Just Listen

A classic complaint I hear so often is, “don’t try to fix it for me, just listen to me!”. People want to be heard.

There are so many ways we can interact with one another, and the majority of times we are helping each other solve problems. We give advice or tell about our experience of something similar to what our friend/lover/spouse/co-worker is going through. These encounters can be awesomely fruitful; full of direction, support and insight. And sometimes, they can be excruciatingly painful.

The wife (most often the female instinctively knows she needs to be heard) tells her partner to “simply listen”. There’s nothing he has to do about it. If only he could relate to me emotionally…. These are real frustrations. The trouble is that we are neglecting to understand the magnitude of such a request to “just listen”.

Listening is a skill. It is a challenge. It can be the most difficult gift to offer another person. The amount of self-restraint that it demands is fantastic. It requires a capacity to tolerate the suffering of another person; to feel it with them and share it with them in a visceral way. It is no longer an intellectual exercise of understanding. Real listening pushes us into visceral and experiential contact with empathy and body-felt emotion and tension. This can be the most painful (and caring) thing a person could do with another. We must tolerate helplessness in order to really hear someone through. We can’t avoid the unknown by solving the problem. Anyway, in most conversations we tend to jump to conclusions before the other has completed the picture. We put the puzzle together without all the pieces. Anything to avoid the real sharing of the others’ feelings, struggles, pains and complications.

Listening deserves infinitely more respect than it is given in our culture. It is real gift we can give. It is a powerful skill to cultivate. It is not “just” listening. It is offering our whole self, willing to be vulnerable and engaging with an other. No small feat.

TRY: Listen to your friend for 5 minutes and allow yourself to simply feel into the experiences they are going through.  Don’t follow your mind into topics of solution or comparison.