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Writer's pictureMiles Sherts

The Healing Power of Supportive Listening

Talking About Needs


When you hear a painful story, your first impulse may be to offer the person a solution that will solve their problem. When someone you care about is feeling bad, you naturally want them to feel better, and instinctively do or say something to make their pain go away.  It is easy to assume that this is what they want from you.


All of us love to be the hero who swoops in with our clever solution and saves the helpless victim.And often these  “rescuing” responses work, and the person does feel better. However, while your intention may be to help them, trying to fix their situation can undermine the deeper healing process that is already occurring.                           


We all face situations that are difficult or seem impossible to resolve, and what makes them feel so heavy is that we are alone.No one else shares your exact problem and this can make it too much to bear.  Carrying emotional pain alone often makes us feel discouraged and hopeless about things getting better.  


When I feel discouraged, what I need most is encouragement to face my dilemma and move through it constructively. If you solve my problem for me, I never get to summon the courage to solve it for myself. In the long run, this weakens me and makes me dependent on you or someone else.


To get a new perspective on this, ask yourself what you most want when you talk with someone else about a problem that you are having.Chances are that you don't really want to hear another person's opinion, solution, or even so-called facts. You may want someone else just to understand your dilemma, so that you are not carrying the weight of it alone. A deeper look at the mechanics of emotional healing will help explain why this point is so important.

 

The Mechanics of Healing


When one of us has a problem, we feel negative emotions such as hurt, anger, fear, sadness, or frustration. Negative emotions such as these indicate that a basic need of ours like food, water, respect, connection, or safety, is not being met. If we don't address the underlying needs that are not getting met, we will be right back in the same painful place before long. 


We all experience strong emotional charges that are triggered by relatively ordinary events, and often we find this explosion of feelings impossible to understand or resolve. In these situations something has just reminded you of a painful situation in your past where your basic needs were not met and the situation was never resolved. These difficult moments are opportunities to heal old wounds by identifying the basic needs and finding a way to meet them now.


Of course this is hard to do when you are charged with negative emotions, and this is usually where we need the most help.However, once you identify the basic needs, the rest of the process of healing is relatively easy.  Basic needs are usually not that complicated and often an obvious solution presents itself once you have discovered the real problem.


We often try to deal with an emotional charge by explaining it rationally, denying it, numbing, or distracting ourselves so that we don't feel it.We think that if we no longer feel the painful emotion we have dealt with the problem. Our automatic responses to other people's pain frequently are aimed at merely taking away the emotion, not addressing the underlying needs.  (in Conscious Communication these are called Disconnects)


This is like the proverbial ostrich putting its head in the sand.The problem does not get addressed and nothing changes. We have simply made ourselves less present and aware, and more ignorant of what is happening around us, and this makes it more difficult to resolve the situation.


The best way to support someone with an emotional charge is to help them diffuse the charge so they can think clearly about their needs, and begin to explore new and creative ways of meeting them. In order to discharge emotions effectively, you first have to feel and express them. Allowing and making room for difficult feelings is the process of healing. Once we accept them, the emotions pass and we are left with a clearer mind and capacity to think rationally about what we need.


The process I am describing is simple, yet often difficult to apply. This is because you instinctively focus on the symptoms of someone’s distress instead of revealing the source.  It may also be that someone else's unhealed emotions remind you of your own wounds, and you impulsively shut down to protect yourself from feeling them again.


This is where the wisdom of self-care and personal development applies.As you are willing to explore your own difficult emotions and made space for them, you will be able to help others do the same. And if you are not working on healing your own wounds, you will not be able to help others with theirs.  


Feeding the Story 


One reason that basic needs often go unnoticed during a crisis is that you get caught up in the story about what is happening instead of just experiencing the raw emotions. Your rational mind is programmed to interpret raw data and convert it into a story that attempts to explain what is happening. A common form this takes is to frame the situation in terms of a villain and a victim.


You learned to blame someone else for your pain as a way to empower yourself when you feel threatened. This approach tries to resolve your vulnerability by making you right and someone else wrong. We are so conditioned to think this will take care of the problem that we have institutionalized it into the way we try to resolve larger social conflicts through our formal judicial process. This framework of right versus wrong (also known as duality) forms the basic template for the rational mind, and it is the reason for the violence and war that has plagued humanity since the dawn of our existence.


The problem with this approach is that it takes your focus away from your immediate emotions, which you can do something about, and keeps your focus on someone or something else, which you see as the cause of your pain, and which you often cannot do anything about.


Of course, if you are being physically threatened, or emotionally abused, self-care would likely mean removing yourself or the other person, or defending yourself forcefully for your own or someone else's protection. However, in most of our conflicts with other people the danger we face is imaginary. We are reacting to what we think is happening, instead of what is actually taking place.


When you feed a story about someone being wrong and right, you also feed the emotions and make them grow larger and more intense. Most of us get caught up in these dramatic interpretations of an event in which our basic needs were not met, and forget entirely about the needs themselves. Instead we try to get the villain to change, which is usually impossible, and we end up feeling more emotionally charged and helpless than when we started.


This approach is so ingrained in most of us that we do it automatically, even though it makes the situation worse. When you listen to someone express a problem, notice how you tend to agree with their story and side with them against whatever bad person or situation is upsetting them. This response, which I call a Disconnect, sets them up for a perpetual struggle that cannot be resolved because it does not acknowledge the real problem.


Tune in to next month’s newsletter to learn about tools that can help by revealing the basic needs underlying an emotional charge.

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