When I began my career as a child and adolescent therapist, I was only 23 years old.  Fresh out of graduate school and thrust into a professional role where I was looked to as the “expert” on all things therapeutic, I felt pressure to know all of the answers.  In that haze, I believed that those answers must come from within—that if I just talked enough during my sessions, the wisdom of my studies would come forth and I would somehow be able to solve whatever crisis had brought clients and families to my office.

Turns out, what I really needed to know about being an effective therapist, I learned from my mother’s earliest and simplest of instructions: Be a Good Listener.

Her advice to me prior to playdates and starting school is the best training I could ever have had as a professional helper.  What wonderful progress my clients were able to make when I finally learned to stop my own nervous chatter and start listening fully.

Providing an experience of feeling heard and understood was far more powerful for the children, adolescents, and families I served than any textbook answers or complex solutions that I could generate.  Not that professional training isn’t important…but when it comes to being there—really being there for others—good listening is among the most powerful techniques around.

The same is true in families and relationships with loved ones.  Though there is much that can be offered in the way of advice, insights, reassurance, and spoken encouragement, there is often even more that can be gifted simply by being present and listening without judgment.

Please Listen details the wants and needs of a person who asks for nothing more than a good listener:

Please Listen

When I ask you to listen to me
and you start giving me advice,
you have not done what I asked.

When I ask you to listen to me
and you begin to tell me why I shouldn’t feel that way,
you are trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me
and you feel you have to do something
to solve my problem,
you have failed me, strange as that may seem.

Listen!
All I ask is that you listen.
Don’t talk or do – just hear me.
Advice is cheap – 20 cents will get you both
Dear Abby and Billy Graham in the same newspaper.
And I can do for myself; I am not helpless.
Maybe discouraged and faltering, but not helpless.

When you do something for me that I can
and need to do for myself,
you contribute to my fear and inadequacy.
But when you accept as a simple fact
that I feel what I feel, no matter how irrational,
then I can stop trying to convince you
and get about this business of understanding
what’s behind this irrational feeling.
And when that’s clear, the answers are obvious
and I don’t need advice.
Irrational feelings make sense
when we understand what’s behind them.

Perhaps that’s why prayer works – sometimes -
for some people, because God is mute.
and he doesn’t give advice or try to fix things.
God just listens and lets you work it out for yourself.

So please listen, and just hear me.
And if you want to talk,
wait a minute for your turn,
and I will listen to you.

Author Unknown

Let’s Talk

Can you relate to the feelings expressed by the author of Please Listen?  When were you in a situation where you needed someone to listen to you without advice, judgment, or problem-solving?  Do you have a good listener in your life?

What kind of a listener are you?  Do you rush in to fix problems or share your own experiences?  Are you comfortable allowing others to talk freely while you provide a listening ear?

Please post your thoughts, experiences, reactions and ideas so that this Blog can serve as a dynamic, interactive place for Humanity Alive visitors to share.