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Second session. Group process
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Second session
By the end of the first session, most people have an idea of what listening is, and have begun to run into what gets in the way of listening, the ways people get tangled up inside when they try to tell another person what they understand.
People have also begun to see where their troubles are in going into themselves (focusing). A group structure which helps deal with these problems is also the " round robin" (used in the first session) only with smaller numbers of people. To do this, we divide into sub-groups. It is best to have two leaders so that there can be three or four learners per subgroup. Time can be roughly divided so that each pair listens/talks for 10 minutes and then each member gets listened to about how it was for them for 10 minutes. Usually there is time for the leader to make teaching inputs relevant to the experiences that come up. The leader should follow the format set forth in the first session in all other respects.
Group process
There is a strong pull in a small group like this to " become a group"; to start dealing with feelings people have about each other and about the group. A balance must be worked out between dealing with these issues and sticking to the learning task. As a leader, you can listen to group or interactional issues to the satisfaction of those raising them, but also make clear your own needs to stick to the structure as closely as possible for learning purposes. It helps to say that the issues people are raising are important, but should be dealt with in another context, since if the group processed them just then it would prevent learning listening. Another thing you can do is put the issues into the learning structure by asking the person who raises them to use that as what he/she gets listened to about. (This is, incidentally, a good training thing because the listener is often having similar or different feelings about this same group and the interaction ends up being an excellent example of how hard it can be to listen to someone who is having different or similar feelings about the same things as yourself. )
Some of this may need to take place at another meeting, or after the learning session.
Likes, dislikes, impressions, ideas about other people often come up in this session. These can also be important material for listening practice. Participants are often surprised about how many of their feelings about the other person disappear, make sense, or turn out to be wrong when they have learned to hear the other person out. You can say that later sessions will teach them additional ways to use their thoughts and feelings about the other person (see section in this book concerning relationships and interactions). At this early stage, interactional issues should be mainly dealt with as they come up in the context of trouble with listening or focusing. As a leader, your job is to hear out the person with the issue, then turn to his/her partner for reactions, and so forth back and forth until both parties seem satisfied. If the two are already good at listening, get them to listen to each other about the issue, and break in only when a listening response is not being given in order for you to give one or to ask the listener to give one.
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There is an important and difficult interactional problem here. When one person is being some way that another person can't stand there is a tendency to tell that person how awful they are, how they are hurting you, what they are doing to you. It is important in this kind of interaction to separate several things:
1. What the other person doing to you. This is best done by being as specific and descriptive as possible, describing the person's behavior as accurately as possible as you experience it. It may take some time, and some being listened to, to get to this, since it is often hard to do when you are first just feeling rejected or irritated or feeling like blowing up at the person.
2. What you infer about what they are experiencing when they do this. They may or may not be feeling the way you infer them to be. This must be checked out.
3. How do you feel about what they are doing. It is important to discover how you got " hooked" by this particular quality of this particular person. For example, it involves going past the first spontaneous reaction of " You're hurting me, " to " I feel hurt when you say that, " to " I get scared and vulnerable inside when I'm wanting people to like me and when you do that I'm not so sure anymore whether I can trust anyone. " This “owning" process may take several steps (Rosenberg, 1976). It may be hard to get to your feeling right away. It’s also important to know that just saying " I feel hurt by you" instead of " You're hurting me" is not yet owning - what needs to be gone into is more about you, just how you are affected, what it is about you that makes it possible for the other person to affect you that way.
When you have finished helping one person explore this, you can go on to help the other person or persons in the interaction through the same kind of process. Keep in mind that your goal is always to clarify each person's own unique experience, and not to judge or evaluate it. If you find yourself judging, forming opinions, or taking sides, then have someone (your co-leader, preferably) listen to you until you discover what is " getting" you.
At the end of the sub-groups, the whole group can reconvene to talk about the session, what they learned, raising questions, etc. The plan for the next session and its rationale can be introduced here.
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