Enter the Other’s World
True listening is not passive. More than 30 years as a psychoanalyst
has taught me that real listening is a highly active process.
As an active listener, I am allowed entrance into another person’s
life story. A privilege. It is not my life story. I learn to see the
world though the other person’s eyes, by asking questions and
questioning my own assumptions. This allows me to experience an event
not as I would experience it in my world, but as it would be experienced
in the other’s world. For example, if I stay solely in my world,
I might not be upset at all if what happened to someone else happened
to me. I might then say to the other “it is not so bad,”
or “Time will help,” or “It could be worse.”
Thus, we try to be helpful. But we only succeed in increasing the speaker’s
pain and feelings of being misunderstood.
How are the outside world’s intimate relationships different from
what I do in my office? It is true that therapist and patient are both
listening to each other, but all intimate relationships involve two
people who both need to listen to the other in the same way, with each
trying to enter the other person’s world as he or she experiences
it. Let’s say you are unhappy with someone you love for some reason.
That person must be able to understand why you are unhappy, not to necessarily
accept your view as factual, but to know why it is true for you. Only
then can that unhappiness be let go.
Emily Krestow, PhD
Psychoanalyst
Hollywood, FL - www.EmilyKrestow.com
