There are many reasons to favor listening over speaking, if our goal is to build or maintain an alliance. We all know this, but it’s hard. This note offers some encouragement.
Before I started working as a psychotherapist, I surveyed my situation, as far as I could make it out. I asked myself, What’s important for a beginner in this field to keep in mind? Then I zoomed in and asked, What are likely to be my specific challenges and growing edges? Having now a little more hard-won kindness toward myself than I did 10 years ago, I’d also ask: What gifts and strengths do I bring, and how can I develop them in my work as a therapist?
Once I had a rough idea of my own answers to these questions, I asked my two supervisors how they’d answer them. (Yes, two. See my Note to Aspiring Therapists.) It will be no surprise that listening was near the top of their lists and mine. My self-reflection at the time was that I was already a pretty good listener, thanks in no small part to being on the faculty at St. John’s College for many years. But in the grad program, and in my own therapy, I was learning that I was a better listener on some frequencies than others. For example, I was less adept at listening (with my eyes and ears) for nonverbal communications.
The case has often been made that no skill matters more to being an effective therapist than listening. Like all common knowledge, it’s too easily taken for granted. Because we think we know what it means to listen, we don’t inquire and therefore don’t get to know all that’s involved.
The first step to being a better listener is of course to shut up! Here’s an invigorating point of view that can help with that: Every time you speak, you increase the chances that the other will feel unheard and unseen by you. Which is not what we want! Feeling unheard often ruptures rapport. If it happens too often in the beginning of a relationship, it inhibits building safety and trust, which in turn diminishes the alliance and the effectiveness of therapy.
Listen, because speaking increases the chance you’ll rupture rapport. This is especially true in the beginning of a relationship, and as beginning clinicians—and the reason is instructive. When we’re quiet, we give the person no positive reason (verbally at least) to doubt that we are paying attention. But when we speak (beyond simply reflecting what we hear), we either confirm for them that we are listening, or cause them to doubt that we are. Even when what we say is accurate, if we interrupt a someone’s train of thought and feeling to say it, we reveal that we’re not fully attuned. They may not even be conscious of our misstep, but the effect is real. (Videotaped sessions in grad school revealed such micro-ruptures in patients’ faces.)
How can we hope to be attuned, if we haven’t listened carefully first, and gotten to know them? For our ability to speak in a way others can hear depends on recognizing where they’re coming from. Until we get to know someone (which takes time), or become more skillful as therapists (which also takes time), all we have to guide us are our hunches and projections, conscious and unconscious; and our motivations—like wanting to seem useful or supportive or knowledgeable or smart. All of these motives are common when we’re beginners or feeling insecure. None of them are good reasons to be talking.
Because it can seem we’re not doing much when we’re quiet, it can be hard to believe how supported most people feel when we’re “just” listening. In therapeutic contexts it’s often the most helpful generous thing we can do.
One of my supervisors in grad school taught us interns the acronym WAIT, for Why Am I Talking? It’s instructive to prompt myself with this question when I find myself talking during sessions. More often than I care to admit, I’m talking more for my sake than for the patient’s. It’s small consolation to think I’m hardly alone in this.
<3