Wherever I wander in New York City, people make a lot of assumptions about me as a therapist. People figure I'm psychoanalyzing them (I'm not--I don't even do that in the therapy room). They wonder how I can "handle listening to people's problems all day" and they nearly universally figure I must be a good listener.
Maybe I am a good listener. Okay, I am; any therapist should be. But the assumption bugs me. I don't think of what I do as a therapist as being about, well, listening. Not at all.
If that brings to mind the image of me sitting in my downtown Manhattan therapy office staring past my therapy patients, ignoring their every utterance, that's not the image I mean to convey. I listen in the most fundamental sense. I listen very well, thank you, but what I do, or, more importantly, what my therapy patients and I do together is create conversations together.
To me, this distinction is as fundamental to understanding how I see psychotherapy as anything I've ever discussed.
Enough with the listening talk!
If I see another "inspirational" blog post or TED talk about the virtues of listening I'm going to vomit! There's this one on the "5 ways to listen better," this one on listening as part of leadership, and this one on how to truly listen.
I can't take it anymore!
I'm not proposing we all start ignoring each other, or that we ignore the fact that we're not doing such a great job at building conversations with one another; discourse, both public and private, is in a sorry state and in need of much improvement.
My argument, however, is that what isn't needed is more talk about listening.
How come? I can explain it best with an example:
You and your buddy decide to toss around the football in the backyard. Your buddy digs out the old Nerf from behind the jumper cables in his trunk, and you take a short jog to the other end of the yard. Your buddy tosses the ball--a neat spiral. You catch it, and then stand there holding the ball and exclaim, "Great pass!" followed by a list of all the attributes of the pass. You toss it back and your buddy does the same thing: "Wow! Great pass! I really like how you got such great lift under it!" You and your buddy really work to show your appreciation of one anothers' passing choices and technique, carefully observing the others' form, taking note, in detail, of the execution of each and every pass.
And then you do that again.
And again.
And again.
This sounds nuts, of course, but it's not far off from what so many of the listening advocates seem to propose we work at to become better listeners.
How about a paradigm shift?
This almost surely sounds pompous. But hear me out: Most of us look at the functions that go into communication between two people as the interaction of two entirely discrete parts. Person A expresses a sentiment that is received and interpreted by Person B, who then "responds" by expressing a sentiment of her own, informed to some degree by the sentiment of Person A.
Here's the paradigm shift: I'd like to argue that that isn't the only way to understand what's happening in a conversation. What if we introduce the concept of a conversation as something generated by the relationship, rather than by its participants as separate parts? What if we examine what happens in the course of a rich conversation in a way that accepts that we couldn't possibly dissect it, as with a scalpel, into two pieces, each representing the contributions of each participant in the conversation? What if we simply assigned ownership of the conversation, as a whole, to the relationship, without any further separation?
In a sense the paradigm shift is away from focusing on the individual parts and more on the relationship as an entity in itself.
I would argue that such a separation dramatically changes how we value the sort of attitude we should bring to conversations in a way that renders much of the talk about listening meaningless. Why? Because listening implies honoring the contributions of the other as separate from ourselves. It relates to what the other person is saying as a unit of meaning that must be received and processed, rather than as a shared contribution to a collaborative task. Just as in the "catch" analogy, listening focuses much too much on the separation between the conversants and far too little on the conversation.
Consider the wisdom of listening talk
One of the cherished principles we're charged with is active listening: Make the other party "feel heard." Strategies include nodding, repeating back key phrases in summary form, and mirroring the other person's body language and facial expressions.
This sort of rhetoric is so cherished, and so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine challenging it. But if we slow down and consider a conversation not as the interaction of two parts but as something created by a we then these sorts of suggestions start to seem stultifying and even patronizing. Exercising them may well be considered good manners, and may sometimes even make your conversation partner feel good, but it doesn't do much in the service of creating together.
Creating, not having conversations
Many of these TED talkers pontificate on the global wisdom of doing more listening. Getting better at listening to others, they argue, can reduce conflict not just in personal relationships but can even do so on a global scale.
To me, this makes a huge assumption that misses the point. In building relationships, especially when conflict emerges (or where conflict has existed for some time, which is too often the case in issues of international relations) it isn't listening that we need to work for. We need to build relationships with one another. We need to sit with our friends and loved ones, and with those with whom we have conflict, and build new sorts of things together. We need to build new types of relationships, new kinds of treaties and partnerships, and even new kinds of nations. We need to do all kinds of things together that listening doesn't begin to touch.
What do I do instead of listen?
Stop using those "techniques," for starters. They're patronizing, they feel forced and artificial, and they keep you separate from your conversation partner from the beginning.
Consider these steps:
1. Work to be in conversations where you're open to going new places. When we set about creating with someone else, it's impossible to know where thing will go. You might end up talking about something you've never thought about before.
2. Resist the pull to be passive. Find ways of including you in the conversation. Does that mean drowning out your conversation partner? Of course not. But if you're focused on "making sure she feels heard" you're keeping your own voice out of the picture as well, and that's not any nicer.
3. Great conversations are chocked full of curiosity, which is a seriously challenging activity. Curiosity demands asking questions about the most uncomfortable things our conversation partner raises, and asking them in ways where we're genuinely suspending a belief that we know the answer ahead of time.
4. Don't throw out disagreeing. It's often the best part, and it's a fact of who we are. Agreement, as it turns out, isn't a pre-condition of building at all (in fact, if you agree there may not be much to talk about).
We've got a lot to build in the world, much of it involving new kinds of stronger, more decent relationships. How are we going to get there? Don't just listen, create a conversation.
