TRANSCRIPT
Recently, somebody left a comment on one of my videos saying, “Daniel, could you please make a video on how to be a good listener?” So I thought, I’m gonna give it a try. I don’t think it’s gonna take that long because to me, I think it’s a pretty simple answer. Simple theoretically, difficult to actually play out in practice, difficult to manifest.
So I’m gonna speak using a case study of someone I know pretty darn well: myself. I’m someone who once upon a time was not a very good listener, and I’m not always the best listener, but I’ve become a profoundly better listener. Sometimes I would say I’m an excellent listener. I did the job of being a therapist, the primary skill being to sit and listen to people, and I did it for 10 years—something like 15,000 therapy sessions where most of the time I just sat and listened to somebody talk.
So how do you become a good listener? Or if you’re not a good listener, how do you become a better listener? The answer for me, the simplest answer theoretically speaking, is for me I had to learn how to listen to myself. I had to learn how to listen to the inner voice inside of me. I had to learn to listen to my feelings. I had to learn to listen to my thoughts, and that for me was something that was a lot easier said than done.
The reason was that as a child, so much of me wasn’t listened to. My feelings, my thoughts, my preferences, my needs were not heard primarily by my parents. They did hear some parts of me; they didn’t listen to some parts of me. Other adults in my life did listen to some parts of me, but so much of me was pushed away. The main reason being that so many different sides of myself threatened my parents. My parents were both hurt, traumatized people. They were wounded people who weren’t listening to themselves. They’d been down in their childhoods; their parents had been shut down in their own childhoods. It went all the way back.
I’ve done a lot of family research, spent a lot of time with my parents listening to them as an adult, trying to figure out where did they come from? Why were they this way? I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. Two of my grandparents I got to know very, very well and got to hear a lot about their life histories, their childhood histories, why they were bad parents. With my parents, the other side I didn’t get to know if while they died when I was younger and they lived far away. But even then, I heard a lot about their childhoods—childhoods of deprivation, neglect, nobody listening to them. So this got passed down the line.
So what I learned in my childhood is—and I learned this painfully, traumatically, subliminally, emotionally intensely—was that so many of the things about who I am, things that really make up the truth of me, of my character, of my life, of my body, of my feelings, of my thoughts, of my creativity, of my soul are not acceptable. So don’t talk about them, don’t share them, push them away. And the best thing that I could do to survive in my childhood—and this extended to surviving in my school environment—this went on year after year after year, not just with teachers but with fellow classmates—is don’t do anything, don’t feel anything, don’t think anything that is unacceptable to the norm.
And the norm, the norm being all these people who in various ways had huge amounts of power over me, the norm was very, very screwed up. The norm was disassociated from itself, wasn’t listening to itself, and by extension, wasn’t listening to me. It was dangerous for me to listen to myself. It was dangerous for me to have my feelings, my private feelings that went against all that I hated that I saw around me—all that made me furious, all that made me sad, all that made me feel depressed—all these things that made me hate myself.
So one easy way to help me love myself more was to just bury the sides of myself that the world and my parents and other power figures in my life found unacceptable. I learned not to listen to myself, and by extension, because of that, I also didn’t listen to other people who were sharing anything that reflected the things that I was denying about myself. So anything that other people shared that kicked up or reflected the things that I was disassociating from, the things that I actually hated or was terrified of within myself, I ignored them. I pushed them away, and when they started talking about it, I either shut down and stopped listening or unconsciously did what everyone else in my life did: try to find ways to shut other people down.
And one easy way to shut other people down is just not to listen to them. The silent treatment—it’s a horrible way to treat other people, but it really works, actually. There’s no way to make someone shut down better than just to totally discount their existence. That’s what happened to me. My mother talked about it. She said it was the worst punishment she experienced in her childhood. Her father, especially her mother too, I think they would actually practice the silent treatment, meaning when she did things they didn’t like, they would just be silent with her, just completely ignore her, look through her like she didn’t exist.
And I read about that in a whole series of books that I loved, The Great Brain. I don’t know if you’ve read The Great Brain series about a Catholic family growing up in Mormon Utah, I believe, in the late 1800s. Well, that was the McKidd who would share about it. The worst thing his father and mother would do to him when he did bad things—it was worse than being beaten—was practice the silent treatment on him, not listen to him, discount actually his existence.
So for me, the way that I’ve gotten better progressively at listening to people is to listen to myself. And how do I listen to myself? Because it’s easy again to say it; it’s a lot harder to do it. The way that I’ve learned to listen to myself, first of all, is to get away from the people who aren’t listening to me. Break the power structures, not be in positions of less power if I can help it in some way, but with people who don’t listen to me, who don’t want to accept or acknowledge anything about me that they don’t like.
So for me, breaking away from my family, breaking away from my parents was a huge step—painful, horrible. Who wants to break away from their parents? Parents are in some ways the people when we’re little who love us the most in our lives. But my parents, like many parents that I see again and again, they loved me the most, and they also tried to kill off parts of me that were healthy that they couldn’t accept.
So for me to reclaim a full, broad part of myself, my full character, the full range of my feelings, I had to get away from people who could only accept parts of me. Not something that I ever wanted to do, nothing that I ever imagined that I would do when I was a child. I never even conceived of this really as a child because for a child to break away from their parents, to break away from people you’re really dependent on, is to die. You die, you emotionally die, maybe physiologically die. Out in the world, animals can’t break away when they’re too young; people can’t do it either.
But for me, as I grew into my adulthood progressively, I broke away more and more. And the more I got away from my family of origin, from other people who were really toxic to me, the more I found I could listen to myself. And the more I broke away, the more my other sides that had been clamoring to come out for years, for decades, they did come out. They came out spontaneously, and I listened to them. I wrote down all sorts of stuff. I developed a relationship with myself—very painful, huge, huge, huge amounts of grieving in this process, grieving what I’d lost, all that pushing away, all those years that I didn’t really have whole parts of myself. But I listened to myself more. I channeled it into journaling. I listened to my dreams. I would write down my…
Dreams. I gravitated toward people who listened to me, who honored me better. Because the more that others listened to me, the more it helped me listen to myself. I wished I could have gotten more help from therapists. I didn’t. I found therapists again and again who actually were kind of like my family and didn’t like whole parts of me. But like my family, they never came out and admitted it. So it became often a rather manipulative relationship with them that I really didn’t like. And on top of it, I’m paying the money. No thanks.
But I did find people in my life who could listen to me, who modeled respect for me. But primarily, I had to be the adult in my life. When I became an adult, I had to become the parent for myself in my own life. I was the wounded inner child, but I was also a parent figure. My parents could no longer do it for me. I had to learn how to do it for myself.
So what I learned in my relationship with myself was modeling how to listen to someone who’s in pain, how to listen to someone who has feelings and thoughts that may be really contrary to what’s considered acceptable in our very screwed-up society, and our screwed-up families, in our screwed-up world. And in a way, you could say I fostered my own rebellion. And I guess I really did, but I fostered my rebellion against real unhealthiness.
And what happened is I became much more integrated. And this process is still going on. I still have to listen to myself. It’s still hard to live in our screwed-up world, and I still have remnants of trauma from childhood, early childhood especially. So I still have to do a lot of careful listening to myself.
But through this process, now a decades-long process of listening to myself, hearing who I really am, a muscle has developed—the muscle of really listening. And listening on lots of levels. Listening to explicitly what I’m saying, listening to the feelings that are below that, listening to my body language, watching myself. These are all parts of becoming a better listener.
And what I found again and again is the better I have become at listening to myself, listening to dissociated parts, listening to subtle quiet voices that are below the surface, listening to the hidden messages, the metaphorical messages even that I send to myself in my dreams, the more that I’ve done this, the more that it really does—and it has transferred to my relationships with others, whatever types of relationships those are. I really have become a better listener. And that’s the clue. That’s the answer. It’s the only thing that I know.
Also, what I have seen is there are therapy schools, there are different programs that try to teach people, no, I don’t know, I don’t know, different techniques for how to become a better listener. Don’t judge, always give positive feedback, listen and take it in. And that’s all good and well, but to me, those are surface techniques. Because you can do all the surface techniques to do the right thing, to listen to someone else, but if they are sharing something that actually is really healthier than you are, if someone is sharing something, for me to—I can only imagine it’s logically true—if someone is sharing something that actually is healthier than where I am in my healing process, and it actually threatens my split-off dissociated sides, I probably will turn off. I won’t listen to them as well as I otherwise could.
And you know what? When I say I still not always the best listener, sometimes I’m really tired, sometimes I’m very withdrawn, sometimes I’m in a mood that has certain pain, emotional pain. Sometimes I’m in a self-hating place, and other people can reflect that, and I just can’t hear it right now. That’s part of when I was a therapist. I like to work in the mornings. I didn’t want to work late at night. My brain, it was fizzing out. I couldn’t listen as well. It’s like I had to go back inside. I had to recharge my battery of listening to myself.
So basically for me, even in the short term, now the best way I listen to others is if I get centered. I’m listening to myself. I’m within. I’m connected. I was going to say the truth within me, but what I should really say to be more accurate is connected to more of the truth within me. And that’s really the battery. That’s the energy for me. That’s my engine that allows me to hear it in other people.
And I’ve seen this with others too. I’ve seen people become better listeners. So when I share myself as the case study, my experience from being a therapist and from being a person just out in the world is that my experience does count toward other people’s experience. I think it is actually universal. And I can think the most easy place I saw it is as a therapist when I really watched people’s process, their healing process, in a very detailed way. When I saw people be heard, you could say by me in the therapy process, but primarily when they learned how to hear themselves, how to grieve, how to love themselves again, how to listen to those dissociated self-hating parts of themselves, and they started accepting it, and they could hear it and not just push it away, they became better listeners for other people in their lives.
And this isn’t just what they told me, because often their partners would tell me, “Oh my god, I love it that my boyfriend, my girlfriend, my husband, my wife, whoever it is goes to therapy because he or she is now a better listener.” And I thought, “Yeah, that’s exactly what’s happened to me too.”
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