A Crash Course in Listening: First Impressions of the Dyadic Dance
My journey of active listening during the fall semester of this course has been incredibly humbling and without a doubt the most educational portion of the quarter. I will look fondly on my time in Process of Psychotherapy I and will hopefully reread this paper someday fondly remembering my very first shot at therapy. It is undeniable that we can read thousands of books and still never learn as much as when we spend some time actually trying to implement the knowledge in a real-life setting. For this second round of active listening dyads, I listened for six sessions instead of four. I kept my two initial dyad partners and added a new one: someone from outside the program, to mix things up a bit. I was glad to maintain D1 and D2, my initial dyad pairings, so I could see how things become more comfortable over time. Then adding D3 to the mix seemed to be somewhat reminiscent of what it feels like to be a practicing therapist taking on a new client. Overall, I am happy with my progress, and feel much more confident active listening than I did at the start of the course.
For this assignment, we were asked to implement a few more active listening skills into our repertoire: accenting, prompting, and so on. I found these skills really broadened the therapeutic space for me to a point where I could achieve more seamless interactions as a listener. I mentioned in my first paper how difficult it was for me to participate naturally, and how I got too in my head about my responses due to my lack of practice. This time around, with the freedom to ask open-ended questions and prompt my talker, I did not even find myself using those skills as much as I thought I might. Perhaps this was simply because certain earlier skills were becoming more natural and obviously appropriate. In general, I found myself comfortable only using questions and prompts when needed, as I found that often accenting and reflecting back the main themes of my talkers’ content was sufficient to keep the conversation flowing naturally. This speaks to my success in learning to track my dyad partners with appropriate fluidity and respond in optimally helpful ways. Listening back to the recordings has provided me with numerous examples to illustrate my growth this semester.
Acknowledging is a skill that led to more conversation than I would have expected when first learning about it. As an example, D2 described to me his general disillusionment with life recently, but I noticed while he was describing school, home, and work that work particularly appeared as the main source of his day-to-day feelings of dread and “stuck-ness.” When I acknowledged his tendency to speak about work in such a way, he completely agreed that it was the centerpiece of his negative emotion and went into further detail about the struggle with his job. In his feedback form, he wrote that he was “feeling very scattered” that day, but that I “did a great job taking it all in and reflecting back a common theme–which was a surprise!” I was incredibly happy to read that his interpretation was similar to mine in terms of feeling the cohesion of the session by the end of it. I think this also demonstrated that earlier skills like reflection were incorporated rather seamlessly this time around.
My first session with D3 was most obviously where I witnessed some of my detours and tendencies manifest in full force. In session one, he described his anxiety surrounding his driving test the next day, speaking about very logistical issues which I couldn’t help but chime in with my own opinion on. It felt difficult to not do so, as he had such little knowledge about the driving test, and I have taken two driving tests in my life. I was quite self-aware about my detour in the moment, and even mentioned to him that I really wasn’t supposed to be offering my own opinion. Still, the fact that I could not help myself was notable and required further reflection as to how I could react less impulsively to logical vs. affective content in the future. Ultimately I was able to reign it back in after I blurted out my opinion on his car troubles, but I did talk to him extensively about my perspective on his driving questions once the session was over, and I felt like this might not be appropriate in the context of the frame I was supposed to have maintained. I made it a point to not have discussions after any of my other dyad sessions that were so antithetical to the structure of active listening. This was certainly a learning experience.
The skill of prompting worked particularly well in my dyad sessions with D3, who was less familiar with the process and notably more uncomfortable opening up as he was coming in as a distant acquaintance. In session two he described with particular lack of cohesion his week being stressful for a number of unrelated reasons. I was able to prompt him to elaborate on a particular moment where I heard more emotion in his voice than in the other things he said. He described his perception of his coworker to “really bother him” and sounded especially angry the moment he brought that up. When I prompted him to say more about it, he got incredibly self-reflective and began to delve deeper into the traits she embodies that truly irk him, while also describing how he can see how she might feel intimidated being the only female in a male-dominated setting. It felt very deep by the end of the discussion, and I was glad to pick up on his slight change in tone and prompt further discussion of that topic. By the end of session two, I felt glad to have broken through the superficial talking points with this new dyad partner and really enter a space of uninhibited flow.
I specifically enjoyed practicing the new skill of accenting/highlighting. I found this to be immensely helpful with all three of my partners at different times. A specific moment of accenting I felt happy about was in my second session with D1, who described his ambivalence toward a new romantic prospect. He was unsure of whether to continue seeing her but said in an offhanded sort of manner that he was glad she had not texted him yet that day. I picked up on this and noted it for later, so when I had a chance to speak, I brought it back up to him as being particularly interesting to me. He seemed to love that I brought it back around to this, as he agreed it was a pretty harsh stance to take toward a girl that he was considering remaining involved with. He concluded that he obviously already knew how he felt about her. I found this moment incredibly rewarding as I could see my contribution to his understanding of his own stance while still only referencing the words that he himself had used.
Importantly, I now realize the role that the talker’s affect plays in my listening experience. Whereas in one of my first sessions with D1 I felt as though my paraphrasing was largely off base and disruptive to his sharing process, I did not have any trouble keeping up with him in our later sessions. I suspect this is partly due to my comfort understanding how he converses, but I also think the specific session we had trouble seeing eye-to-eye was when he was experiencing a palpably low mood. At the time, I did not recognize this as anything other than his baseline interactive style because I did not have enough experience with him as a person to distinguish his negative mood from his regular mood. However, now that I have had four sessions with D1, I recognize that he was feeling particularly bad that day and might have simply been more prone to be unhappy regardless of what I brought to the table. This is ultimately a lesson in not taking things personally and trying to remain open and properly objective when judging dyad interactions in the future. This reminds me of Hays’ advice to “become nonjudgmentally aware of your experience in the moment” (Hays, 2016, p. 31). Being non-judgmental of myself is a lifelong battle, and I am realizing how important it is to recognize this tendency of mine if I am to bring my best self in every moment.
I have not only enjoyed the process of dyadic active listening, but also the reflective piece that these assignments require to tie all the separate sessions together. I am reminded of Treating the Self as I reflect on the unfolding process of active listening as a whole, as Wolf eloquently states that “understanding plus explaining add up to an interpretation” (Wolf, 2002, p. 10). Since I did not initially have enough information to fully understand my sessions as I fumbled, I could not adequately interpret what was happening. Thus, the importance of staying open to the moment is more apparent to me than ever before. I will especially keep this in mind when meeting with new partners for active listening, and work on not automatically attributing any one instance of dissonance to a specific cause. Overall, I am encouraged by my progress and growing comfort with active listening. I am even proud of myself, as the aforementioned skills I brought to certain sessions really seemed to make a difference for my talkers. Thank you very much, Gary, for your guidance and support throughout the course! I will look fondly on this class for years to come as my unforgettable introduction to the art of therapy.
References
Hays, P. (2016). Addressing Cultural Complexities in Practice: Assessment, Diagnosis, and Therapy. (3rd ed.) American Psychological Association.
Wolf, E. (2002). Treating the self. Guilford Press.