Usable Insight - Deep Listening
If you listen for the hurt and fear in people, it’s always there.
-Edwin Shneidman, creator of the field of Suicidology
Dr. Edwin Shneidman is one of my mentors, perhaps the greatest pioneer in the study of suicide and someone who referred many a suicidal person to me early in my clinical practice. He once told me: “If you listen for the hurt and fear in people, it’s always there. If they feel you hearing them in such a way that they feel ‘felt’ by you, the pus will start to drain. And if you let it drain without rushing ito fix it, make it better and go away (out of your own discomfort), or short circuit it, they will eventually stop, cry, e-x-h-a-l-e, be grateful to you and show their gratitude by listening to and considering what you have to say.”
One of the guides to listening in this way is to utilize the purest form of listening, which according to another of my teachers, Wilfred Bion, is to “listen without memory or desire.” When you listen with memory, you have an old agenda you are trying to plug someone into; when you listen with desire, you have a new agenda that you are trying to plug them into, but in neither case is it their agenda.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:01 am
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March 25th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
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June 17th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
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