THE BOTTOM LINE:
BEING YOURSELF IS PERFECT ENOUGH.
Compassion for others isn’t fully possible if we don’t also have compassion for ourselves. Nobody is perfect—not you, not the people you lean on to get your own support. Being kind does not mean you are not allowed to also be a Fretter or a Foister. You may have big problems setting boundaries, or you may have a really full, stressful life right now, which makes it really hard to change or add something to your routine. What we really hope is for you to simply feel more aware of the human tendencies that can get in the way of fully expressing compassion: stress in the face of inconvenience, fear of setting boundaries, and pressure to do things “perfectly.”
IF WE ARE TO FULLY GIVE, WE MUST DO SO BY FIRST GIVING COMPASSION TO OURSELVES.
BECAUSE WHAT SOMEONE IN CRISIS REALLY NEEDS IS NOT YOUR SKILLED PERFECTION, BUT YOU.
CHAPTER 4:
LISTENING SPEAKS VOLUMES
“My dad asked questions like, ‘Can you hang in there? Can you go to counseling?’ He was trying to explore things I could do for the marriage to work it out, as opposed to just being receptive and listening: ‘How are you doing? How are you feeling?’”
—Tina, who went through a divorce
Victoria was married to a cheater. It wasn’t her fault, but there it was, plain and simple. Her husband: the cad. How long had she known? Well, she’d been married to Doug seven years; six years earlier he’d passed out on the couch with his laptop open and a beer in his hand. She’d gone over, fondly, to cover him up, and there it was, for everyone to see: Tuesday at lunch? Airport Sheraton? Miss you, big boy. Suzanne.
Victoria had closed the browser and put the computer away. She’d never mentioned it. But when she would periodically check his email over the years, there were other women too. Carissa. Heather. Molly.
At year eight, Victoria thought maybe having children would help. But they were now $60,000 in debt, and something needed to shock this guy into finding a steady job. She decided to bring it up over pot roast, Doug’s favorite. Doug came in, kissed her, and had two servings.
“I think we should have a baby,” Victoria said, heart pounding.
Doug blinked.
“BUT HONEY, I’M LEAVING YOU FOR DOROTHY,”
DOUG SAID. SO THERE YOU GO, VICTORIA HAD HER ANSWER: DIVORCE.
After months of legal hassles, gradually setting out on her own, and feeling like a wreck every day, an unexpected old friend reemerged: Anna. Victoria had sort of forgotten about Anna. They had known each other in college and stayed in touch off and on. Anna had been a brash, out-there sort of person who always dragged people to dance class. But when Anna heard Victoria was going through a divorce, she came over with lasagna and a magnum of Yellowtail and stayed the night.
“What you don’t need,” Anna said, “is an empty house.”
Anna was twice divorced—a connoisseur. Victoria had to admit Anna was right. The emptiness of her house mocked her constantly. The quiet was another form of sadness, ever blooming.
So Anna kept coming over, and Victoria kept letting her. Anna brought burritos, macaroni, baked ziti, and potatoes au gratin. They would hang out in the kitchen and have tea. Anna didn’t tell Victoria that Doug was an ass or that she had wasted her youth.
“You married him, after all,” Anna said. “There must have been something good.”
Victoria nodded. There were good things. Which is why she so often found herself sobbing to her new—no, old—friend.
Victoria knew she was better without him, but it didn’t feel that way. Anna said it wouldn’t, not for a long, long time. But then it would, she said. After a long while, Victoria made the choice to believe her.
Knowing how bad it can feel to hear the wrong thing, and how easy it can be to say the wrong thing, many of us would rather remain silent and walk away from an emotionally difficult situation. Even if we know from experience how comforting it can be to have someone to talk to, when we’re in the position to provide such comfort, that conversation can easily feel too overwhelming to handle. Thankfully, these conversations get much easier with practice, and they can pretty much guarantee us the absolute best way to build deep, trusting, unshakable relationships—the kind most of us can use more of.
MEET OUR SECOND TOUCHSTONE OF SHOWING UP:
LISTENING SPEAKS VOLUMES.
The best way to have a conversation with someone in a difficult time is not in the talking, but in the listening.
AND THANKFULLY, IT’S MUCH EASIER TO LISTEN THAN IT IS TO FIND THAT ELUSIVE “USEFUL” THING TO SAY.
As the mom of a child with cystic fibrosis told us:
“People think that by listening, they aren’t contributing to the conversation. Totally wrong. Listening to me talk about this horrible disease is one of the biggest gifts that I can receive.”
The enormous value of listening is probably not news to most of us, but when the shit hits the fan and your friend is in pain, “How can I make this better?” is a totally natural reaction.
Yet, before diving into rescue mode with advice, alternative ways of looking at things, or asking a lot of clarifying questions—all the things you want to be really cautious about doing—communication experts advise getting to a place of what they call “emotional resonance” (see our discussion of emotional resonance on this page). That means using the act of listening to tune in to how someone is feeling about her situation.
Ask people what matters most about listening and they will inevitably tell you it’s having someone hear your experience without judgment. What’s more, listening actually helps a person better understand their experience in the course of telling it. One man from an Empathy Bootcamp put it this way:
“As the relationship with my wife started to go south, my family and friends listened to me patiently over many years. I had to talk it through several times (ad nauseam) in order to come to the best decision about what to do.”
LEARNING TO SHUT UP
The first thing to get really good at when wanting to listen is also probably the biggest hurdle to listening, which is sitting “dumbly” quiet while someone else talks.
WHILE YOU’RE LISTENING, YOU’RE FOCUSED ENTIRELY ON WHAT THE PERSON IS SAYING, AND YOU’RE NOT SIMULTANEOUSLY THINKING ABOUT HOW YOU’RE GOING TO RESPOND. (YES. THIS IS A CRAZY NOTION FOR MANY OF US.) IN MOST CASES, THIS IS THE BEST KIND OF LISTENING WE CAN DO.
So after your friend shares a piece of bad or scary news, practice waiting three seconds before responding. This sounds like a short amount of time, but in reality, it can feel like an eternity if you’re not used to it. So prepare to exercise restraint, and prepare for uncomfortable silence.
WHEN THE SILENCE OF LISTENING
IS UNCOMFORTABLE,
IT’S NOT BECAUSE
SILENCE IS A PROBLEM.
IT’S BECAUSE YOU AREN’T USED TO IT.
A couple of things may happen: either the silence continues—and you both learn that sitting together in the introspective quiet, feeling how life can be hard, is actually pretty profound and amazing (rather than shallow and awkward)—or your friend may very well fill up the silence by talking even more about what is going on. Either thing encourages authentic communication.
To help you learn to listen better, we’ll first do an inventory of some normal, common go-to responses that many of us lean on.
Next time you are listening to someone—about pretty much anything—take note of how you tend to respond, especially if what’s being shared is a vulnerable topic. And take heart: we all have at least one of the nonlistener tendencies (and we discuss them in greater detail in this chapter and the next). Then, just practice not doing that thing you normally do.
You know what comes next: just stay quiet (for three whole seconds!) and listen.
EMPATHY WORKOUT:
LISTEN TO A FRIEND
Find a friend and practice this skill: Spend two minutes each, sharing a story of something difficult that has happened in your life
. You might want to start by picking something not emotionally charged right now, but something that was a big deal in the past. Here are the rules:
THE LISTENER:
Absolutely no talking of any kind, even if it’s just clarifying questions. You can nod and show in your face that you hear, but remember: bear the awkward silence.
THE TALKER:
Share your story and proceed on with it, even if the silence is a little unnerving.
After each of you has shared your story, consider these questions:
FOR THE TALKER:
•How did it feel to have the “space” to tell your story without interruption?
•Did the listener do something that helped you relax? How about something that made you uncomfortable?
•What is especially powerful about being listened to (especially when it’s not an artificial exercise)?
FOR THE LISTENER:
•Were there times you wanted to jump in and say something while the other person was talking? What did you feel compelled to say? (This is also a really good way to identify your go-to “nonlistening” responses.)
•What was it like to stay silent throughout the story? What concerns about staying quiet did you have?
•What benefit did you get out of listening?
EMPATHY TIP: Don’t worry: if you don’t have an Official Listening Partner to do this exercise with, you still have a lot of opportunities to practice listening. When you actually decide to cultivate a practice of listening, you will find listening opportunities all around you. There might be a work colleague describing her return from maternity leave or a friend who is complaining about a disagreement with his neighbor—either would be a perfect opportunity to practice listening. Even in these seemingly light circumstances, you can ask some variant of “How is that for you?” and stay quiet for three seconds to see what comes up.
TYPES OF LISTENING:
The kind of listening we just described—being quiet and letting the other person talk until they have finished talking—is a lot of what really good listening is about and is called EMPATHIC LISTENING. Research shows that empathic listening is the most valuable kind. It establishes connection and trust and encourages people to really open up. It helps us tune in emotionally to how someone is feeling, and it involves 95 percent silence on our part. We may ask a few prompts that encourage more sharing (which we describe in more detail on this page). It may also include nodding your head when something resonates. Mostly, however, it means encouraging someone to talk, and when she stops, allowing for three whole seconds of silence before you talk. This allows time for anything else she wants to say to come up, which often happens after a brief period of silence. If you jump in too soon, you may prevent her from expressing everything she wants to say.
IN ACTION, THE GOAL OF EMPATHY LISTENING IS TO AFFECT PEOPLE IN THIS WAY:
“In my grief, even good advice couldn’t help. Only listening did. My college roommate had lost her father years before. With her, I never felt pressure to be in a different place. She often said nothing. She just let me be in the sadness—feel it, breathe it. I had to fully let it in to let it go.”
—Dara, who lost her mother
There are two secondary kinds of listening that we may need to engage in when supporting someone:
FACT-FINDING LISTENING: IN FACT-FINDING LISTENING, WE WANT TO REMEMBER WHAT’S BEING SAID BECAUSE THE INFORMATION IS USEFUL.
In a casual situation, a friend may be sharing a recipe, or the name of a really good movie. We listen to remember facts that we’ll need to call on in the future. In the context of hard times, this might mean getting to know the specifics of a situation to help this person later on, whether that’s through relaying information to others, finding them a resource, or just because we plan on being supportive in future conversations and want to get a good handle on the situation.
But, when fact-finding, there should be a lot of room for caution. In Kelsey’s Empathy Bootcamps, when people engage in a listening exercise and are quiet for two whole minutes while someone else shares their story, two things inevitably happen: (1) some people can’t resist asking clarifying questions, and (2) the feedback from the talkers is that this clarifying behavior is annoying.
Of course, we feel well intentioned when asking questions, because we want our response to be grounded in a solid understanding of the situation. But this kind of listening can get in the way of sharing, because: (1) people often are looking to unload more than they are looking for a particular response, (2) fact-finding questions can divert the conversation away from what a person really wants to talk about to what the asking person wants to know, and (3) fact-finding conversations create a detached, clinical portrayal of the problem rather than an emotional one. Getting the facts can be important to your helping in the long term, but you don’t usually need a lot of specific facts to comfort someone. When you do ask clarifying questions or seek information for future reference, be sure you’ve established some kind of trust with empathic listening first.
CRITICAL LISTENING: IN CRITICAL LISTENING, OUR MAIN GOAL IS TO ANALYZE AND EVALUATE WHAT WE HEAR.
Critical listening helps us form an opinion and make a judgment and might even include a healthy amount of debate. It’s something we do a lot of at work, and sometimes at brunch, but it’s only occasionally helpful in the context of someone experiencing a difficult time. Critical listening in this type of scenario might involve the listener describing his own perception of the situation the person is struggling with: “It seems to me like . . .” Or it might involve the listener coming up with some explanation for why something is happening and, overall, provide a perspective that the suffering person may not have.
Use this listening skill with even more restraint than you would fact-finding. People can very easily experience your different perspective on a situation as a negative judgment about the perspective they already hold. That’s a perfectly normal dialogue over bottomless mimosas or in a meeting, but when someone is hurting and is extra sensitive, this kind of perceived judgment can be off-putting and hurtful. Only do this when invited, and even then, use extreme caution.
EMPATHY TIP: If you are a trusted person in someone’s life, you can learn what kind of listening to best use by asking this one question: “Do you want comfort or truth?” If they just want comfort, use your empathic listening skills. If they want truth, help them with some honest evaluating. Be sure to employ some empathic listening first, to tune in to what they are feeling emotionally. That will help bolster feelings of trust when it comes to any evaluative insights you might have to offer.
CONVERSATIONAL OPENERS: WAYS TO EMOTIONALLY CONNECT AND LEARN MORE
Now that you’ve got a grasp of listening, let’s bring in the second, smaller, yet harder part of a conversation: talking. Knowing what to say, and when to say it, starts with these two very simple principles of supportive communication:
1.YOU CAN’T SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
2.YOU’LL NEVER KNOW HOW THEY FEEL.
YOU CAN’T SOLVE THE PROBLEM
(AND YOU DON’T NEED TO)
The kind of mistakes we tend to make while trying to help people can be traced to a lesson we all learned very early in life:
When someone close to us suffers a loss—whether it’s of a person, a former “normal life” of being healthy, married, or employed, or an acknowledgment of what will never come, like a biological baby—often, our first instinct is to help solve the problem. We say things like “Just give it time” or “You’ll have a new _________ (baby, job, partner . . . ) in no time!” or “Have you tried . . . ?”
This approach works very well if someone loses their iPhone. It really doesn’t work if someone suffers a major loss. In many cases, a grieving person will never “go back to normal” because their entire life has changed, and there’s no “normal” to go back to. In these intensely difficult situations, ones that have no solution, many of our default responses to be helpful just aren’t appropriate.
We have all had that sensation of looking at someone sharing a personal difficulty, and in response to our efforts to “fix” the problem with solutions or alternative ways of looking at things, we begin to see their eyes gaze down, and their arms fold across their chest. We see they are shutting down, and we feel tongue-tied, fumbling to say something—anything to make our embarrassment stop! Which often leads to us pontificating even more. In turn, our friend feels like they’ve just had their suffering micromanaged. And as anyone who’s ever been micromanaged knows—it’s really not fun.
YOU’LL NEVER KNOW HOW THEY FEEL.
If you’ve participated in life, you’ve suffered to some degree. Yet, despite our shared experiences, everyone goes through loss differently.
JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE EMPATHIZING WITH SOMEONE
DOESN’T MEAN YOU’LL EVER BE ABLE TO KNOW
EXACTLY HOW THEY FEEL.
“I know how you feel” is a common saying we use to make someone feel better. Unless we’re taught otherwise, it’s one of those default “this is what you’re supposed to say” phrases that we grow up believing is true and useful.
However, the point of empathy is not to mirror the exact experience of someone else. Empathy gives you insight into the experience of true suffering and fear, and an inkling of what that might feel like. But saying “I know how you feel” can sound dismissive of that suffering person’s own, unique experience. Not one experience is like another—an illness immediately following the initial diagnosis is a very different experience from that same illness ten years out.
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