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Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, Further steps toward better listening and focusing: centering and checking
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You want to respond to the " center" of what the person is saying or struggling with. To do that, you must first of all be exact. Even though you will use your own words, don't change anything about what the person is saying. Sometimes you need to use that person's own words because any other words won't get it exactly.
Secondly, you can sum up a lot of what the person said with a few words, and you can use most of your words to get at the center of it. For instance, the person may have told you a story. What is its point? (" So, it's unfair that they do that to you, when you didn't do anything like that when they were down. " Here you are calling most of the story " they do that to you. " You're using your words to get the point of the story. )
Thirdly, you want to keep having a sense of the person as struggling with something, working on something, wanting something to be different, wanting to get to the bottom of something or understand it, wanting to be better or freer - listen for what the person is really struggling with. You shouldn't make up your mind what others are or should struggle with, they will tell you that. You need only have a sense that they are struggling with or from or toward something - that will help you hear the point of what's being said.
Another way to say this: what is the person doing, or trying to do, in saying this? In the above example, the person's story showed that what happened was unfair.
Take this next example, which doesn't go quite right:
" I have this suicidal friend and I'm all uptight, like there must be one more thing I could do, and what if I don't find it, and like I have to be perfect. "
There must be one more thing to do, and you're trying to find that one more thing.
" Yes, and like I have to be perfect and if I don't find it, God, like it's my responsibility to find it, and it's so heavy. "
You have to find it.
" And lately I've been feeling, well, gee, she ought to do some of the work, she's laying it all on me. ”
You feel there is something she should do.
" She ought to take some of the responsibility, instead of it's all being on me. "
She ought to do more, she ought to try to do some of it.
“Yes. ”
Here the speaker isn't discriminating, and isn't being helped to discriminate into her thing. That the listener does not take up the speaker's struggle, her desire to free herself from a weight she feels, isn't quite right from the first sentence on. The listener instead picks up on the one more " thing" to do (which was only an example of the feeling of responsibility - the point was not one specific thing more to do), and later the listener picks up on what the person not present should do (" She should …”), each time not taking up the speaker's attempt to question and get under the weight she is carrying, and feels she shouldn't have to carry.
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The " Yes, " at the end is a kind of stopped feeling. Either the speaker must find another way to get at it, since this way didn't make it, or give up on it. (Note, earlier, our section on how you can tell when listening is working. )
A good response anywhere along the line would have been something like: " It doesn't seem right for all that weight to be on you, " or " The responsibility is heavy, and all of it seems to be on you. "
Fourthly, you want to respond to this person's feelings, the one who is talking to you, not to the other people (who aren't here), or to the events. Of course, your person's feelings are about, with, or in, the events, so you want to respond to the person+events, or the person-in-the-events, but not just to the events, or just the other people.
The last example also shows this. The listener should not respond to what some third person not here now should do, but rather to this person's feeling about that. (" You feel it shouldn't be all on you, " rather than " You feel she ought to… ” )
There are times, however, when it might fit best for you to say the external details (as when the situation is very complicated, and the person can't be sure you got them right).
There are times when you won't know what's being struggled for. And there will be times when you will have to talk about the details of what the other person said and did, to get that much of it straight. Then, after that, say or ask about the person's own feeling about that.
We need a more general understanding of centering, because the above rules don't always hold.
Centering, in general, is to get that crux (which, if heard, will let the person feel heard, let him feel that " this" has been finished getting said, and so, there is an easing and a freedom to let the next thing come). So, we must talk about what it feels like to " feel heard. " Let's turn it around and take a situation where you are talking.
Suppose you say something, and the listener says it back exactly. Do you always fee l heard? What if they say it back very fast, as if it were pretty much nothing, and yet it's important to you? Then you don’t feel heard, really, even though the words were heard. Or, another example, what if the other person looks very puzzled, and very slowly says each word you said back to you? That's like the listener is asking you what you meant. (" I don't know why I'm here. " " You don't know why you're here? " ) So, we see that you don't always feel heard, even if the what-you-said is said back. You also need the person's tone of voice to be one that shows that some of your point is getting across, not only the words. And you also need to see and feel that the listener gets it, doesn't just remember your words. But you also need something else:
To feel heard you have to feel. You have to let yourself feel whether what the listener say is really what you were trying to say. Where do you go, to feel if what the listener says is, in fact, what you're feeling? You have to go to you, inside you. You have to sense your thing, whatever you were trying to get across, and then hear the listener's words and see if that's right.
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This is called " checking. " Usually you don't have to make a separate move, to check something that's said to you. Usually you will feel it anyway, how it's right or wrong with what you feel. But there are many times when checking is a separate move, a special separate effort.
For instance, if what you are saying, and what the listener is trying to get, isn't all that clear to you, then you have to feel into it each time you are going to say something, and you have to feel into it again each time the listener responds.
“I have this funny feeling that something isn't right about how they are doing it, and I'm scared to be part of it. I think they might be going to hurt people and it scares me. ”
You're scared they'll hurt people, and you don't want to be doing that with them.
" Uh… (gets back into the feeling) … it's sort of confused, I can't put my finger exactly on what's wrong, it's like something isn't right about it, or about my being in it with them. "
You have this feeling there that something isn't right, but you don't yet have it clear what that is.
" Yeah… it's by being in that, being part of it, being responsible for it. It'll be my fault. "
Here you can see that, as the listener responded the person then again felt into his feel of what’s wrong, in order to sense it again and see if it really is as the listener said, or how it really is. He found that it didn't feel exactly like the listener said. (It was not clear how it was, but clear that how the listener said it wasn't it. ) There was nothing wrong with the listener's response, it was a good response and got the person to go further into his feeling. His second response again was just right, and turned out to be centered.
It might be that the statement 1 check is my own statement. I could say something that I think is right, and then check it by letting myself down into what I feel to see if that's how it is, or some other way.
For instance, suppose I say, “I’ve worked a long time now, I bet I'm tired. " I could then very likely feel how my body feels, to check again here if I am tired. The same is true for more personal " feelings. " I might say, “I feel something is wrong, I think what's happening isn't what I wanted. " After I check into what I really directly feel, what I've got there, I might say, " No, that isn't it, I like what's happening, but I'm scared we won't get time to finish it. " (Or, whatever I happened to find I feel. ) I might also, as the talker in the last example, say, " No, that isn't it, but I don’t yet know what it is, it feels like something is wrong but I don't know what. ”
What is important is that by checking a person stays in touch with a directly felt sense of something. Often it isn't clear what it is, but the person can feel it very clearly - only he can't think about it clearly yet, he doesn't know what that is, but he feels that, right there.
Or, it may be quite clear what it is. Even so, she feels it directly; it's not words, even if she can make clear words about it.
To check a listener's statement, the person has to turn to the feel of what he is saying. It may not be a very sharply distinct feeling, it might be vague, too. It might not be a specific feeling of something wrong, that you can sense very directly. It might be a vague fog. Even so, that's what's there.
For example, the woman talking about her suicidal friend felt a weight or responsibility and felt a sense of rebellion against it, a sense that it wasn't right for that weight to be there, but also a not knowing how to get it off her.
So, you can think of " centering" as trying to get exactly the feeling or " felt thing, " which the person is saying, so that, when he " checks" what you say, he will find that what you said was exactly it, exactly what he has there.
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Don't expect to be able to give a centered response every time. Just know the difference between the several tries, and the time you get it just right and the person checks it and feels freed to go on. (In the last example, had the listener not been willing, the second time, to take the " something" exactly in so far as the talker felt it, and no further, there could have been five or six exchanges in which, if the listener was guessing each time, the talker would say, " Uh … no…" etc.
The most important thing about a response is whether it lets the person go back into his feeling, to check it, and possibly to go further into it. But, now, what do you do if the person you're listening to doesn't know about checking, and doesn't do it? Then, in a way, none of your responses are any good!
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