Category Archives: Relationship Skills

The Magic of Listening

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Now more than ever, most of us are spending long stretches of our days at home with loved ones. This brings with it a new possibility for intimacy, and therefore a new possibility to cultivate listening skills.

In the classic movie, “Two for the Road,” Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn are creeping up the stairs to their room.  Looking down into the hotel’s dining room, they see a man and a woman sitting in stony silence.

“What kind of people just sit like that without a word to say to each other?” Finney asks.

“Married people?” replies Hepburn, with wide eyes and a small, ironic smile.

Much of my work at Samaritan, and earlier in a retirement community in Arizona, has been with couples.  Many of them have been married for 20, 30 or more years.  Frequently they tell me that what brings them to therapy is their trouble with communication.

Over the years, couples can become experts at pushing each other’s hot buttons and short-circuiting their lines of communication.  In the early stages of a relationship, they would talk for hours, yet they find themselves becoming more distant and, in a way, losing their good manners with each other.

While what they’re facing isn’t new, it has somehow found a way to break through the surface of their everyday life, and one or both of them feel compelled to deal with it.  Coming to therapy is an admission that they need to make some serious changes if they are going to stay married.  It’s time to develop more generous ways of talking and listening to each other.

Listening? What an idea! Most of us grew up thinking that communication is all about talking, making our point, getting our way. When couples are able to shift their attention to listening to each other, they can increase their ability to truly understand each other.  They can stop having the same old arguments over and over.  They can bring respect and warmth into their relationship.

Maintaining healthy communication isn’t rocket science, but it does require effort.  Here are some tips:

  • Be aware of the message your face, your tone of voice and your body are sending.
  • Don’t mind read.  Don’t assume.  Try not to finish each other’s sentences.
  • Be curious about each other. Bring new ideas to the conversational table.
  • Accept that you can have different opinions and still be friends.
  • Avoid the “trigger” words that you know are likely to set each other off.
  • Be direct.  Ask (nicely) for what you want. Don’t expect the other person to know.
  • When you argue, be fair. Stay on the subject. Don’t be insulting or sarcastic.
  • Most important, be willing to see try on a new perspective. How can you see your relationship with new eyes?

Many of our counselors work with couples and families as well as individuals. Reach out to a therapist today to discuss how we might support you and your partner.

The Heart of Listening

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People freely acknowledge that they want to listen better. Listening well, they admit, can be a huge challenge. They have heard the complaints of their partners and friends: You miss my real point! You seek only to fix my problem! You don’t seem to hear or acknowledge my feelings. These are real barriers. But there is another obstacle that derails or overheats many of our conversations: moral certainty.

We experience it in our private lives. And with dispiriting regularity, we hear it in the public arena: one voice with ironclad moral certainty arguing fiercely with an equally strident and equally certain opposing voice. So many important issues that seem deadlocked in hostility; so many people with opposing positions, sometimes espousing hatred and violence.

In a recent radio story, a local man related his efforts to help a few homeless people living in tents near his neighborhood. Passing the encampment on his commute to and from work, he began to meet and speak with some of the unhoused men and women about their day-to-day hardships. A common theme emerged: the lack of bathrooms. With no nearby accommodations, people resorted to squatting in the bushes, a practice that they found unsanitary, unsafe, and undignified.

The man got the idea of supplying materials for a camp toilet: an army surplus tent, toilet paper and sanitizer, cat litter, and a five-gallon bucket with a seat. The idea caught on, and over time he has delivered more than 75 of these toilet kits to encampments in the Seattle region.

What struck me about his account—a tech worker with an idea and a desire to help—was not so much his action as his frame of mind. As he pursued his project, he encountered neighbors and friends who objected to his do-good gestures. “You aren’t really helping; you’re just contributing to the problem,” they complained. They contended that he was actually doing harm by enabling the unsheltered families and individuals to continue in an unstable and unhealthy way of living.

His reply has stayed with me: “This has become my mantra: ‘If you have moral certainty, you aren’t in deep enough.’” He was not insisting that he was clearly right; he was contending that the problem becomes more complex as you get in deeper. Certainty becomes difficult or impossible.

It’s a notion that I have encountered again and again in my life and work as a professional listener. “If you have moral certainty, you aren’t in deep enough.” Being with people in their moral dilemmas, accompanying them as they “get in deeper,” generally means one of two things: in many cases we discover that they are uncomfortable with moral certainties (their own or others’); other times, their discomfort lies in their experience of moral uncertainty—and our conversations often reveal that this unsettled state of mind is actually more faithful to the complexity of the issue than a wished-for moral certainty might be.

Listening well is a challenge in all our lives. The health and growth of our relationships depend on it. Can we recognize and suspend our moral certainties in the interest of listening and relating? Can we go deeper into the complexity of morally difficult problems that face us as persons, families, and communities? Can we let go of certainty as the goal—striving instead for some measure of personal clarity about moral issues that is rooted in a recognition of their complexity? That appears to be one of the critical challenges of this time and place.