Chapter 13
FROM FINDING right action steps to live our lives forward in the world, we move now to the all-important topic of living forward our relationships with other people.
In relationships we locate ourselves, deepen our experience of what it is to be human, discover our own hearts, find our true center. And—relationships challenge us, pull us off center, muddy the water, bring us down from airy heaven to rugged earth. (I’ve heard marriage defined as a lengthy journey to discover who you really are—while fending off someone only too eager to tell you!) Relationships that are alive and growing are periodically stressed, strained, and ruptured in ways small or large by the emerging, changing needs and behaviors of the different individuals involved.
Real relationships must be built and renewed through repeated cycles of rupture and repair. During rupture we are thrown back on ourselves, compelled to recognize our own neediness and shortcomings. We are faced with the choice of feeling like victims and seeing the other as selfish and hurtful, or recognizing our own needs more clearly and, also, the differing needs of a separate, unique human being. This calls for a kind of bifocal empathy—nearsighted empathy for ourselves and farsighted empathy for others. This double empathy lays the foundation for repair. Actually, reattunement is a better word here than repair. Unlike a car that’s been repaired, the reattuned relationship won’t operate the same as before. Rather, something will have transformed, the human bond grown deeper, stronger, more caring, less self-protective.
Relationship and the Evolving Self
We are each unique. Yet we become our unique selves only in relationship with others. An infant, whose experience of being alive in the world begins with no split between self and other, no “me” and “you” and “it,” has to learn to differentiate itself as a separate individual. At the center of this process is the relationship between the infant and its primary caregiver. By the way Mother attunes to Baby, responding to cries with feeding, to looks with smiles, to distress with hugs, to gestures and sounds with mirroring movements and verbalizations, the young child gradually builds an inner model of itself as a separate individual interacting with others and the world. During the early years of life, children learn both to differentiate themselves—think of the “terrible twos”—and to harmonize or attune their behavior with others’.
This process of differentiation and attunement does not end in childhood. It continues throughout the life span, into old age and even the dying process. It creates a rhythm of rupture and reattunement that is central to our relationships and their change over time. Ruptures are inevitable, but reattunement is a skill that can be cultivated. According to developmental psychologist Daniel Siegel:
When we attune to others we allow our own internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.1
At times of rupture, it is hard to hold self-empathy and other-empathy together. The good news is that cultivating the capacity for self-empathy, as you have been doing in the various exercises up to this point, strengthens your ability to sustain empathy for others. As Martin Luther King, Jr., succinctly put it, “the right kind of self-love and the right kind of love of others are interdependent.” 2
Deep Listening
What distinguishes humans from other life forms is our use of complex symbolic communication in carrying forward the activities that constitute our lives. Although interpersonal attunement originates and is most immediate in direct body-to-body contact—parent with child and, later, lover with lover—verbal exchanges dominate in most of our lives. Accordingly, the central factor in attuning to others is our capacity for listening.
Deep listening means to listen from a deeper place in oneself to a deeper place in others. Centered in our own grounded aware presence, we are able to extend friendly attending to others, catalyzing their ability to find their own felt sense by entering the zone of their experience where confusion, vulnerability, and other feelings usually kept in the shadows can show up. The primary catalyst is not asking questions or giving answers but the palpable quality of our listening. Our simple human presence, offered with no agenda of our own (not even to “help”), provides a safe and empowering space for the other to go deep in themselves and invite fresh knowing to come.
The best way to develop deep listening skills is by simply listening silently while another person shares thoughts and feelings that are meaningful to them. I call this “just listening.” For the next exercise, you’ll need to invite a friend or colleague to join you in a listening partnership—an exchange of turns during which one of you speaks and the other listens in silence. You can explain that you are not seeking any advice or feedback from them, just their friendly presence while you explore a topic and the feelings that it brings for you. During their turn, if your partner is not familiar with Focusing, you can suggest they use the time simply to “think out loud” about a problem or challenge in their life while you listen without commenting. This form of listening partnership is used extensively in the Focusing world, and the guideline is that the two partners agree in advance on how much time they want to spend and then divide it equally between them. Generally the Listener takes responsibility for keeping track of time and gives the Focuser (the speaking partner) a one-minute signal before their time is up.
One important caveat: Until both partners are skilled in deep listening, they should avoid sharing about situations that involve each other. This is to prevent the Listener, who is barred from responding, from becoming triggered by something the Focuser shares that has personal implications for them. Deep listening can become a powerful, transformational sharing between friends, colleagues, and intimate partners, but early on it is best to stick to topics that belong only to the person who is speaking. In the next chapter, we’ll look at a modified version of this exercise that can be used to dialogue about issues of mutual concern.
Sit comfortably close, facing each other so the Listener can take in nonverbal signals like breathing, posture, and body language. Decide who will speak first (the Focuser). Let your partner know that when you are the Listener, you will just listen without responding or asking questions at all, and that they are also welcome to pause and be silent at any point.
Agree that everything shared during the exchange will remain confidential. Confidentiality in this case means that the Listener not only won’t repeat it to a third party, but won’t bring it up with the Focuser afterward. This is important in helping people feel safe sharing about their personal issues. (If they decide to bring their issue up with you later on, then you are free to engage in normal conversation).
Agree on a specific length of time. I suggest starting with five minutes apiece and gradually extending that as you both become more comfortable with the process. It is the Listener’s job to keep time and let the Focuser know when there is one minute remaining in their turn and, if needed, when their time is up.
Take time to come into grounded aware presence together—the more experienced partner can name the three steps of GAP, or you can just agree to start with a minute or so of silence. Then the Listener invites the Focuser to begin. When it is your turn to be Focuser, try keeping your eyes closed or lowered: this disrupts the habitual mode of “I’m telling you something” and encourages a more introspective mood.
After getting the one-minute signal, the Focuser should find a comfortable place to stop for now, understanding there may still be much more to explore in a later turn. The Focuser finishes their turn by thanking the Listener for listening and, when ready, inviting their partner to begin their turn as Focuser while they become the new, silent Listener.
In just listening, you refrain from any verbal response, including asking questions. This may feel unnatural at first, but it is valuable training for two reasons: it allows all your attention to go into empathic listening and, at the same time, alerts you to your own habitual tendencies to respond in certain ways. As you sustain your silence, you can take note of momentary impulses to ask a question, offer advice or comfort, or share something from your own experience. While wanting to help the other person is good in intention, at times we go about it in ways that are not helpful. Our impulses to problem-solve, express sympathy, or share similar experiences often have more to do with relieving uncomfortable feelings in ourselves than addressing the other person’s actual needs. When we can internally acknowledge and allow space for our own emerging feelings without interrupting our partner, we make that same supportive space available for them to stay with their inner process. In a real-life interchange, such strict silence may not feel appropriate, but once you’re comfortable with it, you’ll find many times when such nonverbal, spacious listening is the best response.
Here are the Listener instructions in outline form for easy reference while practicing. The Focuser can refer to the Mindful Focusing Protocol guidelines in Chapter 8.
1. Grounded Aware Presence
center attention at your base, head, and heart (or)
settle your body, drop thinking, bring awareness inside your torso
2. Friendly Attending
listen to your partner but don’t speak
double empathy—open, empathic, nonjudgmental, in touch with your own felt sense as you sense for the inner source from which the other person is speaking
note your own reactions as they arise
clarity / confusion
agreement / disagreement
pleasure / discomfort
wanting to help, solve, or fix
accept your own reactions without self-judgment
return to open, empathic, nonjudgmental listening to your partner
3. Keep time
“one more minute”
“time”
4. Confidentiality