Revealing Basic Needs
In Conscious Communication, the skill of Supportive Listening is designed to interrupt the habit of trying to resolve a problem by evaluating one side as right and the other as wrong. This tool is a simple formula for responding to a person with an emotional charge by focusing first on the raw emotion, with no story attached.
You simply name an emotion, usually one word, that may express the basic feeling that person is expressing. (sad, angry, hurt, frustrated, upset, confused, etc.) This often is expressed in a phrase such as: “It sounds like you feel hurt?” Notice that this is merely a suggestion or question to prompt the person to focus on their immediate feeling. You don't have to get it right. The point is for them to be able to feel and express their emotional charge, so that it can begin to dissipate.
The key to this step is empathy. Instead of approaching their problem from your head, this formula prompts you to access your heart and imagine the other person's emotion as if it were your own. Then when you use this phrase, the tone is one of caring and compassion. You know what it is like to be scared, angry, or frustrated, and you can empathize with their emotional state, regardless of what event triggered it.
The next step is to name the simple event that triggered the emotion, without any dramatic interpretation. You can do this better than they can at this moment because the event did not happen to you, or did not have the same impact on you. When you describe the trigger event in neutral terms, without placing blame or judgment on anyone or anything, it neutralizes the story and enables the person with the emotional charge to let go of the meaning they put on the event.
The third phrase in the Supportive Listening formula is naming the impact the event has on the person with the charge. This begins the process of linking the emotion with a need, and prompts the person with the problem to begin working it out. You only use information the other person has already offered and do not add your own analysis.
In this process you are simply reflecting back what they said to you, re-framed in these three phrases which usually begin with:
“So you feel ... (raw emotion), when...(basic facts), because you...(impact on them).
The intention of this kind of response is to encourage them by validating their experience without feeding into the story of them being a victim. You are only offering them empathy and understanding in this stage, which is what they need so they don't feel alone in facing their difficult situation.
How to Use Tools, Instead of Rules
Using this skill of Supportive Listening takes practice for many of us because our focus has been to try to take away the other person's pain. Our intentions are good, however, we don't realize that by merely taking away the pain we were interrupting a deeper healing process which the other person needs to go through in order to be healed and whole.
I have outlined the main skill here, and there is more to it that you can read about in Conscious Communication. After you have expressed empathy and validated the other person's emotions, the charge they are carrying usually begins to fade, because someone else understands their problem and they don't feel so alone. At this point the person with the difficult situation can begin to think more clearly about how to help themselves meet their needs. And you can help them in this process if you want by using the next set of skills described in the book as Open Problem Solving Questions.
At this point you may have some resistance to using a formula like Supportive Listening because it feels too mechanical or scripted. My experience is that if we don't have a clear way to interrupt our habit of feeding the drama or being the hero, we default to these automatic responses which feel natural and spontaneous but are really programmed, predictable patterns. And, as I explained above, these default responses don't really help the other person to heal.
Keep in mind here that I am offering tools, not rules. The skills of Conscious Communication are only intended to interrupt your programmed responses so you can be aware of them and notice their effect. These are prompts that use specific phrases only to redirect your attention away from the conclusions about the experience, and toward the immediate experience itself. Without making this shift, we remain caught in the dramatic and habitual interpretation of our situation, with no way out.
When someone expresses their problem in terms of a victim and a villain they are confining themselves to a prescribed story that locks them into an impossible situation. The only way out is to get the other person (villain) to change, and this is usually doesn't work. The more forcefully we try to get someone to change, the more they resist, and we often destroy any sense of connection between us in this kind of power struggle.
A tool enables us to do things we cannot do as easily without it, like a shovel for digging dirt, or a bicycle for transportation. Most tools require training and practice in order to use them effectively, and during that process the focus is necessarily on the tool and the method of employing it. However, the tool does not dictate the work, and while we may have to narrow our focus to learn how to use a tool, once we get it, our focus can expand and we can be more creative than before.
Conscious Communication skills enable us to interrupt the repeating patterns of being a victim or a hero, and focus instead on raw emotions and basic needs so we can move ahead in life and are not limited by old hidden wounds. In this way the discipline of using this formula to redirect our focus ends up freeing and expanding, rather than limiting or confining us.
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