Long ago there was a booth called The Lucy Booth where advice was offered for 5 cents. Evolution of counseling and human interactions has made advice a quantity a bit less useful, but the real activity that went on then and is going on now was, and is, listening. Simple focus and compassionate listening to a person with a problem (or several problems) is known to be far more effective than many other calming techniques. It matters a lot that someone cares. Mark Roberts, who had the vision and energy to start the Empathy Tent, is a longtime practitioner of careful and compassionate listening. His older brother suffered from polio which he did not allow to stop him from engaging fully in life and he set an inspiring example of overcoming obstacles and encouraging others to do the same. Mark took up the challenge to move obstacles with personal power, and by engaging others who share the goals of improving our lives for a happier world, he has opened many avenues for people to help themselves find workable solutions to whatever they face. Obstacles are problems with solutions. Steps can be replaced with ramps, door handles with automatic openers, walls can be fitted with doors. It takes will and it takes action, and all of it starts with defining needs and working to solve problems, one step at a time.
The first step is figuring out the need driving the distress and the empathy of a caring listener can be so helpful in figuring out what the underlying need is. Humans can complicate their experiences and layer distresses very effectively, masking their real needs and putting up their own walls to stand between them and getting what they need. We all experience the subtle ways we get in our own way. Often we can't see through the distress to identify what are feelings, misconceptions, assumptions, or denial of what is really bothering us. There are a multitude of ways we can confuse our issues and overwhelm ourselves, making logical choices and actions really hard to find.
The compassionate listener doesn't tell us what to do or what we are feeling or thinking. In my experience, a good listener might reflect what she is hearing or what appears to be the presenting emotion, or just offer a kind look or word to encourage me to go further with my presentation of what's wrong. I am the one who has to feel my emotions, sort them out, and figure out what action I can take to fix my problem. I'm not helpless and don't like the feeling of helplessness, so I don't generally ask for help. I might start to act out my distress: withdraw, get angry at some frustration, take out my frustration on someone else in some altercation that I am drawn into seemingly without my intention. It's easy to take a further step to blame whatever or whomever got caught up in my acting-out. None of these actions bring real relief and can be very distracting.
Years of experience have taught me a few things to listen for to help me see I am irrationally acting out instead of feeling my actual feelings. I might fall into some negative "cognitive errors" (lots of online sources outline these in further detail. I linked to one but haven't really read it...just a place to start.) These are common ways of thinking that take us further away from the problem-solving and into the distress. For me they are commonly control fallacies like thinking I am the one who has to fix the problem, and I can't, or catastrophizing (the Market will die because of this!). I do lots of other things like making things into black-and-white dichotomies that don't have any nuances, (polarized thinking) or magnifying the negative without remembering the positive (filtering). These ways of thinking are easy to fall into and culturally available and supported, particularly if you watch television. All the sit-coms and soap operas display actors falling into these avenues of error and we might see these actors as role models. It seems okay to freak out and do things and then apologize or pick up the pieces. We call it "losing it" or "blowing off steam" and it isn't even seen as violence but we are taught we are helpless to change that pattern and that it is "hard-wired" and helpful. Increasingly we witness people taking their stress out on others and it is so harmful and destructive. Often people just walk away shaking their heads, unable to respond. We aren't taught more boring, productive ways to solve problems from sources such as TV. In fact, these events are juicy and entertaining and often make the news. You don't generally see news stories about people who engage in warm problem-solving interactions that de-escalate the distress and calm the participants so they can think clearly.
But through people like Marshall Rosenberg and countless others we can be introduced to way more productive ways to make life easier and more productive without so much of the stress and distress brought about by our thinking errors and assumptions. It's really rare that someone is out to get you. The post-office clerk or the grocery checker isn't doing or saying things to mess up your life, they are doing their work within the confines of their job situation and they might be as unhappy as you are on that particular day. You might display behavior that pushes them into their own stress reactions. It's your job to get the skills to keep your stress and issues from hurting other people. To do that job you have to do some work.
Whether you do that work in years of private therapy, in a discussion group, or in your chair with a book or the internet, the information is out there for you to learn the skills and there are lots of people who are willing to support you while you learn to practice it. Just reading about it doesn't make you able to use the skills in the situations where you need them the most. Generally, I have found, I need some other human to listen to me and hold the space for me to hear myself. I can (most times now) hear my assumptions surface and my illogical thoughts without much prompting, partly because I am an artist and my brain is trained to look at problems from lots of different angles while I try to figure out the creative solutions. Emotional problems are simply a different, more nebulous set of challenges than artistic problems, and if you don't have the skills it will be like a jeweler trying to build a rack without the woodworking tools to make it easy. I've done lots of things with bad tools and then redone them with the right tools and been amazed at the difference.
When you try to hang a door or even change out the lockset with a dull chisel you will probably split the frame and make a messy hole around the lock, as well as mis-align the parts so the door won't close well. I have several doors in that condition, as I built this house with few skills and learned as I went. The last time I did it I was much better at it than the first time. I got better tools, learned why they need to be sharp, and was better able to use them in the proper ways to get a more finished result. Emotional issues are similar. While yelling and driving someone away may solve the immediate problem of the irritation you are feeling around them, it shifts some of your irritation to them, to people who had to watch you yell at them, and on down the line. They might take that stress you handed them and take it out on someone else. Most people are really good at personalization, taking everything that happens and thinking it is mostly about them. It is easy to set off a chain of negative thoughts in them, thinking about the things they should have done, the ways they should have defended themselves, taken control of the situation, or taking on the hurt and feeling like an inadequate person in some way, internalizing the conflict to hurt themselves.
If you could have taken your frustration to a listener and worked through it to let go of it, you could have addressed the actual problem with the other person, if there was one. You could have owned your frustration, felt the irritation as something you were believing in (not an actual fact like the temperature), and faced the issue as something that could be eased. Many of us are not in the habit of owning our feelings. Even the simple language of talking about feelings can be improved. I read a great article about phrasing yesterday: the subtle difference you feel when you say something in these three ways: I am delighted; I am feeling delighted; I feel delight. The first two created a little distance from the feeling (delight) and the third connects you to the emotion in your body and is a clear declaration of your experience. If you substitute "frustrated and frustration" into the sentences it is a little more clear. What Vika Miller says in her blog is: The first phrase ("I'm delighted/frustrated") uses English in a way that says something has been done to us, and that our experience is static or ongoing. I AM [fill in the blank] says that I'm this way all the time; it labels me and tells my brain that this experience is all there is. Both of these slow or stop the flow of Life energy ...
The second phrase ("I'm feeling delighted/frustrated") lets go of this labeling, this linguistic permanence, and acknowledges that what we're experiencing is a momentary experience, rather than what we ARE. But, it still suggests that something has been done to us. The first one allows more energy to flow, while the second one still limits that flow somewhat...
The third phrase ("I'm feeling delight/frustration") focuses our attention on the present-moment experience arising within us, allowing all the Life energy to flow freely.
Her point is mostly that the language that we use really matters in the ways we communicate and process our emotions. These may seem like very subtle fine points but I wanted to show how the basic owning of one's emotions can help greatly in communicating and solving human-interaction problems.
Trying to find a way to control the forces that act on us might seem like our job and might seem overwhelming, but most of the ways we have learned to exert control in our society are by oppressing someone else. Most of the things we encounter cannot be controlled. Most of them have to be dealt with more creatively than that. Thanks to the internet and to the wise people in our community, we have lots of ways to start thinking about these more elegant solutions and our response to the complications of our lives. What we say and do is important, and when we are next to each other on Saturdays, in the state of vulnerability that we open ourselves to each week putting our creations on display, we are all at risk of hurting ourselves and each other if we cannot stay in our most loving human state. I'm not saying it's easy; far from it. I have to talk myself through something every week that could derail me and send me into negative thinking. I use the good listeners in my neighborhood and my friend group to help me regain my rational thoughts and not go further into my irrational assumptions. I talk to Mark, as I am lucky enough to be a friend of his and he is very generous with himself.
If I am stuck in my booth with no neighbors I'm comfortable with, and the pressure of thinking I have to be there to serve my customers above all, I can go off the rails. I see it in someone every week. Some of us are more fragile than others, more or less grounded, more or less clear in a particular moment or time. Autumn stresses me and I don't like to be cold. I worry about the declining sales on the days with the early football games. I worry about lots of things. But worrying is focusing on an outcome I don't want, so I try to use the skills I've gained to redirect my worrier warrior. I can't control the weather or the football schedule or the customer or my neighbors or much of anything besides my response. That I can, with support
, learn to control. If I do that imperfectly, I am a human being. I don't really believe in perfection.
So what I'm saying is hurrah for the Empathy Tent, and I want to encourage everyone to stop in there for a moment or several. Use this terrific resource Mark and his associates are kind enough to provide us when we need it so much. Use the available resources. Learn more: Oregon Network for Compassionate Communication. Read more, think more, even feel your feelings more. Don't think you have to tough things out like a pioneer or a buccaneer. We live in an age of abundant resources. Give yourself the gift of empathy. Take care of yourself, and that will make life more wonderful for all of us. I pledge to do my best to do the same.
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