Listening with the Heart – Members Content

The first step towards the kind of active listening that will facilitate an experience of intimacy is to examine some of our normal responses to the other’s personal sharing of what’s going on inside them.

Resistance

People tend to block the sharing of their emotions when the listener reacts defensively or signals that they don’t really want to get involved. This resistance can be blatant, as when they argue with the other’s emotions because they feel blamed for them, or because they don’t think they would react the same way in similar circumstances. It might be more subtle: Saying “I’m sorry you feel that way” really means, “I don’t think you should feel that way”.

Attitudes of superiority can block your ability to listen, and you can cut off or attempt to pre-empt someone’s personal sharing by saying, “I know, I know”, appearing distracted, or patronising the other with a proverbial “Yes, Dear.”

Finally, if you are uncomfortable with emotions you may try to avoid them entirely by focusing only on the problem or issue that surfaced them.

Sympathy

Many people try to be sympathetic listeners. Being open to, and attempting to understand, is better than resistance, but often they are reluctant to get too close to the other’s emotion. When you take this posture, you can provide a sounding board or a receptive ear for the other while maintaining a level of intellectual and emotional distance. You limit yourself to understanding the words without wishing to experience the emotions of the person. This is the level that is typical of most therapy or counselling; you are more like a kindly advisor than a passionately involved lover.

Features of this style of listening may include:

• Validation: Intellectual understanding and feedback
• Attention: Eye contact or touch while maintaining a safe distance
• Support: Encouragement without seeking to change the other or to be changed.

This style of listening may be quite appropriate for most of your daily interactions with close friends and family, but it does limit the degree of intimacy you may experience. It is less than what you need and have a right to expect from your fiancé and future spouse; the one who loves you most deeply and passionately.

Emotional Communion

Emotional communion opens you up to a deeper level of understanding. It asks you to go one step further and be willing to actually feel what the other is experiencing. It involves making the effort to personally relate to the emotions and needs that the other is sharing by being vulnerable and completely other-centred. You consciously try to step into the inner world of the other in order to connect with the person you love in their experience. As you strive to draw out more and more descriptive detail, you make a deliberate effort to get out of yourself and to taste what it is like to be the other.

The goal to go beyond the intellectual acceptance of the other’s emotions and needs to actually share in their experience.

Hallmarks of emotional communion are:

• Intimacy and empathy
• Mutal vulnerability and reverence
• Actively engaged body language (including a deep sense of connectedness and a desire to be close physically).

Emotional communion is the most loving way to respond to your fiancé’s emotions and needs. It allows you to unite at a very human level. When you listen to and involve yourself in the other’s experience in this way, they feel accepted and loved.

By seeking to experience the other’s emotions and needs, you make it possible to really know what it is like to be them in a given situation. It’s the difference between ‘knowing them’ and ‘knowing about them’.