The Lost Art of Listening (41 page)

rapidly. They started getting along better; but in the fifth session, Mary

reported that she was still having trouble with Tamara at home. It was

only then that she told me that often when Tamara was punished, she’d

run down the hall to her grandmother’s apartment. Instead of supporting

her daughter’s authority, Mary’s mother tried to comfort Tamara by telling

her not to worry, “Grandma loves you.”

The grandmother’s interference with her daughter’s discipline may

strike you as too obviously misguided to be of much relevance to the prob-

lems of listening in your own life. But aren’t you playing the same game

whenever you take one person’s side against another?

How to Listen and Be Heard within the Family
245

Most family problems are triangular. That’s why working with two

people may have limited results. Teaching a mother techniques for disci-

plining her son won’t resolve the problem that she’s overinvolved with the

boy as a result of her husband’s emotional distance. Similarly, working on

a couple’s communication may not bring them closer together as long as

their number-one priority is children or their careers.

Are triangles always a problem? No. Sometimes you just
have to
talk to

someone else. For example, when I complain to my friends about my wife

nagging me to take out the garbage, it’s because my wife doesn’t under-

stand that I don’t always feel like doing it. Besides, if I tried to discuss this

directly with her, we might get into tedious and unnecessary issues, like

fairness and inequality and so on.

When Rigid Boundaries Keep People Apart

Some people establish rigid boundaries, so restrictive that they permit too

little contact, resulting in
disengagement
. Disengaged people are indepen-

dent but isolated. On the positive side, this fosters autonomy. If parents

don’t hover over their children, telling them what to do and refereeing

their battles, the children will be forced to develop their own resources.

On the other hand, disengagement limits affection and nurture.

Being listened to by their parents is how children build confidence in

their powers of communication. Parents may not always listen, but for a

day care worker in charge of eight toddlers at once, it’s almost impossible

to listen more than very briefly.

A visit to your child’s school might result in the sober realization of

how little children are listened to and might inspire you to reoccupy center

stage in your children’s school- dominated lives. Spending time with your

children— without turning everything into a struggle for control—helps

displace peer pressure and pedagogy that compel your children to conform

or rebel, both of which undermine their efforts to discover themselves.

The way to help children figure out who they are

is to listen to them.

246
LISTENING IN CONTEXT

Disengagement is a behavioral description for lack of involvement—

spending time together, sharing activities, talking. People who are disen-

gaged aren’t necessarily uncaring, even if they do seem to spend a lot of

time pursuing their own interests. Often these individuals are using dis-

tance and displacement to insulate their own sensitivities.

Suzanne and Rick were worried about their son’s difficulty making

friends. The boy’s lack of friends, as it turned out, was nothing serious,

little more than a ticket of admission to therapy. Actually, Suzanne was

more concerned about the lack of closeness between her and Rick. She

complained of his distance and of his not thinking about her needs, but

she talked in an anxious, unclear way, circling her feelings, never really

saying flat out what she meant.

Rick tried to listen but wasn’t very good at it. Perhaps he recoiled

at the underlying whininess of Suzanne’s complaints. Suzanne also men-

tioned—“by the way”—that she was seeing an individual therapist. When

I asked why, she said she needed someone to understand how she felt. (
Oh
,

great
, I thought.
She’s using a therapist as her confidant at the same time she’s

trying to create a more confiding relationship with her husband.
)

The hard core of Suzanne’s and Rick’s problem with intimacy wasn’t

just that they were busy or that the wild happiness they once knew had

faded or simply that they’d gotten out of the habit of being close. It was

that they had trouble talking and listening to each other. Her contribu-

tion was holding back her complaints and then venting them in emotional

outbursts. His contribution was not listening hard enough to penetrate

Suzanne’s complaints and hear her loneliness and not speaking up about

his own grievances. He made a typical unconscious bargain: if he wasn’t

satisfying her demands, he’d better not make any of his own.

After a while they started getting through to each other. Suzanne

was able to be more direct with her requests when she realized how she’d

learned to avoid asking for what she wanted by observing her mother’s

constant complaining. Rick worked harder at listening and harder at

speaking up. Then Suzanne made what felt like a confession. For years

she’d spent hours every day confiding in her journal. She spoke of it almost

like a child’s invisible friend. This, then, was Rick’s rival.

Is it wrong to complain about your spouse to an individual therapist?

Is it wrong to keep a diary? Of course not. But the more you confide your

How to Listen and Be Heard within the Family
247

feelings to someone or something other than the people you want to get

closer to, the less pressure you feel to improve those relationships.

Disengaged relationships don’t exist in a vacuum. To close the dis-

tance between you and someone you love, keep two things in mind: You

catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. And if you want to close

the distance in a disengaged relationship, be prepared to hear some com-

plaints. Disengagement isn’t just distance; it’s protective distance.

When Closeness Smothers Intimacy

Sometimes the boundary separating family members from the rest of the

world is so rigid that relationships become enmeshed, offering closeness at

the expense of autonomy. Isolation—from conversation, broadly speaking,

with the rest of the world—puts too much pressure on any relationship.

Intimacy grows with time together and time apart.

Some people are togetherness oriented. They value closeness and

connection, but these values can actually reduce intimacy if they result

in pressure to conform. To achieve genuine closeness, you must respect

every family member’s sovereign individual experience, their right to

their own feelings and their own point of view.

Enmeshed relationships can comfort like a warm coat on a cold day

or chafe like a wool blanket on a hot night. Children enmeshed with their

parents become dependent. They’re less comfortable by themselves and

may have trouble relating to people outside the family.

We usually assume that parental involvement with children is a good

thing: if children are having problems, their parents must not be suffi-

ciently engaged. In some cases this is true. But sometimes the problem is

parental overinvolvement, robbing children of room to be themselves—to

have problems, make mistakes, and learn to chart their own course.

A clear boundary between the generations puts parents in charge,

allows them to claim their own rights and privacy, and helps them respect

the children’s autonomy within their own orbit.

When family therapists encounter mothers enmeshed with their chil-

dren, they certainly don’t blame mothers for this arrangement (as though

a family’s structure were the unilateral doing of one of its members). Oh,

no, they would never do that!

248
LISTENING IN CONTEXT

Enmeshment, unfortunately,
is
usually blamed on mothers. Who else?

They’re the ones smothering their children, aren’t they?2 Blaming mothers

for a family structure that leaves them neglected by their husbands and

overinvolved with their children is like saying that a car without spark

plugs won’t go because the pistons don’t fire. Even infants and mothers

engulfed in the blissful intimacy of baby love need paternal involvement.

They need a supporter and a confidant, not a frustrated competitor.

Children need attachment? So do their parents.

Some of the overidentification of mothers with their children may be

due to their being wedded to their roles as selfless servants. Critics often

suggest that enmeshed mothers should have more of a life of their own.

Meaning careers, doing things, spending time with friends, and so on. But

some of what they need is the experience of being listened to and empa-

thized with. It’s getting the listening you need that makes you strong, not

trying to go it alone.

Parents need to be united. But most parents have different opinions

on at least some issues involving their children. What should they do?

They should talk about their opinions and listen to each other. Then they

can decide how to act.

Forming a United Front

To forge an alliance that works, both parents must yield on some issues to

gain in unity.
Accommodation
is the process by which people adjust their

differences to come together. It is the mechanism of compromise, some-

times a deliberate result of negotiation, sometimes the result of instinctive

adjustments. Unified family leadership is based on communication and

compromise between parents and then presented to the children as one

policy. Most parents eventually discover how important it is to accommo-

date their differences in order to present a united front. Similarly, as many

people eventually discover, it’s learning to accept each other, not trying to

improve your partner, that makes couples last.

2Most people still harbor ancient grudges against the hand that rocked the cradle.

How to Listen and Be Heard within the Family
249

When children continue to misbehave, you can bet

that one parent isn’t backing the other up.

If you don’t feel supported by your partner in parenting, if you get

stuck with all the driving or always have to be the one to enforce the rules,

don’t put all the blame on your partner. Maybe he or she disagrees with

what you’re doing. Try asking.

“I get the feeling you don’t really agree with my way of handling this.

Maybe you don’t think I’m interested in your opinion—but I am. I’d

really like to hear what you think.”

Parenting is also an excellent place to observe the other side of

complementarity— polarization. Instead of coming together on certain

issues, parents push each other further apart. If one is too strict, the other

may become too lenient. The more one harps at the children, the more the

other tries to compensate by being indulgent.

Polarization is what happens when the controls on your electric blan-

ket get switched. The first attempt by either of you to make it warmer or

colder will set off a cycle of mutual maladjustment.

Small differences can drive couples to antagonistic opposites. A

mother whose threshold for telling the kids to quiet down is only slightly

higher than her husband’s may never get the chance to discipline them

if he always shushes them before she feels the need. Every time he rep-

rimands the kids, she’ll feel he’s being too harsh. If she complains about

his impatience, he’ll get angry. Family life then becomes a battleground,

where instead of sticking together, two parents become adversaries in a

game where everybody loses.

Why do couples accommodate on some issues and polarize on others?

Because we compromise where we’re able but polarize in response to our

own inner conflicts.

The engine that drives conflicts within us to become conflicts between

us is projection. This dynamic comes into play when an ambivalent bal-

ance between pairs of conflicting impulses (dependence– independence,

emotional expression– restraint, desire– anxiety, privacy– companionship)

is resolved by projecting one’s own motivation onto the other person. A

250
LISTENING IN CONTEXT

man (or woman) who’s afraid of anger may express it through passive con-

trol that provokes his (or her) partner. When they fight, she gets angry and

he gets hurt. The man who feels only hurt may be seething with rage but

remains unaware of those feelings as long as he has an obliging mate to act

out his anger for him. In the process, the partner who shows anger may be

able to avoid facing inner feelings of helplessness.

Polarized mates fight in each other what

they can’t accept in themselves.

Projection and polarization turn couples into antagonists and prevent

partners from integrating latent possibilities in the self— because these are