We Are Not Extrovert or Introvert in the Emotional Dialogue
This short piece offers the tools and basics to understand what a true listening experience entail. How we lack the skills to express well emotionally and how we can't get out of them alone.
Are you an extrovert or an introvert? There could be more categories, but that’s not the point. We make generalisations and categories to put people and ideas into based on how things are on the outer. There is another form of communication which is hard to categorise into anything. Rarely one finds an individual who is adept in this flow of communication: the flow of emotions and its expression. Schools don’t teach about this and we don’t take it upon ourselves to understand the emotional complexities on our own. We generally don’t even follow school or college education, there is no chance that something which is not taught grabs our attention out of curiosity. Life forces us to look into deeper emotional education with inner turmoil which requires us to be emotionally vulnerable, strong, articulate and understanding.
It is the psychotherapists or mental health professionals eventually who show the way because they are the ones who have the tools to cater to someone’s emotional needs. If you have a better chance of understanding the deeper communications well, I think it is wise to turn to them for help before something big happens, and we knock at their doors for literal help.
The hallmarks of a true therapeutic conversation which showers actual benefits are within our approach and they can be easily inculcated by a person in their communication with others. The psychotherapists use these techniques all the time but what if even a normal individual can make use of them without having to go to a therapist for sundry emotional needs. Here is my brief about the DIY list from The School of Life Book by the wonderful Alain De Botton.
Witnessing- An important part of who we are while interacting with the world is that we convey the filtered thoughts: socially acceptable thoughts, socially conditioned thoughts, and likeable thoughts. If we start dumping out every thought that occurs in our minds, eventually we would be left with our shadow. But there is an exception to this -psychotherapists -home we are not supposed “to impress or reassure of our sanity”. The point here is that we can try to be non-judgmental and truly acceptable to others while listening. Not just because it is a profound and right thing to do, but also because we are also not immune to not having the buffet of censor worthy thoughts which makes us think twice before sharing with someone.
Be a relaxed and interested observer of someone who is offering you, their vulnerability. Make them at ease with your personality by opening up to you naturally.
Worldliness- We have all had our share of life experiences, some deeply painful while the others troubling to an extent, and that is a common thread we share with so many. Human nature has many truths, some are cultivated while the others are inflicted. Alain points out that, “inside every adult there remains a child who is confused, angry, hurt and longing to have their say and their recognition."
The therapists know the traumas of humanity- incest and rape suicide and depression- as well as the smaller pains and paradoxes: belonging provoked by a glance at a person in the library that took up the better part of 20 years, and otherwise gentle soul who broke a dough, or a handsome, athletic man who can no longer perform sexually. They know the human heart, not primarily through books, but by being courageous about exploring their own nature. -Excerpts from the book
There is a cue in this for all of us on how to operate in this world with people who have been through the goods and bads of life. Like therapists, we need to have a broader idea of what it means to be normal and not necessarily signal people to be conventionally good or typical which will come at the cost of them guarding their vulnerability. This is a negative sum game because we are stripped off of the experience of yet another human condition and the other person carries their inner weight for longer.
We can strive to be such that people give up the need to be defensive in front of us; hard but indeed a worthwhile gesture.
Kindness- Did you know what is the fundamental difference between the listening skill of a therapist and a normal person? Alain says, “they (therapists) are, furthermore, and very gratifyingly, on our side. Without ill intention, most people are not quiet; they are intermittently, jealous, bold, vindictive, keen to prove a point or distracted by their own lives. But the therapist brings a focused, generous attention to our case." Kindness requires us to look at people through their experience, their reasons for certain actions behind their legacy of shame and isolation, and without an expectation to reciprocate.
Listening- It is one of the hardest things to do even if it would help us handle our internal words. We are often unable to think deeply for any length of time by ourselves and in that we realise the value of the other. "For all the glamour of the solitary seer, thinking usually happens best in tandem… as beneficiaries of active listening, memories and concerns don't have to fall into need, well-formed sentences. The active listener nurtures the emerging confusion and prompts us to address a salient point we might have sidestepped.”
Our active listening is required with utmost patience and keenness in such scenarios because it is not common for someone to articulate their feelings into understandable form quickly as we might expect out of our own urgency. We can learn to help the person by trying to fill in the blanks for them.
Time- Like me, you would have often seen that the people we live with tend to prioritise sorting some issues the same day or at least urgently. The impatience to sort out quickly usually flows from the person who hurt us, unintentionally or inadvertently. It's a fine intention but an untimely one, mostly.
Have more patience to allow for mutual exchange without an urgent timeline. It’s the sensible resolution of conflict that matters, not the time in which we achieve it.
Interpretation- This is the hardest part, partly due to lack of a keen eye for proper interpretation and partly due to a dearth of patience reserves required to offer the other person who likes taking time in opening up. It's not a kind of job any normal person would do effectively, but a psychotherapist has incentive to do it. For him, it's a voyage going into the faraway lands of a troubled mind trying to prepare a map of emotional burdens the person carries over many patience-filled short trips. After all, it's about the emotional understanding of the person in front of you but not the intellectual one only.
“We need the novel, not the essay.”-Alain
Inner Voice & Clarity of Action
We constantly do self-judgement through our inner voices. The inner voices are important because they help us meander through life by judging various scenarios or people. Judging is fine as long as we are judging right. I like how Alain puts it, “an inner voice was always an outer voice that we have- imperceptibly- made our own… because at certain moments in the past they sounded so compelling and irresistible." All we need is benevolence and compassion when judging ourselves so that we are better suited to comfort others properly in the moments of their need too.
However, understanding our inner world better does not guarantee that we would be able to understand the inner world of someone else. We understand others from what they choose to tell us after considerable mental sieving. It's born of the limitations of our minds rather than our nature. Alain demands this from the culture to make up for our shortcomings, " Ideally, the task of culture would be to compensate for the failings of our brain. It should assist us to a more correct vision of what other people are normally like- by taking us, in realistic and sensitive ways, into the inner lives of strangers.” Our art forms have a role to play in this, representing emotional richness in all its glory and gloom is a momentous task, but it should not be low on the priority list.
One of the hardest pieces of advice to accept from Alain is to face our enemies with a response of love. I won't dare to belittle the explanation with my words because his words have beautifully summarised the essence of his idea. Here, “contended people have no need to hurt others. One has to feel very small in order to belittle. We may not be able to punish them, but the universe has in a sense, and the clearest evidence for the sentence lies in the unhappiness that is powering their attacks…. We can move from helpless victims to imaginative witnesses of justice.” (I feel so good reading and writing this!)
Reading the works of Alain De Botton offers me a shot of sanity because in his words I see the picture of our society more clearly. In our era of stressing over vague individuality, he tries to hold us with his noose of interconnected and shared sense of existence within which an individual is never alone. That's why he talks about the charity of interpretation with kindness, importance of tragedy and breakdowns, and weakness of strength (as inculcated in the recent times). In all these aspects, he nudges us to have a wider view of ourselves with positives and negatives which would lead to a profound acceptance of human condition leading to a saner and sensible society, something which we are growing out of slowly in this fast-paced world.
The art of living is to a large extent dependent on an ability to understand our thorns and explain them with a modicum of grace to others- and, when we are on the other side of the equation, to imagine the thorns of others, even those whose precise locations or dimensions we will never know for certain. -Excerpts from the book
My aim for presenting these nuggets of wisdom from a profound thinker is to offer accessibility to a brief guide on how to have meaningful interactions with other humans. Walking the talk is tough, but knowing the terrain on which to walk is a major step in the direction.
We are not required to get better at these things very quickly, nor can we do that, this is a constant endeavour as covered in one of my previous posts about Phil Stutz where he says that constant work, pain and uncertainty are the hallmarks of our lives; these are not the ones to be avoided but accepted.
Walking the talk is tough, but knowing the terrain on which to walk is a major step in the direction.
I hope you have a better time in the upcoming interactions where the need is to comfort someone emotionally, not just intellectually or offering a mere presence. I also wish that you find such people with whom you can have deeper and meaningful conversations.
I'm grateful that you chose to read down till this point.