Free The Lost Art of Listening by Michael P. Nichols Page B

couple’s relationship. Now when Janice talked about the problems she
    was worried about, Wayne could sympathize because it was clear that he
    wasn’t responsible. He could sense her vulnerability and he felt good about
    being able to listen and comfort her.
    What shifted wasn’t the result of anything either of them did deliber-
    ately. Wayne became a better listener once he realized he wasn’t respon-
    sible for doing anything about Janice’s feelings, and she became easier to
    listen to when she expressed her feelings of vulnerability more directly.
    Too bad it took a crisis to make clear what had always been the case.
    Wayne wasn’t responsible for Janice’s feelings, and when she expressed her
    feelings more directly, he was able to listen. I’ll discuss later what you can
    do to bring about this shift toward mutual understanding, whether you’re
    a listener who gets defensive or a person who has trouble getting people to
    listen to your feelings.
    Preconceived Notions
    By the time we emerge from adolescence, most of us have become self-
    protective. We know where our naked nerve endings are and don’t often
    expose them. We open ourselves selectively and, like any creature with a
    soft underbelly, retreat from unfriendly encounters. Sometimes, however,
    it’s too late to pull back inside our shells. When the pressure of emotion
    makes us open ourselves to someone we think we can trust, failed under-
    standing can be as bruising as a mugging.
    When his son told him he was dropping out of college, Seth did his
    best to hide his disappointment. Still, he was upset and needed someone
    to talk to. Hoping that his brother would understand, Seth gave him a call.
    It wasn’t easy for Seth to talk about his feelings, so he started out mak-
    ing small talk. After a few minutes Seth told his brother that Justin had
    dropped out of school and that he was very discouraged about it. There
    was a pause, and then his brother went on to talk about something else.
    Seth was stunned. How could his brother be so unsympathetic? With great

    How Communication Breaks Down 51
    effort, he confronted his brother, saying “Didn’t you hear what I said?” His
    brother replied that he had never thought of Seth as someone who needed
    emotional support.
    Here was a chance for the brothers to share a deeper understanding; if
    they would only open up and listen to one another, they could reestablish
    the closeness they’d had so many years ago. But it didn’t happen.
    The expectations with which we approach others are, as we shall see,
    just one of many ways we create the listening we get. Nor can the process
    be reduced to the behavior of the participants—the words—and therefore
    always be improved by “skills training” or pretending to take an interest
    or other calculated strategies. (Conversation can, of course, be reduced
    to a behavioral analysis, but only by trivializing the feelings of the people
    involved.) Dialogue takes place between two people with not just ears and
    tongues but hearts and minds—and all the famous complications therein.
    Having an understanding attitude doesn’t mean presuming
    to know a person’s thoughts and feelings. It means being
    open to listening and discovering.
    Emotional Reactivity
    As I mentioned in the Introduction, we all have certain ways of react-
    ing emotionally within particular relationships. The closer the relation-
    ship, the more vulnerable we are to hearing something said as rejection
    or attack, even if it wasn’t meant that way. Because of the dynamics of
    the relationship or what we’ve learned to expect, we get defensive, which
    makes it impossible to listen to and understand what the speaker meant
    to say.
    A simple “Have you taken the garbage out yet?” might be taken as
    a rebuke by someone whose parents never expected him to do anything
    right. His response might be an overreactive “Can’t you leave me alone
    for one second!”
    It’s not always the