The Danger of Deep Listening

As a counselling therapist, I listen to people everyday. It’s a demanding skill that requires constant practice. Listening is the crux of my profession, but it also feeds my soul and nourishes my mind. I hold a space for others to the best of my ability. Often this means bracketing aside my reactions and meeting the person before me in the fullness of their humanity. This is the abiding challenge of every session, an ongoing practice that shapes my life. Against the kick of instinct and the upsurge of emotion, I listen my way into another terrain. Deep, empathetic listening has been the abiding challenge of my professional life. For that very reason, it has also been the most transformative.

Good listeners attend closely. They register the speaker’s words while tuning into the emotional tenor of the message. They read the inflections that give depth to the speaker’s voice, note the valences that lurk in the speaker’s face and body. They allow words to reverberate through the chambers of both mind and heart. Good listeners do not interrupt. They do not assert themselves in annoyance or impatience; they walk alongside the speaker in a gesture of solidarity. Conversation with a good listener is not a night at the fireworks, with explosions of colour in rapid succession; it is more like a walk in the quiet of the morning, accompanied by dew drops that sparkle in the light.

Lamentably, our culture has all but abandoned deep listening as an ongoing project in our shared life. The breathless pace of conversation occludes pause, those silent spaces that invite reflection. Without reflection, there is little possibility for learning, growth, and transformation. Perhaps this is the reason for the paucity of deep listening: when we listen, we open ourselves to possibility, and thus we risk losing the certainty of our views, the stability of our positions, the fixity of our identities. In listening, I may stumble upon a perspective, an experience, an insight that upsets my manicured world-view. I may feel implicated in an injustice, or unfairly accused of an offence. My ethical convictions can spur me to fight. A brusque comment can sting a hidden wound. In addition to these hazards, the listener seems relegated to passivity. Whereas a speaker gives voice to thought and stakes ground through speech, the listener seems inert, reduced to barren silence. It can seem that agency resides in the speaker, powerlessness in the listener. Fear of irrelevance makes us restless; this fear weakens our bond and diminishes our ability to hear each other.

That listening is dangerous is precisely why we must listen. In an age of political and social strife, listening is the first casualty of a divided culture. The world is baffling in its complexity. No one person alone can apprehend its intricacies in its entirety. No one can afford to ignore what others know, see, and feel. No one person can command the sum of our shared challenges. We need each other’s minds and experiences to piece together a more complete map of these uncharted waters. For instance, an economic policy can affect different segments of the populace in different ways. Assessments about its effectiveness is only as valid as the variety of outcomes included in the tally. If we ignore perspectives that are part of the whole, we confine ourselves to partiality, and thus foreclose a more complete understanding.

It often hurts to listen, which shakes something deep within our core. Listening sometimes feels like a betrayal of what is just and right. The urge to rebut a ludicrous notion or an offensive belief can stir us to arms. We want to fight, retaliate, lay bare the absurdity of another person’s position. Some beliefs seem deeply misguided, others blatantly harmful. However, if we engage in the spirit of combat, casualties are sure to result. We may win the argument, but we will lose the other person. The bond that ties us together may be irreparably damaged, and further dialogue becomes impossible. In a polarized culture, bitter discourse only further alienates divided parties. Far from changing each other’s perspectives, we become more entrenched in our views, more resentful of the other. Indeed, we must stand up for our values, speak for what we believe to be right. However, the moment we do so, we are also prone to the primal urge to eliminate what we perceive as a threat. We can be on guard against the obliterative impulse that seeks to demonize and demolish the other. The task is to preserve the cords that keep us together while forging a shared understanding. This is fundamentally a constructive, rather than destructive, task.

Sometimes our listening is saddled with an agenda. We may not argue, but we hope that our listening is noticeable, that our patience is salient and our virtue conspicuous. We listen with the expectation that our listening itself will change the other. However, if we think our listening will change the other, then our listening is weighed down by expectation. We can easily grow frustrated when others neither acknowledge our views nor demonstrate a reciprocal willingness to listen. We may feel that the onus of listening renders us mute. Others are forever speaking, and I am always the one listening. The interaction hardly seems equal. Here, our desire for communion among equals is apparent. Recognizing these difficulties, deep listening asks us to give ourselves entirely to another, relinquishing every expectation that our listening might make any difference, or that it might return to us what we secretly pine for. The listening becomes total. In our attention, we forego our devices for controlling outcomes, for shaping the other. We let go of the rope, and allow the waves to carry our raft toward the horizon. If this feels scary, then we are coming closer to what deep listening requires of us.

Still, listening is rife with difficulties. There are relations of power that tax our exchanges. The one who gets an airing makes the mark. Why should women who have suffered sexual harassment and abuse listen to other men rant about the excess of the feminist movement? Why should members of the LGBTQ community, many of whom live in fear for their physical safety, entertain abrasive views about gender and sexuality? To assign the duty of listening to an oppressed population seems to extend an existing injustice.

This problem plagued my reading of Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” many years ago. However, Freire assuaged my resistance. Though we might dispute the hard dichotomy between the oppressor and oppressed, something is brought to light in Freire’s framework. The burden of reform lies in the hands of the oppressed because oppressors are incapacitated by their own blindness. Those captured by vitriol, who raise their fists in fight, are animated by a pain that they themselves are powerless to overcome. Rage and bitterness overtakes them. If they are able to turn towards the hurt that emanates from within, there is hope for healing. However, they often cannot come to a clear recognition of their own destructiveness. Only those impacted by the oppressor’s actions can reveal to him the damage he inflicts. In this sense, the oppressed stand on higher ground – they are poised to overcome baser instincts; they can resile against the odds while holding fast to noble principles. For these reasons, those who are hurting have a vital role in engaging and countering those with oppressive power.

Some people shout, others are belligerent. We’re reluctant to listen for fear of getting scorched. However, behind the fury, there is hurt. Those who shout the loudest are often the most wounded. By listening, we not only register the content of their rage, we are also nearing the pulse of their inner pain. Someone who is against taxation may feel that it is a great injustice for their hard-earn income to be claimed by the government. Behind the protest may be someone who was once wounded by unfairness, someone who felt under-recognized for their work. They harbour an indignation against unfairness. If we can listen past the fiery speech and recognize the hurt behind the words, then we remain in touch with the humanity in each person and preserve the possibility for compassion and understanding in our interchange.

Listening is not easy and should never be. Real dialogue is always messy and unstable. Emotions spill easily and clumsy words clutter the arena. Our own egos, with their self-preserving impulse, can spike our best intentions. Even the best listeners can feel triggered. These are not reasons to abandon the practice; instead they can galvanize our commitment to deeper listening. It is precisely that it is difficult that we must listen. The alternative is disastrous, for if we do not listen, we shall not understand. Without understanding, we are blundering fools ruled by destructive impulses. Listening draws us out of ourselves, pushes of our comprehension towards another, and therefore brings us closer to the horizon. In so doing, we risk losing our footing on a small patch of familiar ground, but we also gain an entirely new terrain with unimaginable sights.