The Lost Art of Listening (7 page)

Attunement, a parent’s ability to share the child’s affective state, is a

pervasive feature of parent–child interactions with profound consequences.

It’s the forerunner of empathy and the essence of human understanding.

Attunement begins with the intuitive parental response of sharing the

baby’s mood and showing it. The baby reaches out excitedly and grabs

a toy. When the toy is in her grasp, she lets out an exuberant “aah!” and

looks at her mother. Mother responds in kind, sharing the baby’s exhilara-

tion and showing it by smiling and nodding and saying “Yes!” The mother

has understood and shared the child’s mood. That’s attunement.

One demonstration of the baby’s need for an attuned response is the

still-face procedure.
If a mother (or father) goes still-faced— impassive and

expressionless—in the middle of an interaction, the baby will become

upset and withdraw. Infants after about two-and-a-half months of age react

strongly to this still face. They look about. Their smile dies away and they

frown. They make repeated attempts to reignite the mother by smiling

and gesturing and calling her. If they don’t succeed, they finally turn away,

looking unhappy and confused.8 It hurts to reach out to someone who

doesn’t respond.

“No, I Don’t Want a Nap! I Want to Play.”:

The Sense of a Verbal Self (Fifteen to Eighteen Months)

Learning to speak creates a new type of connection between parent and

child. The acquisition of language has traditionally been seen as a major

step in the achievement of a separate identity, next only to locomotion.

8Daniel Stern,
Diary of a Baby
(New York: Basic Books, 1990).

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THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

But the opposite is also true: the acquisition of language is a potent force

for interaction and intimacy.

Developmental psychologists Arnold Sameroff and Robert Emde sum-

marize an extensive literature that shows that emotional unresponsiveness

produces an infant with “a restricted range of emotional expressiveness;

less clear signaling; and a predominance of disengagement, distress, or

avoidance in interactions. Under these conditions, clinicians may also see

a ‘turning off’ of affective interactions and, in extreme cases, sustained

sadness or depression.”9 In other words, a child whose communications

aren’t appreciated and responded to eventually gives up and turns inward.

When we see sadness or depression in someone, we tend to

assume that something’s wrong, that something’s happened.

Maybe that something is that nobody’s listening.

The Listened-To Child Is a Confident Child

By the time children get to be four or five, empathy or its absence has

molded their personalities in recognizable ways. The securely understood

child grows up to expect others to be available and receptive. This is

demonstrated by a tendency to draw effectively on preschool teachers as

resources. The listened-to child who becomes ill or injured at school will

confidently turn to teachers for support. In contrast, it’s particularly at such

times that insecure children fail to seek contact. “A boy is disappointed

and folds his arms and sulks. A girl bumps her head under a table and

crawls off to be by herself. A child is upset on the last day of school; she sits

frozen and expressionless on a couch.”10 Such reactions are typical—and

don’t change much as the unlistened-to child gets older.

Preschoolers with a history of empathic listening are more engaged

and more at ease with their peers. They expect interactions to be positive

and thus are more eager for them. They are able to make more friends and

9Arnold Sameroff and Robert Emde, eds.,
Relationship Disturbances in Early Childhood
(New

York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 47.

10Alan Sroufe, “Relationships, Self, and Individual Adaptation,” in Arnold Sameroff and

Robert Emde, eds.,
Relationship Disturbances in Early Childhood
(New York: Basic Books, 1989), pp. 88–89.

How Listening Shapes Us and Connects Us to Each Other
37

are happier. They are also good listeners. Already by four or five, empathic

failure—not abuse or cruelty, but simple, everyday lack of understanding—

results in a self that is isolated and insecure, vulnerable to rejection and

therefore fearful of new people and experience.

“He Never Talks to Me.”

The reticence of some men may have as much to do with a history of not

being empathically responded to as to anything inherent about gender.

Getting uncommunicative people to open up requires an extra effort to

demonstrate acceptance of their feelings— including feeling like not talk-

ing about something right now.

Imagine five-year-old Tammy, weaned on understanding, telling her

playmate about a bully in kindergarten. “And then he pushed me and

hogged all the crayons!”

A tiny cloud momentarily overshadowed her friend Ryan’s even tinier

face. Bullies were not his favorite people. But listening sympathetically,

he knew, was for sissies. Confident that if his own ire were sufficiently

aroused, he could demolish a grape with a single blow of his fist, Ryan

counseled war. “You should put paint in his hair and spank him with your

ruler when he does that.”

Here were two kindred spirits, meeting at last on a plane of perfect

understanding. “Thanks,” said Tammy gratefully, “but I think I hear my

mother calling. Nice talking to you.”

The need for listening is based partly on the need to sustain our sense

of significance. The listener’s understanding presence serves a selfobject

function—to satisfy our need for attention and appreciation. But the idea

that listening is something one person
gives
to the other is only partly true.

Another vital aspect of listening is mutuality.

Listening Bridges the Space Between Us

Mutuality is a sense not merely of being understood but of sharing—of

being-with another person. Here it isn’t just
I
but
we
that is important.

Our experience is made fuller by sharing it with another person.

38
THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

When I want to “share” a thought or feeling that means a lot to me,

what I want is to be understood, taken seriously and appreciated. (Call-

ing this “sharing” is an unctuous affectation; what we really want is to

express ourselves and be heard.) It is I who wants to be validated. But if

I see an especially funny cartoon in
The New Yorker
, I immediately think

of someone to share it with. (Here, “sharing” is appropriate, because the

experience sought is mutual, communal.) In this instance I don’t want to

be admired or valued; I just want to share the laughter.

As psychologist Ruthellen Josselson says in
The Space Between
Us
,11

mutuality is a powerful but neglected aspect of human experience. When

we’re young and alive, before life blunts our naked nerve endings, the

yearning for mutuality takes its most intense form in the hungering for a

soul mate. We find or invent a special someone with whom we can share

light moments and deep thoughts.

Mutuality is the stuff of everyday human exchange. We swap knowing

comments about the president’s latest gaffe, complain about the weather,

and chat idly about the events of the day. Nothing important is happen-

ing, just life and shared humanity. One woman said, “That’s why when I’m

away on business I call my husband at the end of the day—to tell him that

the meeting went okay or it’s raining or I forgot to pack my good shoes.”

This woman doesn’t
need
anything; she calls just to share the everyday

observations and opinions and complaints that otherwise back up and bur-

den us in isolation.

Most theories of human relationship emphasize one or another aspect

of connection, whether it’s mutuality, the selfobject function, holding,

attachment, or caring. All these many modes of relatedness are ways of

reaching through the space that separates us. Underlying all our agendas,

however, is the fact that speech is the primary mode of relating, and being

listened to is the primary means of being understood and appreciated. By

“appreciated” I don’t mean admired, but rather perceived and accepted

as we feel ourselves to be. When we talk about being down in the dumps,

it doesn’t help to be told how wonderful we are; we want our discontent

recognized. We want to be known.

As we’re reminded from time to time when we’re misjudged or hurt

more than anyone realizes, no one can really see our selves. They see what

11Ruthellen Josselson,
The Space Between Us: Exploring the Dimensions of Human Relation-

ships
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992).

How Listening Shapes Us and Connects Us to Each Other
39

they can and are willing to see, and they know what we tell them. The rest

is private, mystery.

The way we become known is through empathic responsiveness, what

Heinz Kohut called “mirroring.”12 The good listener (or “mirroring selfob-

ject”) appreciates us as we are, accepting the feelings and ideas that we

express as they are. In the process, we feel understood, acknowledged, and

accepted.

Empathy—the human echo—is the indispensable stuff of emotional

well-being. What is adequately mirrored becomes, in time, part of the true

and lived self. The child who is heard and appreciated has a better chance

to grow up whole. The adult who is heard and appreciated is more likely to

continue to feel that way.

Unshared Thoughts Diminish Us

Some people are good at getting appreciated, but they work too hard at it.

They aren’t open to all of themselves, and so what gets appreciated is only

the face they show to the world. Reassurance isn’t very reassuring to the

person with too many secrets.

Why, then, do some people say so little about themselves?

The answer is, life teaches them to hold back. The innocent eager-

ness for appreciation we bring to our earliest relationships exposes us to

consequences. Some people are lucky. They get the attention they need

and thereafter approach life with confidence. Others aren’t so lucky. They

don’t get listened to, and as a consequence they avoid opening up. What

might appear to be modesty in some such cases may have more to do with

the reluctance to expose old wounds. Many people learn instead to chan-

nel their need for appreciation into personal ambition or doing things for

other people.

Not being listened to is hard on the heart, and so to

varying degrees we cover our need for understanding

with mechanisms of defense.

12Kohut’s two great (though unfortunately dense) works are
The Analysis of the Self
(New

York: International Universities Press, 1971) and
The Restoration of the Self
(New York: International Universities Press, 1977).

40
THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD

Some people become experts at avoidance and cultivate the capacity to

be alone. The charm of solitude, celebrated by British psychiatrist Anthony

Storr,13 is that it provides space for repose and reflection, time for looking

within the self, time for creative endeavor. Solitude offers respite from the

noisy claims of everyday social living. I’ll discuss later how solitude can give

us a chance to listen to our own thoughts. But some of the penchant for

being alone is defensive—an accommodation to being hurt by not being

heard. The defenses that form the solitary person’s character support a grand

illusion: the illusion of self- reliance. If we could only examine the contem-

plation of one’s own feelings that passes for introspection, we’d discover that

the silence of the solitary is often filled with imagined conversations.14

One of the reasons Sharon found Don so appealing was that he always

seemed cool and self- contained. While other people at the office always

seemed to be complaining or arguing, Don went about his business with

quiet assurance. He never seemed to get into arguments with anyone.

But one morning Sharon couldn’t help overhearing a junior colleague

come into Don’s office and ask if Don was annoyed at her for something.

In a barely controlled voice Don said that he didn’t care for Ellen’s argu-

ing with everything he said in staff meetings. “Oh,” she said, sarcastically,

“what do you want me to do, agree with everything you say?” At that,

Don lost it. He said that she hadn’t shown him any respect since she came

into the firm; he was sick and tired of her disagreeing with everything he

said. She never really considered his ideas, he said in an increasingly shrill

voice, she was just being disagreeable. At that point Ellen walked out.

Well
, Sharon thought,
I guess Don isn’t so self- composed after all. He’s

just one of those people who stay calm only by avoiding confrontations.