One of the most common presentations to my practice is couples wanting to communicate better. We often think of communication as talking, we rarely think of the skill of listening and more importantly listening to understand rather than listening to respond.

I don’t believe our culture has taught us this skill. We listen to agree or disagree, we listen until something gets spoken that we get emotionally charged about, we listen as we formulate our response. All of which takes us away from truely listening with curiosity or with generosity to really understand where or how the other sees things or feels. This is what gets on the way of people feeling seen and leads to a sense that ‘my feelings don’t really matter’. 

Learning to listen and learning to listen well so that the other feels heard and understood is a skill set that most of us could learn to do better. Especially in conflict where we get so hung up on the other hearing and ultimately agreeing with our view, that neither of us are are actually invested in hearing and listening to understand the other. And so things escalate, voices get louder, our walls of defence get thicker until eventually we walk away to lick our wounds with no resolve found.

When we can get off the wheel of resolve looking like I won/ am right…and move to a place of leaning in with curiosity. Putting our ego defences aside. Quieten our amygdala fight/flight response. We are in a much better space for actual resolve which comes through understanding. That while we might see that while we might not see things the same way, we can get to a place of seeing, hearing and understanding the other. To do this I instruct my clients on how to actively listen, a skill set that gets practiced outside of conflict so that we can draw on it around topics which hold more charge.