broke the pattern of avoidance. The truth is that

we become more interesting when we assume interest on the part of our

listeners.

Why Someone Doesn’t Hear What You Think You Said

Sometimes people don’t hear us because they’ve had a bad day. They may

be preoccupied with the angry things someone said or with all the extra

How Communication Breaks Down
45

work they have to do. Or they may be turned off to us by any number

of things—they assume that we’re talking to them only because we want

something or that we’re going to give them a lecture or that we don’t really

care about them. Listeners often don’t hear because they have a precon-

ceived notion of what we’re going to say. Or they can’t hear us because

they can’t suspend their own needs or because what we say makes them

anxious. In short, although hurt feelings may tempt us to blame failures of

listening on other people’s recalcitrance, the reasons for not listening are

many and complex.

When the communicative process breaks down, we—who are doing

our best—tend to assume that the other person didn’t say what he meant

or didn’t hear what we were saying. Usually, both parties to misunderstand-

ing feel that way. But it may be helpful to realize that between speaker and

listener are two filters to meaning.1

The speaker, who has an
intention
of what he or she wants to commu-

nicate, sends a
message
, and that message has an
impact
on the listener.

Good communication means having the impact you meant to have—

that is,
intent
equals
impact.
But every message must pass first through the

filter of the speaker’s clarity of expression and second through the listener’s

ability to hear what was said. Unfortunately, there are many times when

intent doesn’t equal impact and many reasons why this is the case.

Some of the reasons for misunderstanding are simple and can be

improved, like learning a skill. For example, by giving feedback, listeners

tell speakers about the impact of their messages and give them a chance

to clarify their intentions. But many reasons for misunderstanding are less

straightforward and not amenable to simple formulas for improvement.

Our young lawyer’s assumption that his wife wasn’t interested in his work

is just one example of the psychological complications of listening.

Transference

This dynamic, the speaker’s tendency to impose certain expectations on

the listener, is what, in the psychoanalytic situation, is called
transference
.

For simplicity’s sake, the idea of transference is often reduced to the notion

that the patient assumes that the silent analyst is a carbon copy of one of

1John Gottman, Cliff Notarius, Jonni Gonso, and Howard Markman,
A Couples Guide to

Communication
(Chicago: Research Press, 1976).

46
THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

his or her parents, judging her harshly just like her father did or enthralled

with his accomplishments the way his mother was. In fact, transference

refers to all the ways in which a person’s experience of a relationship is

shaped by subjectivity—past experience, expectations, sensitivities, hopes,

and fears. Transference isn’t limited to the therapeutic situation—and it

isn’t only distortion.

Chris grew up with a jealous and competitive older sister who was

always proving him wrong. Chris’s sister would ask innocent- sounding

questions that always led to the same conclusion: Chris was wrong or

dumb, or both. Now whenever Chris’s girlfriend asked him a question

about something he was explaining, he felt attacked.

Transference: the way in which a speaker’s experience

of a listener is unconsciously organized according to

preestablished expectations.

Walter hated his wife’s constant criticism. She challenged almost

everything he said. Consequently, he didn’t say much. According to Julia,

Walter was overly sensitive. While he admitted that there might be some