To Listen And To Be Seen

In my blog entry “How I Use Pain to Transform my Life” I wrote about my journey of handling and living with chronic pain. This topic challenges me with two, sometimes conflicting, needs: The one of being seen and the one of avoiding self-pity.

Self-Pity and Being Seen

Struggling with pain is a difficult and draining challenge I am facing in my life. It is to be faced every day, or every hour, and needs a strong conscious effort to stay present and positive; to be able to enjoy life and grow in it instead of collapsing into self-pity. An attitude of self-pity makes things worse, as it adds a feeling of depression and emotional pain on top of the physical pain. There are days when I can handle pain easily, some days I learn a lot from it, but on some days it drains all the life energy I have.

Being seen in these struggles is important for me. The experience that someone recognizes and acknowledges the journey I am in. I need compassion – Sometimes it is too hard to do it alone.

But being seen is difficult in itself. Many people are uncomfortable and challenged if I talk about my health issues. They either try to switch the topic quickly or start to think very hard what they could possibly say to me that makes the situation better – already knowing that it won’t. The answer is normally either “Oh you could try healing method XY” or “I am sure you will find a way to heal it”. While all these answers are meant by best intents, they somehow hardly ever make me feel “seen”. Or maybe it is more that I do not really listen to them? Sometimes the opposite of what I hope for happens: I open up my inner struggles but do not feel seen in it, which throws me back into self-pity. But if I talk to someone from a point of self-pity, it often creates a even stronger feeling of being uncomfortable and helplessness for the listener. It’s is like a vicious cycle. Self-pity makes me talk to people in a needy way, which makes them uncomfortable and avoiding to really engage in the topic, which throws me back into self-pity.

Congratulations if you have been reading until here :-). It takes energy to engage into difficult stuff like that. So let me switch to the positive part of this blog post:

I spent the last week in Kikov, Poland, in a training for myofascial energetic release (MER), a massage technique focusing on connective tissue (fascia). I shared a room with four other guys – a Rumanian, a Serbian, a German and a Polish. We had a really fun time, switching back and forth between fun and primitive jokes and deep honest talks. During the first days, the topic of my health issues came up and I quickly and objectively explained my situation. The conversation did not take long and I was glad about it – I felt tired of talking about it anyway.

During the last night of the training, we did a group exercise where we sat in front of each other, having eye contact and telling each other what we appreciate and love about the other. It is a fun exercise, as it really makes you feel amazing (I still would love to do this exercise with talking about things that separate instead of connect). What touched me most during that one hour was a sentence that both the Serbian and the Rumanian guy told me:

“I see and respect you in your journey with pain. And I feel sorry for what you are going through.”

That night, I felt seen and listened to. It gave me a lot of comfort. Thank you Satto and Milosch.

But why is it that their words touched me deeply and at other times similar words make me feel more isolated than seen?

I find a possible answer in my own way of relating to people. Very often, if someone shares an either sad, joyful or fascinating part of his/her life, I immediately think about how I could respond. I think about what I should answer, and filter and change my answer in my mind, while the other person is still talking. Sometimes I feel an urge to talk about my own experience with the subject rather than really engaging in the experiences the other person told me. Instead of being present and listening to my friend’s story, I am really just occupied with my thoughts. When I realized that, I started playing with two ways to change my way of listening to people:

Meditative Listening

The first way is to move my awareness and focus away from my thoughts. I believe we have only a certain range of things we can focus on. This “technique” is to move my focus away from my thoughts provoked by the other’s story and away from constructing my response. Instead, I move all my awareness towards the other person. In this, I use all my senses. I focus on hearing the sound of her/his voice, I try to focus to see the person, with his/her mimic, expressions and posture. In a way, this is similar to what some people do in meditation – but it really has not much to do with spirituality. I try to empty my mind and be just fully present in listening, seeing and feeling the other person. My experience is that I need only very little focus to hear and understand words. But this “exercise” often makes me feel deeper and more connected with the person I am listening to.

Resonating

The second way, called resonating, is something which is new for me and I just learned it during a therapeutic trauma release training I did last month. In resonating, I try to bring my focus in my own body while listening to the other’s words. I focus on what happens in my body while I hear the other talking. It is like a guitar or violin resonating sound. The other person’s words are the string vibrating and I try to be like the guitar’s body that resonates these vibrations. I just started playing with this. Sometimes I physically feel emotions coming up by the words of the other. As an example, I might feel a constriction and tension in my chest, if I hear something uncomfortable or sad. Or I feel a lightness, opening and space around my heart or in my stomach if someone tells me a joyful story. Physically experiencing the others words is a really fun and beautiful way of listening.

Back to my need of being seen in my health journey. Why do I sometimes feel not seen at all and sometimes, like last week in Kikov, feel seen very much and find comfort in it? I think it has to do with the above reasons on both sides. Often when talking to people, they are not really listening to what I say but are forcefully thinking about a possible answer. It is intended in a good way, but really, I do not need an answer in that moment, I need to be listened to. But it is also me who often is not really listening to the words said by the others. Last week in Kikov, thanks to that exercise, I was simply listening and fully focused on listening as it was not part of the exercise to respond to what was said. My focus was fully on the words being said, which made them having a stronger impact on me.

I enjoy using both of these ways – meditative listening and resonating. It somehow takes away the urge to change, judge and respond. It allows me to simply listen and see – which in the very most cases is what we are looking for when telling someone about our life.

Anodea Judith put this beautifully in words:

When a teenage daughter comes downstairs for her first prom date, dressed as a woman for the first time, we simply behold her. It is an embrace, but it is not physical. To behold is not to fix, change, judge or even want. It is simply to witness – to embrace with our awareness
— Anodea Judith — Eastern Body, Western Mind

If you have thoughts, questions experiences in this, please let me know: Write a comment or send me a mail. I would love to hear and learn more about this.