Listen to me
How often does a person in your life fully listen to you,
without judgment, without trying to make you feel better?
Simply listens - with love and compassion -
radiating the goodness that you are back to you
despite the uncomfortable, “ugly” things you are feeling and saying.
Have you ever had this experience?
Have you given this to your children?
The topic of listening has been heavily on my mind and in my heart. For the past several weeks I have been meeting with a listening partner to vent about parenting challenges that arose in the previous week. During the call, we each take the same amount of time to share and listen. We don’t talk about what is shared. We simply radiate the inherent goodness the person is back to them, trusting that they have the wisdom within them to get through this. It is a practice from the parenting model Hand in Hand Parenting by Patty Wipfler. My dear friend turned me onto Patty’s work after hearing some consistent struggles I was having with my 12-year-old son. It has been an incredibly healing container thus far.
This week it was brought to my attention to begin practicing the other tools Patty outlines in her book, Listen: Five Simple Tools to Meet Your Everyday Parenting Challenges, specifically a tool called stay listening. It is a process of grounding yourself when your child is upset and maintaining a loving container for them to express all of their emotions in all of their enormity. You lovingly state the boundary of whatever triggered them until there is a noticeable shift in their emotional state, i.e. all of the yelling, tears, etc. are expressed and a lightness of being remains.
When my partner was sharing her experience about using stay listening in her parenting experience, I began to cry. What she was describing was so far from the experience I had as a child. It touched on a deep wound that I had and was never able to name so clearly. As a child I had the need to be unconditionally listened to and instead I was met with fixing me or pretending it was not happening. This created a vast crevice in my inner world with how I navigated listening to my own needs and desires. Fast forward decades later and here I am now doing the same thing with my own children because I had yet to see with enough clarity the wound that still resides in my own heart.
As humans, we all have a need to be listened to. Yet, at least in American culture, many have no idea how to listen. Often we do not even attempt it and instead prepare a litany of defenses in our minds while another person is sharing. I certainly know this has been a common pattern for me and I have had to be diligent about not slipping into this mode when listening to my loved ones. We have such a fear of being wrong, unloveable, and unworthy that it prevents us from experiencing authentic connection with others and with ourselves. It also causes us to prove ourselves “right” and we are left feeling isolated, unseen, and unloved. When we meet our children this way an opportunity for validation and authentic connection can become explosive arguing, consequences, judgment of emotional expression, modeling to “stuff it back in.”
Learning how to listen to our children models for them a way to listen to themselves moving forward. It provides them with a strategy for emotional regulation as adults. It also offers a chance to re-parent yourself from the listening you may not have received as a child. Add in a listening partner and you get to say all the fearful things you may be thinking (this week mine were - my child is going to grow into an abuser if this continues, he is going to burn the house down, his addiction to screen time is going to lead him to become an alcoholic or heroin addict) to an adult who can objectively and lovingly hear it all and still think you are the incredible parent you are. It is so simple and yet so marvelously divine to be fully listened to.
Dare to Desire.
Kristen