The Lost Art of Listening (30 page)

they certainly do no less.) When people complain about other people in

their lives, a therapist doesn’t feel blamed and therefore doesn’t get defen-

sive. But when you talk to the people you’re close to about your upsets,

they feel implicated. That’s why their response is often reactive: “No, don’t

feel that way!” An accepting, nonreactive response feels like “Yes, is that

how you feel? Tell me more.”

People Are Defensive for a Reason

When someone says, “You pay more attention to your parents than you do

to me,” a reactive response might be “I hardly ever see them!”

What imagined threat might the reactive partner be defending

against?

What would be an empathic response to “You pay more attention to

your parents than you do to me”?

How might an empathic response put you in a more vulnerable posi-

tion? A more empowered position?

Empathy is permission giving. Receptive, nondefensive listeners allow

us to get our feelings out. They welcome unpopular parts of us to speak

(which allows us to do the same for ourselves). They recognize that even

on those occasions when what we’re saying about them may not be true,

our feelings are.

Feelings are facts to the person experiencing them.

The simple—and often enormously difficult—act of not becoming

reactive has a tremendous impact on relationships. It enables you to handle

difficult conversations—and it empowers you to remain in control under

pressure.

How to Avoid Reacting Emotionally When Provoked

Every so often Nadine lets out her frustration in the form of an emotional

outburst about Tim’s many failings:

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“You’re selfish and inconsiderate.”

“You
never
think of anyone but yourself.”

“You don’t care about me; all you want is sex!”

Tim can’t stand these tirades.
If she’s unhappy, why can’t she just say

so without calling me every name in the book?
He tries to listen to her com-

plaints, but by the time she’s through dumping on him he just wants to go

away and hide.

When Gordon complains about Jane’s handling of the kids, she gets

furious. First he leaves everything to her, then he criticizes her for doing

what she thinks is right.
He’s always right, and she’s always wrong.
So she

let’s him know just how she feels.

All four of these people have a right to their feelings. The trouble is,

no one is listening. To listen without flying off the handle, you have to

learn to tolerate a certain amount of anxiety—and to resist the “fight or

flight” urge.

“Don’t Get Defensive!”

The trouble with this famous advice is that it’s harder to stop doing some-

thing than it is to start doing something else. If you’re trying to cut down

on coffee, it’s easier to pour yourself a cup of tea than to sit there not drink-

ing coffee. If you want to stop eating junk food, it’s easier to grab a carrot

than to try to avoid the urge to rip open the potato chips. If you want to

reduce your emotional reactivity, concentrate on listening harder.1

You probably know how it feels to be berated in an angry, assaultive

way or found fault with by someone who’s better at criticizing than help-

ing. But getting reactive only makes things worse. Tim thinks his problem

is Nadine’s emotional exaggeration. But a fuller description of the problem

would be that when Nadine feels ignored she tries not to say anything

until she can’t stand it anymore and then her feelings come pouring out—

and
Tim isn’t able to pick up her signals of unhappiness before she explodes

1If “listening harder” seems abstract, just try listening longer.

How to Defuse Emotional Reactivity
179

or, when she does, to listen without getting angry and pulling away. Like-

wise, Jane’s problem isn’t just that Gordon leaves the children to her and

then complains about her handling of them. Her reaction— getting mad

and counterattacking—is part of what keeps Gordon from getting more

involved. A full description of any listening problem must include both

parties.

What defeats us isn’t the provocative speaker

but our own defensive response.

The best way to master emotional reactivity is by having the courage

to engage emotionally intense situations and tolerate the anxiety associ-

ated with that engagement. Avoiding such encounters affords only the

illusion of self- control.

Ginny didn’t call her mother after being in a car accident because she

didn’t want to have to deal with her mother’s frantic questions and exag-

gerated concern. So she burdened herself with another secret and rein-

forced her own inability to deal with emotional pressure.

Learn to resist the impulse to act out your usual defensive response—

avoiding, arguing, blaming, rebelling, dominating, or accommodating to

achieve peace at any price. These reactions are driven by anxiety and

designed to mask it by avoiding issues and defying, avoiding, or appeasing

others. Facing up to people and situations you’d prefer to avoid, and learn-

ing to contain your own reactive reflexes, leads over time to a reduction

of your anxiety.

In Chapter 6, I talked about hostile questions. Something a speaker

says (or maybe it’s just sitting there being lectured to) makes someone in

the audience restive, and he or she attacks the speaker in the sublimated

form of a question.

“Excuse me,” said the eminent French deconstructionist Claude

Nasal- Passages, who just happened to be in the audience, “but isn’t every-

thing you’ve just said total blather and you’re full of nothing but helium?”

In big words, of course.

Unfortunately, having just stood up in front of an audience for an

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hour or so pouring out their ideas, some speakers get a little touchy at such

moments. And I’ve noticed (in other people, you understand) a certain

unfortunate tendency to respond in kind.

“Well, yes, Professor Nasal- Passages, that’s an intriguing point. But

you’re a pompous ass, and so is the horse you rode in on.” Big words,

again.

A better way to respond to hostile questions is to apply Formula Num-

ber One for resisting reactivity: hear the person out. Instead of agreeing or

disagreeing, invite the questioner to say more. Hostile inquisitors aren’t

really asking questions; they just want to say something. So let them.

The same strategy works to keep reactivity from escalating in everyday

conversations. Here’s how a friend used this advice to reduce the antago-

nism that was starting to poison his second marriage.

When Rob married Carla, they got along wonderfully well except

when it came to Rob’s daughter. According to Carla, Rob spoiled Melanie,

like lending her money and letting her have the car whenever she wanted,

even though she didn’t always bring it back when she said she would. But

whenever Carla raised any objection, Rob felt she was attacking his child,

and so instead of hearing what she had to say, he fought back. Many sec-

ond marriages are broken on this very issue.

When Rob realized the situation had reached the point of crisis, he

resolved to at least listen to Carla the next time she complained about

Melanie. Two days later he got his chance. Melanie promised to have the

car back by eight so Carla could go shopping, but she didn’t get home

until nine- thirty, after the stores were closed. When Carla complained

to Rob, he felt his stomach knotting and the counterarguments forming.

But instead of getting defensive, he said what he’d prepared himself to say:

“Tell me more.”

Carla said that overindulgence wasn’t doing Melanie any good. Rob,

sticking to his resolve not to interrupt, kept listening, and Carla went on.

She talked about feeling like an outsider in her own house. She knew that

Rob and Melanie had a special relationship, and she respected that. She

had no wish to play Melanie’s mother or tell Rob what to do. She just

wanted to be able to talk to him when she felt concerned. Having deter-

mined not to argue, Rob found it remarkably easy to listen—that is, after

he checked the rising emotions that Carla’s first few sentences triggered

How to Defuse Emotional Reactivity
181

in him. He stopped hearing in Carla the overbearing voice of his ex-wife,

who was always so critical of the children, and started hearing how left out

his new wife was feeling. He was able to hear that Carla wasn’t asking him

to change anything, just asking him to listen to her point of view. After

that, things changed. They didn’t always agree about how to respond to

Melanie, but now that Rob knew that he could listen to Carla’s opinion

without necessarily following it, their differences ceased to divide them.

Prepare for Tense Encounters

The best way to defuse reactivity is to avoid becoming reactive yourself,

something more easily said than done. One thing that helps is planning, as

Rob was able to do once he realized how serious his breach with Carla was

becoming. You can predict many of the difficult conversations in your life.

If you stop to think about what the boss or your teenager is likely to say to

trigger your anxiety, you can prepare for it.

Anticipation frees you from overreacting.

One way to remain calm is by schooling yourself to ask questions

instead of flaring up at the usual provocations. This is a variation of the

“tell me more” strategy. Another way to tone down emotionality is to

respond to rhetorical questions and sarcasm literally, instead of being pro-

voked into a defensive retort.

“Don’t you ever think about anything but sex?”

“No, it’s kind of a hobby with me. Like woodworking.”

“Must you pick on every little thing I say?”

“Yes, all in the service of helping you become the perfect person I know

you’re capable of being.”

How to Understand a Speaker’s Anger

When people start to cry, we feel an urge to comfort them so that they’ll

stop. We equate the crying with pain. In fact, crying isn’t pain; it’s the way

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people release their pain. The same is true with expressions of anger (even

if it’s a little harder to keep that in mind).

I once watched a therapist interviewing a couple five years into a

second marriage. They were having a hard time deciding how to balance

their obligations to three sets of children and an even harder time keeping

the discussion from turning into a shouting match. As the wife was say-

ing her piece and starting to go on and on, rehashing the past and finding

fault, her husband’s foot started twitching ominously. Sitting behind the

one-way mirror, I felt apprehensive. I could see an explosion coming but

couldn’t do anything about it.

Then the therapist, bless him, did exactly what needed to be done. He

acknowledged what the wife had said and then let the husband speak—

being careful to direct the husband’s response to himself, who could listen,

not to his wife, who at that point couldn’t. Even so, the husband exploded.

With hot emotion he refuted what his wife had said and explained the

truth of things as he saw it. As he talked—with his wife blocked from

responding—he calmed down perceptibly. His jaw relaxed, the tension

went out of his shoulders, and his foot stopped twitching. Not having a

chance to express his anger made it build. Expressing it,
even in an angry

way
, released the anger.

The hard part would be teaching this couple to listen to each other

without flying off the handle in the future. It’s one thing to understand

that expressing anger helps detoxify it; it’s another thing to be on the

receiving end.

The wife in the couple I observed was angry because her husband

questioned her motives. She thought one of the children, who happened

to be her son, needed some financial assistance. Her husband was jealous

of the attention she paid this son and felt she was neglecting him. “He’s

twenty-three years old. He can take care of himself.” But it wasn’t dis-

agreeing that caused their problems; it was getting reactive and shouting

at each other. If he would concentrate on understanding what she was

feeling
and not allow himself to react defensively, he’d understand that

she was worried about her boy. She might or might not decide to give

him some money; that was just an idea, a way of expressing her concern.

Her husband wasn’t really upset about the money but about not getting as

much attention as he used to. Unfortunately, instead of talking about his

feelings, he blamed her for them.

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183

When feelings of not being understood come out as anger,

hearing them, not shutting your ears or fighting back,