A few words about the ability to listen to other people.
Our biggest mistake is
that we don’t listen to understand.
We listen to respond.
Unknown author.
We all have to listen a lot in our lives, one way or another. In the 21st century, we listen so much that at some point we lose interest in this activity. And we gradually acquire new skills — “listening without turning on” and “listening without hearing.” Cognitive psychologists will tell you that these skills are vital because they are how we protect our brains. After all, our channels of perception have limited bandwidth and thus we try to preserve our mental space for the most important things. But it’s not only us who listen — they also listen to us, often they listen without turning on and they listen without hearing. Or, at best, they hear in our words confirmation of their thoughts and not at all what we want to say. And God, what a blessing it is to meet a person who is able to tune in to the wave of our experiences and really hears us!
Many years ago, when my professional path in Gestalt therapy was just beginning, I began my personal psychotherapy. Everyone who has undergone psychotherapy in the Gestalt approach knows how this happens — once a week, at the same time, you come to your therapist and talk with him about your difficulties, sorrows and difficulties. Sometimes about your joys. And the therapist listens and listens to you, only occasionally interrupting with questions. I still remember what happened to me, after several dozen hours of therapy, the insight — delight at how great it is when you no longer have to be left alone with your thoughts!
Now that I have been working as a practicing psychologist and gestalt therapist for many years, I understand well that listening to people is much more than just an opportunity to share problems that have been painful for a long time.
Based on my experience, I see that any person necessarily has two needs that inevitably arise when his basic needs are provided. This is: the need to be heard by others, the need to hear yourself. As we go through life, we all try to satisfy them in different ways. One of these methods, and quite effective, is psychotherapy. And I want to share my experience as a therapist about this path.
The need to be heard stems from our natural need to belong — the need to avoid loneliness and feel part of the world around us. In the dynamically changing modern world of the “great separation”, when physical survival no longer requires being part of a tribe or community, the need for belonging, ingrained in humans over hundreds of thousands of years, is nevertheless still strong. And the therapist increasingly serves as that other person who can provide a sense of belonging because he can hear, see and understand.
Every person wants to be listened to and heard, wants to feel that his thoughts and point of view are needed and important for someone. He needs another person, he needs support. So that at the moment when a person feels bad or difficult, someone would be there and accept him in different manifestations: crying, screaming, wailing, angry or silent. I understood his feelings and could talk about them, listened carefully and heard. To be able to receive external support and, on its basis, begin to build internal support, because our inner world is a reflection of the external world — being determines consciousness, as the classic said. And this external support becomes the attention, gaze and understanding of another person — when your counterpart listens, sees and understands you.
But, as has already been said, in order to feel heard, you need “proper” listening. The therapist needs to actively listen and hear while being aware of himself and the client. To do this, each therapist uses his own personality traits. For example, I try to make maximum use of my sensory experience as a source of understanding, independent of the rational sphere. It is equally important to pay attention to the details of the interaction process — without judging, evaluating or interpreting words. By engaging in such interaction as a practical psychologist, I get the opportunity to find out how the client is currently feeling and what is happening to him. These are the tools that I need in the diagnostic process — to see the world through the client’s eyes as much as possible, actively listening and actively perceiving his story.
Careful “absorption” of any manifestations of a person and active listening during therapy also usually provides information about how my presence is perceived by the client and what impact it has. Usually, I pay attention to the words he pronounces, accents, rhythm of speech, timbre of voice, pauses, emphasis on individual phrases or even syllables, I monitor intonations. It happens that when pronouncing a text with one meaning, a person uses the intonation of a completely different content, and this is important to hear. For me, these are working feedback mechanisms in terms of understanding the ongoing process, so that then, if necessary, timely change the pace, type or direction of therapy.
But being heard is not enough for a person. It is also very important for him to hear himself. In the bustle of life, we rarely listen to ourselves and do not pay due attention to this important need. But one day in life too many incomprehensible things accumulate and we have to look for answers to the questions “Why Why Why” and a strong desire arises to find the lost reality again.
Working with the client’s reality is one of the main tasks of the therapist. At the same time, reality is the unstated information that we tell each other about ourselves, about relationships, about problems. A person’s subjective reality usually contains fantasies, interpretations, and personal assessments of some life circumstances. But what is real is only the form of the relationship between the therapist and the client and how we say the words, why we present them now, and why we present them here, and why to this particular person. The actual meaning of communications is hidden in the sounds of words and the direction of messages. I see, hear, feel what is happening here and now — this is the only reality. What matters is intonation, facial expression, time of utterance, context of the utterance, targeting of the utterance, expectation of an answer and the meaning of why the person said it.
The reality that the client describes and the reality that I hear are often different. At this stage, it is important to accept the client’s reality, since it is the only possible point of support for him, listening carefully, providing full support and accepting the whole, with all his properties, as a unity — after all, there is nothing superfluous in a person. This requires the ability not to rush and not to interfere with the client listening and hearing himself. After all, through a conversation with a therapist, a person gets the opportunity to tell himself about what he is hiding from himself for some reason, what he actually denies or represses. In other words, when the client eventually hears himself, he will, as it were, see his reality from the outside.
And after a person catches the melody of his reality, he will again need to be heard. Find someone whose eyes or ears will testify to his story, his voice, his words. The very fact of its existence will testify, and therefore the fact of the right to its own reality. So that a person can hear, feel and understand: “They see me, they hear me, they understand me — that means I am.” And when this fact becomes understood and accepted by a person, his internal support begins to take on clear outlines.
The described approach was formed as a result of my professional experience — after all, a therapist must be able to listen empathically, as well as experience other people’s emotions, without taking the position of an arbiter or lawyer, and without being destroyed himself.
By the way, Carl Rogers, one of the great psychotherapists of the 20th century, wrote: “If you really understand a person, if you want to enter his personal world and see what life seems to him, you risk changing. You can see the situation through his eyes, you can find that your attitude and your personality are influenced. This risk of change is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face.”
In my experience, listening really does change people — both those who are listened to and those who listen.