Mental Health Article - A family is the emotional unit as an individual processes certain stress factors over their lifespan. Many husbands, wives or parents will hopefully listen to their loved ones based on their observations, their meaningful experiences, their facts, allowing them to process and discover their own unique feelings, allowing more space for thinking, analyzing rather than feeling. Feelings come and go depending on circumstances out of our control. A big part of this important communication process is the art of listening.
Listening is dependent on various things such as our environment, our habits and our patience. Other critical communication skills are part of listening and a key factor to others experiencing stress factors or experiencing strong emotions. Certain ways of “thinking” and “listening” might need to be retrained so we are not always in the mode of “cause and effect” thinking or listening - a natural behavior we all feel in many cases trying to blame or control others.
Being a part of a quality thinking system and listening to our loved ones, being aware of how we are listening, being a small part of something much larger than self. By understanding how certain theories or principles can help us when listening to our loved ones (family) or a very close friend could have a long-term impact and ultimately, a positive outcome. It might just start with us, deeply listening to a loved one right in front of us using a type of listening skill called, active listening.
A Closer Look at Listening
How we listen starts with our attitude for listening to others.
According to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, listening consists of complex, affective processes, being motivated to attend to others, certain behavioral processes, such as responding with verbal or nonverbal feedback and cognitive processes as attending to, understanding, receiving, and interpreting messages.
The Motivation and Value of Listening – Bowen Family Systems Theory
Listening to our loved ones, according to the Bowen theory by Dr. Murray Bowen, family can be a big part of the solution.
If the family can begin to calm the intense process of their thoughts, listen to each other carefully, they can begin to “think their way through to solutions”. That is ultimately the goal and a proven formula for us to help our loved ones with their autonomy, encouraging them to explore and find their own unique desires, what they see value in and urge them to use their critical thinking skills over using their intense emotional feelings.
A parent or a friend who can try to stay emotionally neutral, by encouraging others in their triangle to communicate. This type of communication is based on their principles, based on important facts, logical thinking to solve their problems. Trying to embolden our tribe or family to resolve a problem and allow them to literally remove the obstacles and take positive action, the problem-solving process. This is known as the mental process that people go through to discover, analyze, and solve problems.
As many leaders and parents understand, relationships work best and improve when relationships in the entire family or triangle improve and family members are freer to be the best they can be by improving their functioning, lessen certain negative patterns come to fruition and positive long-term outcomes will arise organically.
A Specific + Effective Type of Listening – Active Listening
While I was working at a crisis line with the world’s largest mental health organization I studied and used various different types of listening styles. These listening strategies were based on the specific situation, what would be effective in helping the individual who called and needed help for themselves or their loved one relating to mental health. A type of listening skill I used with many people and it is respected in many professional fields is called, active listening.
Per a recent study called, The Relative Effectiveness of Active Listening in Initial Interactions, active listening is sometimes called “empathic listening” or “reflective listening”. The characteristics of this style of listening is where you summarize or paraphrase the message back to the person after a pause or break. This will give clarity to understand why you are listening and why they are sharing vulnerable information with you. But first, you allow them to share their thought freely by listening very attentively and allowing them to finish before responding and even allowing some occasional pauses so the person feels heard and can process their own thoughts.
The Roots of Active Listening
Active listening roots were developed by Carl Rogers, back in the early 1940’s, and his colleague, Dr. Thomas Gordon. According to The Decision Lab, a short book published in 1957 by Rogers and another one of his former colleagues, Richard Farson, these two invented the term, active listening.
The short book on this type of method of listening said active listening, “requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from his point of view, just what it is he is communicating to us. More than that, we must convey to the speaker that we are seeing things from his point of view.”
(Book by Carl Rogers and Richard Farson originally released in 1957 called Active Listening)
Active listening was later promoted more many years later by Gordon, who worked with Rogers, who reiterated just how this type of listening method is an important communication skill with his Parent Effectiveness Training program in the early 1960’s. The former Nobel Peace Prize nominee later published a book that became a popular strategy in parenting philosophy in the early 1970’s.
Active listening was originally designed to build trust between patients and the psychotherapist in the helping field and soon after was used in families with marriage counseling to improve dialogue during conflicts. This type of communication skill, active listening, is respected in various professional fields now as an essential soft skill for many people looking for positive outcomes, solutions and an effective way to use their critical thinking skills.
Recently, research confirmed this type of communication style where the listener expresses they care about what the person is saying and avoids giving the speaker unsolicited advice or sometimes “bad advice”. Using this type of listening style, active listening, does help the person to feel “understood” as well as “more satisfied” compared to responding with little feedback or advice.
Better Listening Equals Better Relationships + Better Outcomes
Using active listening can be challenging at times though and can be time-consuming. Make sure that if something is important to the speaker to carve out the appropriate time where you can deeply listen to the person without any distractions, without interjecting, without a bias response or influencing the other person.
It can be very challenging, and this is not a great opportunity to share your opinion or your particular story that relates to you when your loved one is being vulnerable and sharing their important thoughts. The focus and attention should be on the other person, the speaker.
Rogers and Farson in an excerpt from Communicating in Business Today said, "Listening brings about changes in people's attitudes toward themselves and others; it also brings about change in their basic values and personal philosophy. People who have been listened to in this new and special way become more emotionally mature, more open to their experiences, less defensive, more democratic, and less authoritarian."
Your role when listening is trying to stay focused on your loved one and their goals, or their solution. Ask them after a few seconds or a pause, “what is a good outcome you are looking for”? This will reemphasize what we stated earlier, leaders or parents of a nuclear family, as symptoms become less and less with certain stress factors, families improve, the triangle improves and they are freer to be the best they can be.
Many times, it can begin at the beginning of a conversation with just listening very attentively, being mindful this is about the speaker and applying active listening skills, understanding our loved ones much better, uniting for a bigger and better perspective while being a small part of the solution and improving their functioning.
The art of listening in many cases, is a simple, satisfying but selfless act of kindness.
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