Being Heard and Being Attentive

The Power of Compassionate Listening

In my role at a crisis hotline, I listened to a teenager tell her story of trauma and wanting to end her life, and when the brittle defenses in her psyche gave way to a flow of crying, I cried along with her. Because I’d been trained in answering calls, I knew not to contradict her experience or feelings with advice but instead to “listen with” as an equal and true (temporary) friend. The experience on her side—as with hundreds of others—was to feel heard, often for the first time at that deep level, and to reconnect with her own power to make choices. The experience on my side was feeling the honor of being trusted and the grounding of a connection that was all in earnest with no fluff, pleasantry, or deceit. Each call like this revived my capacity for compassion, which had withered in my overly competitive, flat world.

In another experience, a Quaker friend was sounding antagonistic, and others were arguing against them while they were frustrated to find words. In Friends meetings, someone can be repetitive, chronically off-topic, or crude, and the meeting often tries to be patient, hoping the person will eventually stop speaking. In this instance, I remember receiving an unexpected insight that illuminated an otherwise painful process. Suddenly I felt that what the antagonistic Friend was saying was not a point to be argued but a calling that needed to come out: something that was inarguably true for this person and not phrased to make others comfortable. As someone who is occasionally chosen to hear others’ voices when they are being shushed, I’ve come to understand that a called person may need a listener to form a “system of two” in order for the calling to be expressed.

I see listening for the Spirit or inner voice as similar to listening to a person in crisis. And I believe we can encounter Spirit whenever we listen long enough to anyone or anything with full attention.

In a crisis, listening works wonders, and many of our callers at the hotline say our listening works better than professional therapy. It seems to work best when we are “listening with,” and not just listening for diagnostic red flags that we then use to construct advice to give when they’ve finished talking. Being “with” a caller means respecting the person’s full autonomy to leave the call; to choose what we, ourselves, would not; or even to take their life. It can mean just affirming with the words “yeah, that must feel terrible,” instead of coming up with a brilliant solution. People feel heard when the listener is empathetic without subtly trying to steer them. Since feeling heard is perhaps the greatest need in a crisis, listening meets that need and helps someone stabilize their own situation. Feeling heard can also bring clarity and order, which allows someone to identify the change they need to make.

In Quaker terms, the power of listening can be understood as the power of eldering to clarify a calling. Occasionally in meeting for worship, a deeply felt calling can come out as powerful and dense speech, which others immediately recognize as called. It can also come out, however, with tentative and confusing words, and others may dismiss it. When someone speaks about a belief with conviction, most often the person speaks twice: at the beginning, when they first discover the belief, and at the end, when they are resisting letting it go. At the beginning, words are often hard to find, and the person must try different ways to make it conscious and communicable. Something that arises as a movement of energy may defy words to describe it. The way that being truly heard can loosen the knot of a psychological crisis is also helpful in advancing someone’s spiritual calling to action. Perhaps there is no clear distinction between what is psychology and what is Spirit: both are about unblocking movement.

To understand how trauma can lead people to contemplate suicide is that trauma (which is unresolved by definition) accumulates into a daunting wall that we dare not approach. By standing still, we do not move, and not moving is the worst, inescapable pain; death seems to be a preferable alternative. We need to be dynamic and to suffer in our psyche and spirit to be alive; there is no arriving at perfection or any fully resolved state. The kind of movement that can happen when we are heard at the point of deepest despair can feel like a door opening, like the movement of the Spirit that Quakers talk about.

A current trend in psychology is to promote stability through techniques that de-escalate panic—staying in the present moment—over techniques that delve into past trauma. This has always felt inadequate to me for a couple of reasons. One is that when people call a crisis line, their coping techniques often have stopped working, and the only thing left is to examine the hardest thing to face (whatever that is for that person). The other reason is that it’s a mistaken philosophy that everyone should be pleasant, undifferentiated, and have no strong feelings, ever. That is saying we should avoid feeling suffering and movement, but this lack of feeling separates us from our spirits.

Being autistic, I never got much out of typical social life, which can feel unreal or prescriptive. Conversations in a time of great need, though, feel real and nourishing, as do messages from worship (the social hour after meeting, not so much). What I long for in meetings is being on both sides of that “system of two”: being heard and being attentive.

Once in a meeting, another woman with a disability similar to mine said she did not feel let in: just allowed to be on the periphery, as a token. Her words unlocked something for me: a vision of listening and eldering relationships as the central foundation for the corporate body. We need to let go of guarding a pleasant demeanor and the illusion of agreeing on everything. (Vehement agreement can be a sign of an ideological purity, like a creed, rather than inner authenticity.) A person’s truth is likely to sound distinct rather than mirroring others’ opinions. We may be less fearful of exposing uncomfortable truths when we are in a system of two with one other person, as I felt with this woman in worship even though we did not know each other well.

A meeting’s attempt to make sure everyone has a voice can be an elusive project, as those of us who are not sure we deserve a voice may not push ourselves to be heard. Eldering is sometimes narrowly (mis)understood as limiting or controlling, but it is more about a listening relationship that activates a called person’s power to put their calling into words and to follow it faithfully.