The Lost Art of Listening (17 page)

What We Hear

One way to learn something about the forces that influence listening is to

hear the same story from two different sides.

Lucy was a special- education teacher who had a humiliating encoun-

ter with the principal of her school. When the principal needed to find

96

How Hidden Assumptions Prejudice Listening
97

space for a new reading instructor, she sent Lucy a memo saying that she

would have to move to a small room in the basement, previously used

for storage. Lucy prided herself on being flexible, but being banished to

the basement made her feel humiliated and that the principal had little

respect for the special needs of her children.

When Lucy called to discuss this unsatisfactory arrangement, the

principal made an appointment to see her that afternoon. But when Lucy

showed up at four o’clock, the principal had gone to another meeting and

left a note suggesting they get together later. Ten days went by before the

principal finally made time to talk to her. By that point Lucy had to make

an effort to control her anger to make the case, as calmly as possible, that

moving to the basement just wasn’t acceptable. Instead of listening, the

principal, who’d obviously made up her mind, got defensive. At one point,

when Lucy protested that the specially equipped classroom in which the

children now met had always been her room, the principal said archly,

“Oh, did you bring it from home?” Lucy left the meeting in tears.

As soon as she got home, Lucy called her sister, who since their moth-

er’s death was the only living member of her family. But when Lucy tried

to explain what had happened, Katrine kept interrupting with questions.

“What did you say that made that woman so defensive? You must have

said something to set her off like that.” Lucy couldn’t believe it. Instead

of being supportive, her sister was blaming
her
for the incident. It felt like

a slap in the face. “Just listen, Katrine, will you!” she pleaded. That shut

Katrine up for the moment, but Lucy could tell that her sister wasn’t sym-

pathetic and wasn’t really listening, so she said good-bye and hung up.

When Lucy told me about this incident two days later, she said that

her sister hadn’t been there for her when she’d needed her. It certainly

sounded that way. But by a strange twist of fate, I got to hear Katrine’s ver-

sion of the same event the following week.

According to Katrine, she’s had lifelong problems talking with her sis-

ter. “Lucy has always dominated our conversations. She loves to talk about

herself, but she hardly ever listens to anything I have to say. If I pause for

a minute, she immediately jumps in with some comment or criticism.” But

what bothered Katrine most was that Lucy was always complaining. “She’s

always telling me about hassles with somebody—other teachers, neigh-

bors, supermarket clerks, even the nice old man in the Chinese take-out

place. And it’s always the other person’s fault. I used to try to listen—after

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THE REAL REASONS PEOPLE DON’T LISTEN

all, she is my sister. But as I’ve gotten older, I just don’t have time for

her negativism.” According to Katrine, Lucy was hard to listen to because

she’d used up her credit.

It’s not uncommon for speakers not to be heard because their cred-

ibility is low. A father’s credibility, for example, may be determined by

whether his wife and children think he’s tuned in to what’s going on in the

family or too preoccupied with his work to have any idea about what’s hap-

pening at home. If he’s had an affair or drinks too much—even though he

preaches virtuousness to the children—they may not respect him enough

to hear what he has to say. A parent’s status in the world also affects his or

her credibility. A father who is laid off and out of work may lose credibil-

ity. This may not be because his family is judgmental, but because people

who have lost self- respect in their own eyes often express themselves with

a bitter edge that makes them hard to listen to. Listening is always code-

termined.

The minute you pick up the phone and hear some people’s voices,

you’re on guard. They’re asking you how things are going, but you’re wait-

ing for the pitch. They call only when they want something. Even if you

want to be friends, the one-sided nature of these relationships wears thin

after a while. When you answer the phone and they say hello, they can

probably hear the enthusiasm drop out of your voice. Do they have any

idea why?

Credibility is also influenced by whether you’re viewed as being in an

appropriate position within a particular setting. A colleague who’s seen as

not really caring about what goes on at work may not be listened to even

when he has something worthwhile to say. A mother who talks to her ado-

lescent children as though they were still six years old may be experienced

as out of touch and therefore incapable of having legitimate concerns.

A lot of grandparents don’t get heard when they give advice about

childrearing. Their mistake isn’t necessarily being intrusive but rather

being out of touch with their children’s insecurity about being parents.

The grandparents aren’t heard because their children perceive their advice

as undermining their own uncertain authority. In this case, the grandpar-

ents’ mistake may be treating their children as though they were
more

grown up, in charge and confident, than they feel.

A speaker’s credibility is also affected by whether or not his or her

messages are clear and pertinent. If your father-in-law muddles his mes-

How Hidden Assumptions Prejudice Listening
99

sages with malapropisms and tangential references, you may try to under-

stand him as part of building a relationship with your spouse’s family. But

if you have to work too hard at it, after a while you may give up. If your

father always changes the subject to talk about himself, you may get out

of the habit of listening. People who abuse the privilege of our listening

by going on and on or flitting from one subject to another may create the

expectation that listening to them is too much work, so why bother?

When the speaker has lost credibility but the relationship has a good

track record, you might pay attention even though you may not really

hear. You might give the aunt who’s always been nice to you the courtesy

of your attention even though you don’t respect her enough to really listen

to what she’s saying. But if there is relentless repetition of a message—any

message—you’re likely to withdraw even the courtesy of attention, replac-

ing it with annoyance or distance.

If a friend can’t stop talking about her ex- boyfriend, you may get tired

of hearing it. And perhaps frustrated that she won’t let go. The same thing

happens if a friend going though a divorce can’t talk about anything but

what a bitch his ex is.

How Our Expectations Make Us Hypersensitive:

The Discoveries of Object Relations Theory

Our relationships to each other depend on our capacity to transcend imme-

diate experience by making a reproduction of it inside the mind, where we

can then manipulate the possibilities. A simple example of this is a baby

learning to tolerate his mother’s absence by remembering her presence and

relying on her return. This mental representation of experience can be the

source of adaptive flexibility or of rigid inflexibility that sets some people

at odds with the world around them.

From the start, our lives revolve around relations with others. The

residue of these relationships leaves internal images of self, other, and self-

in- relation-to- others. As adults we react not only to the actual other but

also to an internal other.
Object relations theory
focuses on this internal

other—the mental images we have of other people, built up from experi-

ence and expectation.1

1
Object relations
may seem a cold- blooded term for human interactions, but
objects
refer to 100
THE REAL REASONS PEOPLE DON’T LISTEN

The details of object relations theory are rich with particulars for

explaining our assumptions and emotional sensitivities, but the essence is

quite simple: We relate to people in the present on the basis of expecta-

tions from the past. (A man who emerges from puppyhood with a clear

picture of his father lording it over his mother may vow always to be kind

and considerate to his own wife—at all times unstinting in his criticism

and counsel.)

Contemporary relationships and earlier ones (encoded in the inner

world of objects) interact in circular fashion. Life circumstances maintain

internal expectations and are chosen because of them and interpreted in

light of them.

Alice sometimes felt overwhelmed by all the people in her life who

depended on her. She was the one responsible for taking care of her aging

parents, even though her brother lived a lot closer than she did. Her thir-

ty-year-old daughter called her three or four times a week to complain

about something or ask for advice. Several people at work were always

asking for her help on various things, even though she had her own proj-

ects to look after. What Alice forgot was that she liked doing things for

people. It made her feel good. She sought out opportunities to be helpful.

She grew up being rewarded for being the “good daughter” and was still

playing that role, including with the two people who taught it to her in

the first place.

Terry had a reasonably full life but no real friends. As a boy he had

friends but never got too close to any of them. He didn’t want to feel out of

control or that he’d lost any of his freedom to come and go as he pleased.

Beginning in college, he got more involved with what he was doing and

less involved with friends. He avoided small talk because he felt it was

taking him away from more important things. Slowly he got out of the

habit of socializing, and eventually when he realized that he missed having

friends in his life, most of the men he wanted to get close to were too busy

with their jobs and families to have much time for friendship.

mental images of other people that are the object of our actions, not to the people them-

selves.

How Hidden Assumptions Prejudice Listening
101

The past is alive in memory—and it runs our lives

more than we know.

To understand the depth of some people’s hypersensitivity to making

mistakes, we might turn to Melanie Klein’s notion of the
depressive position
,

the painful discovery that love and hurt can go together.2 To understand

other people’s rage at criticism, we might consider Ronald Fairbairn’s idea

that the neurotic’s ego is split into an
exciting ego
(leaving him longing for

total love) and a
rejecting ego
(leading him to expect rejection), so that

his relationships take on an “all good” or “all bad” quality and shift dra-

matically from one to the other.3 To explain why some people attack and

others withdraw when they get hurt, we might look to how their families

responded to their narcissistic need for attention. Some people get atten-

tion for being good; in their families anger and assertiveness are beyond

the pale. For others, who get attention for achievement, vulnerability and

weakness may be intolerable.

What’s common to these and other object- relations formulations is

the idea that the neurotic person encounters others not as an equal but

as a fearful child, intimidated not so much by the reality of other people

as by imagined negative responses. In this respect, we’re all a little neu-

rotic.

How We Learn to Overreact

Some of the expectations we bring to conversations are built up from the

history of our relationships with specific individuals. But some of what we

expect to hear is part of the deep structure of our personalities, the resi-

due of our earliest relationships. To understand listening and the dynamics

of relationship it’s necessary to consider not only what goes on between

people but also what goes on inside them.

2Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,”
International Journal of Psycho-

Analysis
, 1946,
27
, 99–110.

3W. Ronald D. Fairbairn,
An Object- Relations Theory of the Personality
(New York: Basic Books, 1952).

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THE REAL REASONS PEOPLE DON’T LISTEN

More than we like to realize, we continue to live

in the shadow of the families we grew up in.

The sometimes vast difference between words spoken and message

intended is nothing compared to the often vaster gulf between what is said

and what is heard. Whenever someone seems to be responding unreason-

ably, it might be useful to ask: What would make that response reasonable?

Once you start thinking this way—namely, that people act the way they