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Part Two: About listening. Ferdinand van der Veen, Some thoughts about what listening is. Listening is a way to help another person
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Part Two: About listening
Ferdinand van der Veen, Some thoughts about what listening is
Listening is something people do together. It is a way of being in touch with another person and helping a person get in touch with her or himself. It is a way to be in good communication, so it is valuable when there are conflicts or differences of opinion. It is mutual - the listener can become the one listened to and vice versa, so each person can both hear and be heard.
There are many ways in which listening is important. These are the ones that stand out for me.
Listening is a way to help another person
Being listened to can help in several ways: when you are listened to your feelings and thoughts become important because here is someone who is giving their full attention and interest to what you are saying about yourself. Listening can also lead to feeling cared about, in the very concrete sense that someone wants to understand right now what your thoughts and feelings actually are. Also, listening leads to more self-knowledge, to our understanding of what is going on in ourselves and being able to go from being confused to making sense out of our experience. In each of these ways listening can be helpful.
Listening is a way of knowing another
Listening is putting your attention with the other person; not attention that is used to control or judge, but attention that is used to get to know about the other. The listener puts her own ego aside, so the talker does not have to deal with the listener's ego. Then the talker is more free to express what is really going on inside himself, which the listener can then understand. Often the listener experiences this knowledge as new and special and valuable. Now she knows something about what is real for the other that she did not know before and would have had no way of knowing without listening. Even if only a small thing is talked about it still overcomes the barrier of strangeness and lack of contact that comes up so quickly between ourselves and others. The humanness of the listener is affirmed by being in touch with what is presently real in another and by the others’ willingness to share. She now feels her own personhood and her own potential for self-awareness. It takes one to know one, so to speak.
A form of political liberation
Listening is also a form of political liberation. It is liberating because it enables people to get in touch with their own reality, not reality as prescribed by society (peers, government, teachers, parents). It reaffirms each person's capacity to know his own experience and to make sense out of it himself. This means that there is not a certain group of experts in the society, such as a special university " priesthood, " that determines for everybody else what is so and what is not. It also means that certain credentials, such as a Ph. D. or M. D., are not a prerequisite for making intelligent and valid interpretations of reality. The power to define what is real is far-reaching. As long as an individual believes that he has to depend on the opinions of others to know reality he is not free to act on the basis of his own experience. This lies at the base of oppression. Liberation is the possibility to act on the basis of our own experience.
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This ability depends on the realization that we are each able to create valid meaning out of our own experience (cf. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, and Rogers on organismic valuing). We are then able to trust our own ability to make intelligent decisions regarding ourselves, decisions that are based on what is true for us, independently of what others might say or think. Society teaches that we are dependent for knowledge on others (cf. Paulo Friere, The Pedagogy of Oppression). This prevents independent action in our own self-interest, since that self-interest will often be in conflict with prevailing societal views. If we are taught that we cannot know what is real for ourselves we are helpless to take individual or collective action.
When being listened to the person realizes that she can know for herself what her experience means, in its full, immediate, concrete reality. This meaning may diverge sharply, even in its conception, from what parents, schools, and the media usually say. The institutions of our society do not have ways to affirm the truth of an individual’s experience. Yet in the listening process we have an unmistakable experience of knowing for ourselves what is valid and what is not.
Being listened to is a way of knowing
Thus, the person being listened to finds that she has a way of arriving at knowledge in herself. It is not " scientific" knowledge, abstract and provable, but a personal knowledge (cf. Polanyi on intuitive knowing) about what is true for oneself. Through listening one can tap into a source of truth. This can range from knowledge about more usual kinds of things, such as why am l upset or happy, or what do I feel and want, or what does it feel like to be sitting here writing this, or what do I think of an organization or a meeting, to more exceptional things such as the meaning of someone's death, an outlook on life, or a personal experience of God.
When we are listened to well we often have the experience of " Yes, that's exactly the way I feel. " This affirms our own capacity to judge what is valid or true for ourselves. We know when someone is saying it exactly the way we mean it, just as we know when it isn't being said just exactly right. Our intelligence is remarkable in its sensitive ability to determine very precisely if someone correctly understands what we mean.
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