Read The Lost Art of Listening Online
Authors: Michael P. Nichols
played out by the other. The tough man may be unable to integrate his
softer side to the extent that his wife acts emotional and helpless. His
dependent wishes and vulnerability are repudiated because they’re seen as
her domain. She then becomes a dependent and demanding wife. This is
one reason men take revenge for their dependency—that bottomless need
for mother-love—by bullying and belittling their wives for exhibiting the
needs they themselves don’t dare express.
In our day, gender differences have permeated public consciousness.
No longer do we believe that men are strong and women weak. Yet what
is the current vogue of celebrating women’s uniqueness if not stereotyping
updated? It’s hard for husbands and wives to work at partnership when all
around they are told that women speak in a different voice and men have
strange ways of communicating.
Are we once again to believe that anatomy is destiny? So many hus-
bands and wives run out of patience with each other that they sometimes
lose hope of ever reaching understanding. This haunting feeling of frus-
tration is something that comes to all of us from time to time. If it helps
some people to blame failures of understanding on irreconcilable gender
differences, and if doing so seems to armor them against their own despair,
fine. But if stereotyping serves to abstract members of the opposite sex, to
turn them into categories, and to avoid genuine encounters, that is unfor-
tunate. Exaggerating gender differences is a crutch favored by those who
fail to find understanding—no, fail to
reach
understanding.
The wounded narcissism and boundless ambition of our time militate
against self- sacrifice, compromise, and partnership. In hard and troubled
How to Listen and Be Heard within the Family
251
times like ours, loyalty, tolerance, cooperation, and complementarity—the
values necessary to create and sustain family harmony—are undervalued.
Too often we hear what once might have been thought of as teamwork
described as codependency.
We tend not to see complementarity. Instead, we see control and
submission, power and weakness, villain and victim. In trying to create
more flexibility for both men and women, we are in danger of forgetting
that complementarity can be mutually enhancing. Self- fulfillment doesn’t
require constant self- assertion. The sturdy self can tolerate differences and
thrive on them.
Exercises
1.
Make a list of three annoying things someone in your family does on a
regular basis. Next, for each one of these things, write down how you
think that person would prefer to be seen. See if you can direct yourself
to the person’s preferred view in your next encounter. In other words,
try to treat them as the people they prefer to think of themselves as.
2.
Identify one boundary in your family that you don’t like—for example,
your wife is too involved with the children, or your husband is too dis-
tant. Remembering that boundaries are reciprocal (enmeshment in one
place is related to disengagement in another), try to identify the part
you play in perpetuating the boundary you don’t like. Don’t be in a rush
to change anything; just observe.
3.
Try to identify two or three triangles you participate in. If there is a
triangle where you are on the uncomfortable outside, try moving not
to the person you want to be closer to but to the person or activity on
the other pole. For example, if you’re a father who resents all the time
your wife spends with the kids, try moving closer to the kids and see
what happens.
4.
Are you more enmeshed with or disengaged from your children? With
your partner? For an experiment, try moving closer or further away and
notice what signs of resistance or unbending routines block your move-
ment.
LISTENING IN CONTEXT
Listening to Children and Teenagers
12
…
From
“Do I
Have
To?”
to “That’s Not Fair!”
Listening to Children and Teenagers
When new parents leave the hospital to bring home their first baby, that
smiling miracle of their own creation, they wonder,
What now? How will
we know what to do?
They soon find out. A baby’s needs are simple, and the
crying that announces them is simply overwhelming.
Once the baby is fed and changed and has had enough sleep, parents
convey their responsiveness through cuddling and play. “Listening” at this
age consists of reading the baby’s mood—rather than imposing the par-
ents’ moods, as though the baby were an extension of themselves.
Long before a baby can talk, his parents demonstrate how well they
are able to listen. Here as elsewhere, flexibility and responsiveness make
for willingness to tolerate the otherness of another being. Call it sensitiv-
ity.
The Parent’s Gift of Empathy
A parent’s empathy— understanding what a child is feeling and showing
it—builds a bridge of understanding, linking the child to someone who
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Listening to Children and Teenagers
253
listens and cares, thus confirming that the child’s feelings are legitimate.
The sharing of emotional experience is the most powerful feature of true
relatedness.
How do you empathize with a child who won’t stop pestering, as
though he were the center of the universe and you had no concerns of
your own? The solution is not to mistake sympathy for empathy. Sympa-
thy means to feel the same as rather than to be understanding of. It’s an
emotion that makes people suffer
with
others, and that feeling motivates
parents to talk children out of their feelings or to do
for
them rather than
to empathize
with
them.
Foremost among the obstacles to listening are those that stem from
our need to
do something
about what someone tells us: defend ourselves,
disagree, or solve the other person’s problems. Parents are prone to offer
advice; it comes with the job description. But if a father’s first response to
his son’s painful sunburn is that he should have used sunblock, the boy
will feel blamed rather than commiserated with. Likewise, if a little girl
complains that she doesn’t have any friends and her mother tells her that
if she acted friendlier, other children would be more friendly in return, the
girl might conclude that even her mother doesn’t like her.
Psychologists use the term
empathic immersion
to describe the intense
and focused listening that therapists use to understand their patients’
experience. It is an evocative metaphor, but it is of course hyperbole. Per-
haps a better metaphor for empathy would be taking someone’s hand.1 Two
clasped hands are still two hands—but they are also two hands touching,
the warmth and pulse of one in contact with the other.
To be better listeners parents should lead less and follow more. If a
child shows signs of distress, a simple statement like “You feel bad, don’t
you?” is more likely to make him feel understood than pressuring him to
explain what he feels. If an exasperated child indicates that she wants to
be alone, let her. She may need time to pull herself together. If someone
is having a hard time putting something into words, it’s more empathic to
say “It’s hard to explain, isn’t it?” than to guess what the person is trying
to say. A parent who finishes a child’s thoughts for him is the opposite of
empathic.
1I am indebted to Alfie Kohn for this metaphor. Alfie Kohn,
The Brighter Side of Human
Nature: Altruism and Empathy in Everyday Life
(New York: Basic Books, 1990).
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LISTENING IN CONTEXT
Listening well is more midwifery than dentistry.
In the presence of an empathic listener, children are able
to discover their own minds rather than having to resist
or succumb to what someone else expects them to feel.
The empathic failure that saps self- regard isn’t the kind of child
abuse we usually hear about; it is a silent, invidious lack of responsiveness.
Empathic failure doesn’t batter, bruise, or injure children; it deflates them.
Empathy is energizing. Being listened to releases us from brooding self-
absorption and mobilizes us to engage the world around us. With insuf-
ficient empathy children grow up preoccupied with themselves, as though
attention were a need that, unmet, keeps growing. The unlistened-to child
remains locked in silent conversation within himself, too anxious and
unavailable to enter the freedom of the moment.
Listening to Young Children
Being listened to creates a sense of being cared for. Not being listened to
generates insecurity. In practice, not being listened to may take forms that
aren’t always obvious. Here are some cues that you’re not listening to a
young child— despite the fact that you care very much.
“Watch Out!”
Some parents who seem attentive are more concerned with the exter-
nal environment than their children. They hover over their babies and
make sympathetic noises, but they don’t listen. They pay attention to
the hard edges of a table, sharp things on the floor, cold drafts, and hot
food. Because they worry a lot, they seem involved with their children.
But because they’re preoccupied with trying to make the world safe, they
remain too anxious to share the baby’s experience. These “child- centered”
parents provide almost no experience of intersubjectivity. The impression
of closeness they convey is an illusion. Hovered-over but not- listened-to
children may become dependent, in the sense of being uneasy on their
own—not because they’re used to intimacy but because they suffer from
Listening to Children and Teenagers
255
a pervasive sense of aloneness, an intolerable feeling from which they use
superficial relationships to distract themselves.
“Quiet Down, Go Wash Your Hands, and for Goodness’ Sake,
Don’t Touch Yourself There!”
More common than this general lack of attunement is the selective attune-
ment by which parents convey to their children what is shareable and
what is shameful. In this way the parents’ desires, fears, prohibitions, and
fantasies affect the wiring of a child’s self- system, leaving the child with
the conviction that he is or is not a self worthy of respect.
Selective attunement determines what falls inside or outside the
realm of acceptability. Is it all right to bang toys on the floor, to get dirty,
to touch yourself? It includes preferences for people: is it all right to get
mad at Grandma or sometimes to prefer to play with her rather than with
Mommy? And it includes the extent to which internal states—joy, sad-
ness, delight—can be experienced with another person. Is the child whose
parents try to jolly him out of it when he’s frightened likely to come to
them with his fears when he’s older?
It’s the breadth of attunement—from generous to cramped—that
determines whether children feel okay about themselves and whether they
have a broad or narrow range of experience.
Suppose a toddler listening to
Peter and the Wolf
is happy and excited.
He’s moved by the music and wonders if his mother feels it too. He looks
up, and she smiles back at him; her eyes are bright and she’s nodding.
Yes, she feels it too!
With this attunement, the child knows that he is feel-
ing something that can be shared—rather than something that should be
stifled. His feeling is validated; and since the feeling is part of him, he too
is validated.
“Don’t Brag. It’s Not Nice.”
In addition to the lessons parents teach deliberately, they shape their chil-
dren’s experience with negative affective responses. When a child proudly
shows off to a parent who responds with disgust or disinterest, it’s a slap in
the face of the child’s healthy narcissism. This is shame.
What children show off for their parents’ approval isn’t simply what
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LISTENING IN CONTEXT
they can do; it’s also their fantasies of who they wish they were and what
they dream of doing. They’re not little and weak—oh no, they’re big and
strong! If parents squelch that wonderful wish to make an impression, the
child may decide that he’s unworthy or that he has to achieve really big
things for anybody to notice.
Before you let negative reactions slip out, think about why you’re
tempted to be so critical or disapproving. Is it really a prohibition your
child needs, or are you more concerned about what other people might
think? Sometimes, in an attempt to instill social graces too early, we crush
a child’s self- esteem.
Listen
to what your child is saying. The little girl who
shouts, “I can jump higher than Robbie!” isn’t putting down her friend;
she’s seeking your approval. Why not give it to her?