You're Not Listening

by Kate Murphy

  When you reflect on what someone said, the person’s thoughts and feelings take up residence in you. It’s an extension of the idea of listening as a form of hospitality. You are inviting someone into your consciousness. And the conversations you care about are the ones you carry with you in memory. Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of the treatise On Friendship, once told me, “The best friendships are those where you are able to immediately pick up the conversation where you left off because the person’s words have remained with you.” Indeed, one of the most gratifying things you can say to another person is: “I’ve been thinking about what you said.” Likewise, friends are people who can connect what you are saying in the moment to things you’ve said in the past to help you work through problems or clarify your thinking or, in some cases, just make you laugh at the association.

  But in an age when listening is seen as a burden, people often feel ashamed, embarrassed, or guilty when someone listens to them, much less reflects on what they said. They might empty their souls into the digital black hole that is the internet, but revealing themselves to someone in the same room, who is giving them full attention, is another thing entirely. “It may really be too hard and too late, not even desirable, after such long, familiar cold, to be known, and heard, and seen,” wrote Amy Bloom in Love Invents Us.

  Jerry Jacobs, a hairstylist in New York City, told me many of his clients apologize for unloading during their appointments. “It seems like they think they are doing something wrong,” he said. “I tell them not to worry about it. It helps to talk. I don’t run away from other people’s trouble.” Visit his salon and you can easily see how people might end up releasing pent-up thoughts and emotions. First, there is a perceived intimacy when someone stands so close to you and touches your head. And Jacobs asks very personal questions: “How do you feel about how you look?” and “How do you want to look?”

  Facing a mirror, his clients seem to respond by talking to themselves as much as to him. “I get the sense, for a lot of them, they don’t have other people who listen to them, or maybe don’t listen very well,” Jacobs said. Whether the person in the chair is a young woman who wants to experiment with turquoise streaks or a middle-aged man wanting to camouflage his bald spot, details about their failing relationships, issues with their kids, health concerns, social anxieties, or money problems accumulate like piles of hair on the floor.

  When you don’t interrupt or talk over people, you don’t keep them from finishing their sentences and thoughts. They sometimes say things that they didn’t expect and maybe didn’t even know themselves. It can be disconcerting, and they may not appreciate it. I have interviewed people who later became embarrassed by what they said or, worse, insisted they never said what they said, even when I had them on tape and knowingly on the record. Similarly, in social situations, people may apologize for saying too much or might later act distant or coolly toward you, resentful that you know what you know. Psychotherapists told me that when patients divulge particularly sensitive information during a session, it’s not unusual for them to cancel their next few appointments or maybe not come back at all. “They feel exposed, so you may not hear from them for ages,” said Zerbe.

  This vulnerability brings up the importance of keeping people’s confidences. There’s a world of difference between gossip (talking about other people’s observed behavior to try to understand it) and betraying someone’s trust by divulging what the person told you in private. According to communication privacy management theory, private information is kind of like money. If you are indiscreet with other people’s private information, it’s like you are spending their money without their consent. You can give up as much information as you want about yourself, just as you are free to spend your own money any way you like. But when you start drawing from other people’s accounts, they are going to get upset. This is true even if you believed the information was already widely known or thought that it was not embarrassing or sensitive information. The information is still not yours to give away unless given explicit permission. Better to be a reliable confidant. Otherwise, people will think twice about telling you anything of significance, or they may cease communicating with you altogether.

  With all its potential perils and pitfalls, listening may seem like too much to ask. And sometimes, with some people, it is. But more often, listening is a rewarding endeavor. Hearing how other people deal with struggles helps you figure out how to deal with your own problems, either by adopting their coping strategies or doing the opposite when you observe it’s not working out for them. Listening helps you see we are all dealing with similar issues—wanting to be loved, looking for purpose, and fearing the end. You learn you are not alone. By listening, you acknowledge and embrace the world that is going on outside your head, which helps you sort out what’s going on inside your head. And unlike most things in your life, listening is fully under your control. You get to decide who deserves your attention. Listening is your gift to bestow. No one can make you listen.

  But just as you should be mindful and intentional when you grant the gift of your attention, you should try to be as mindful and intentional when you withhold it. While not listening is justified and a matter of practicality in some circumstances, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s a form of rejection. Consciously or unconsciously, you are choosing to attend to something else, which implies that person is not as interesting, as important, or as worthwhile, at least not at that moment.

  Not listening to someone can be hurtful even when you don’t mean to be, and it can be cruel if used as a weapon. It’s why ghosting, where someone cuts off all communication with another person without warning or explanation, is so incredibly painful. A study published in Journal of Research in Personality found that compared to other breakup strategies, ghosting (technically, the avoidance/withdrawal strategy) was the most wounding and provoked the most anger and resentment from those on the receiving end. Those who were given the benefit of an explanation and the opportunity to have their say were less angry and aggrieved.

  One of the most common reasons people withdraw is in response to criticism. But it’s important to remember sometimes the things we least want to hear can be the most beneficial. A rebuke can sting, but if we really listen without letting our egos get in the way and reflect on what was said, even if indelicately, we might realize how we are coming up short. Or if we feel the criticism is unfair, it gives us the opportunity to acknowledge how we came across and explain our true intent. Also, good listeners, because they expose themselves to a range of thoughts and opinions, are more resilient when they are criticized. They know one person’s words are not necessarily definitive or entirely accurate.

  A good exercise is to think about the people in your life who you have a hard time listening to and ask yourself why that is. Are they judging? Do they tell the same stories over and over? Do they exaggerate? Give too much detail? Do they only talk about how great they are? Do they get their facts wrong? Are they too negative? Saccharine? Superficial? Insulting? Do they challenge your thinking? Disagree with you? Do they make you feel envious? Do they make references and use words you don’t know? Are their voices annoying? Are they not socially or professionally useful to you? Are you afraid of the intimacy that might develop? You have your reasons. Just know what they are and whether your reasons say more about you than they do about the other person. And also know that people change, and your view of them changes, when you truly listen. It often pays to first make the effort before you decide to pull the plug.

  Conclusion

  You know you’ve arrived at the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle when its glittery exterior mosaic depicting Jesus and Our Lady of San Juan emerges over the billboards for bail bonds and Whataburger along Interstate 2 in the border town of San Juan, Texas. The other tip-off is all the people, thousands of them, streaming into the church. They come to light candles and make offerings, but the longest lines
are for the confessionals, which wind in tight S curves like security lines at the airport. Priests man the six confessional booths in constant rotation, listening in three-hour shifts for up to twelve hours a day, often extending their hours rather than turn anyone away.

  Father Jorge Gómez, the young, round-faced rector at the basilica, told me the lines for confession seem to grow longer every week, even as sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church have led many to question their faith. Father Gómez doesn’t quite know what to make of the surging numbers. He doesn’t think it’s because we are living in a more sinful society or that people are feeling more guilty about the things they’ve done. In fact, many who come don’t talk about sin. Some aren’t even Catholic. “When the people come here, it’s like they are going to a field hospital,” Father Gómez said. “They so badly need to be heard, it’s like a wound; they are in a critical state.”

  We were walking around the sanctuary as we talked, his black robe rippling with his footsteps. Originally from rural Mexico and the eldest of twelve children, he retains a sense of disbelieving wonder that he ended up at the basilica. The size of a sports arena, the church and its sprawling campus attract more than twenty thousand visitors every weekend, making it one of the most visited Catholic shrines in the United States. They come from all over—North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe, the Caribbean—but they are not tourists like many who visit, say, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., or Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. The people who come to Our Lady of San Juan come to pray, and more to the point, they come to be heard.

  The people waiting in line to unburden themselves on the day I visited were all ages, ethnicities, and nationalities. Multilingual priests heard confessions in four languages. Some in the queue looked as if they worked in the nearby citrus groves, while others had a Euro-hipster vibe, wearing slim-fit suits and expensive Italian shoes fastened with gold buckles. Most of them stared at their phones as they waited their turn.

  “I’ve begun to think there is a crisis of listening in our world,” Father Gómez said. “There are a lot of people who want to talk but very few who want to listen, and we are seeing people suffer from it. I just let the people talk. At the very end, they say how nice it was to talk, but I didn’t talk. I think it’s just making yourself available to listen to the people; that’s what they are starved for.”

  There’s very little training in Catholic seminaries on how to listen to confessions, Father Gómez told me. For him, the best preparation has been to regularly go to confession himself. “I need to sit down in front of another priest with a humble heart and confess my own sins so that it gives me the tender compassion when I’m on the other side of the screen,” he said.

  This kind of empathy is important for any listener. It’s hard to develop the sensitivity and respect for another person’s vulnerability without knowing what it’s like to be vulnerable yourself. Those who stick to superficialities in their conversations or who are jokey all the time don’t know what it’s like to give of themselves and, therefore, have a hard time knowing how to receive.

  Anyone who has shared something personal and received a thoughtless or uncomprehending response knows how it makes your soul want to crawl back in its hiding place. Whether someone is confessing a misdeed, proposing an idea, sharing a dream, revealing an anxiety, or recalling a significant event—that person is giving up a piece of him or herself. And if you don’t handle it with care, the person will start to edit future conversations with you, knowing, “I can’t be real with this person.”

  When you engage with someone, your behavior does two things: 1) it helps or hinders your understanding, and 2) strengthens or weakens the relationship. Listening is your best bet on both counts. As discussed throughout this book, it’s possible, with awareness and patience, to develop your skill as a listener and do it extremely well. But there will still be times when you lose your focus or tolerance, or both. Even Father Gómez said there are times when he zones out. Listening is like playing a sport or musical instrument in that you can get better and better with practice and persistence, but you will never achieve total mastery. Some may have more natural ability and some may have to try harder, but everyone can benefit from making the effort.

  The lines at Our Lady of San Juan speak to a fundamental and urgent human need to be heard. When something wonderful or terrible happens to you, what’s your first instinct? It’s probably to tell someone. We will tell our troubles and triumphs to strangers, pets, and even potted plants if no one else is around. But listening is the flip side of that impulse and arguably no less critical to our well-being. We long to receive as much as we long to transmit. When we are too busy to listen, when we look at our phones, jump in too soon with our opinions, or make assumptions, we prevent others’ thoughts and emotions from being genuinely expressed. And we end up hollow or emptier than we would be otherwise.

  Listening heightens your awareness. It makes you feel. As you become more attuned to the thoughts and emotions of others, you become more alive to the world and it becomes more alive to you. Life otherwise can become a muted existence, with days spent cocooned in unquestioned beliefs and fixed concepts, where, even though the world and the people in it are always changing, nothing is ventured beyond the borders of what you already know or accept as true. It feels safe, but it’s really just stifling.

  The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget talked about the collective monologue of preschoolers. Put several of them together and they jabber away to themselves rather than to one another. The parallel between the typical sandbox confab and what passes for discourse today is obvious. It would be funny if we weren’t suffering the consequences politically, economically, socially, and psychologically. To engage in collective dialogue, which Piaget defined as listening to and being responsive to one another, is to be mature, with all the relational capacity that implies.

  Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.” It is flattering when someone listens to you, which is why we are drawn to those increasingly rare individuals who actually do. Listening is a courtesy and, more fundamentally, a sign of respect. It’s impossible to convince someone that you respect them by telling them so. It must be demonstrated, and listening is the simplest way to do that.

  But listening is no easy task. Our magnificent brains race along faster than others can speak, making us easily distracted. We overestimate what we already know and, mired in our arrogance, remain unaware of all we misunderstand. We also fear that if we listen too carefully, we might discover that our thinking is flawed or that another person’s emotions might be too much to bear. And so we retreat into our own heads, talk over one another, or reach for our phones.

  Technology does not so much interfere with listening as make it seem unnecessary. Our devices indulge our fear of intimacy by fooling us into thinking that we are socially connected even when we are achingly alone. We avoid the messiness and imperfections of others, retreating into the relative safety of our devices, swiping and deleting with abandon. The result is a loss of richness and nuance in our social interactions, and we suffer from a creeping sense of dissatisfaction.

  Not listening reduces the level of discourse. We experience and evaluate our words differently when said aloud to an attentive listener versus when they are in our heads or tapped out in 140 characters. A listener has a reactive effect on the speaker. As a result, careful listening elevates the conversation because speakers become more responsible and aware of what they are saying.

  While listening is the epitome of graciousness, it is not a courtesy you owe everyone. That isn’t possible. It’s to your benefit to listen to as many different people, with as much curiosity as you can muster, but you ultimately get to decide when and where to draw the line. To be a good listener does not mean you must suffer fools gladly, or indefinitely, but rather helps you more easily
identify fools and makes you wise to their foolishness. And perhaps most important, listening keeps you from being the fool yourself.

  Listening is often regarded as talking’s meek counterpart, but it is actually the more powerful position in communication. You learn when you listen. It’s how you divine truth and detect deception. And though listening requires that you let people have their say, it doesn’t mean you remain forever silent. In fact, how one responds is the measure of a good listener and, arguably, the measure of a good person.

  In our fast-paced and frenetic culture, listening is seen as a drag. Conversations unfold slowly and may need to be revisited. Listening takes effort. Understanding and intimacy must be earned. While people often say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “I can’t listen right now.” And for many, it seems they never get around to it. This, despite what we all want most in life—to understand and be understood—only happens when we slow down and take the time to listen.

  Gratitude

  In journalism, your story is only as good as your sources, which is why I am profoundly grateful to the many people who were generous with their time and knowledge as I researched this book. None of them had to take my call, respond to my email, or meet me in person. And yet, they did. I appreciate their willingness to engage with me more than I can adequately express.