Emotional Intelligence | Main Page on Listening

Listening, Life and Death

Twenty four hours ago I was feeling suicidal. I was feeling alone and discouraged. Now I am feeling more optimistic about life than I have felt in many years. So what changed so quickly?

Last night I was afraid I was losing a special person from my life. I wrote her an email in which I expressed my fears, frustrations and resentments. Fortunately, I did not send the email. Nor did I show it to her when she came into work late this morning.

Instead I just listened. I had made a conscious decision to listen to her side of things before speaking myself. Last night I had sent her three text messages which went unanswered, and as is so often the case with people from emotionally dysfunctional families, I misinterpreted the situation. So I decided to just let her speak first. That proved to be what we could say was almost a life saving decision.

I saw by the look on her face as soon as I said hello that something was wrong. So I pulled a chair next to hers and said "What's up?"

She sat in silence for a few moments, staring straight ahead at the computer screen.Then she said, "He came over last night."

I knew just what she was talking about. I knew it was an emotionally painful night for her. I pulled the chair even closer and offered her my arm on her shoulders, which she accepted. I said, "And...?" This helped open the doors which were keeping her pain trapped inside. Though she lives with her family, she has no one she can be emotionally honest with there.

She told me what happened and I listened, mostly in silence. Now it reminds me of how I listened to a young girl in Holland a few years ago, an experience I wrote about in the story "Silent Hugs."

As she talked I realized I had misinterpreted things and I was thankful I hadn't immediately started interrogating her when I first saw her. I saw how much pain she was in, how hard it was for her to try to tell him "It's over" without hurting him even more.

When she first started working for me they were still dating. Since then we have developed feelings for each other and things have gotten a bit complicated. I have been feeling afraid she would get back together with him and I would lose my best friend here in Argentina and my best employee all at once. It reminded me of the guideline to not mix work and romance, but I never have been very good at following convention or setting boundaries. Instead I take each situation on its own and unfortunately I have become a little too dependent on her emotionally.

There is another complicating factor. She still lives with her parents, though she is in her early twenties. She is still afraid of them, as many South American females are since it is still common for parents to live by the mentality that "As long as you live in my house you will follow my rules." This has made it very difficult for us to be spontaneous in either work or friendship. She has been afraid, for example, of arriving home 15 minutes late. Since I am afraid some readers will find this hard to believe I will mention how a previous girl I dated was hit with a belt by her mother when she was 22 because the mother didn't approve of us hugging in public.This was because hugging in public "looked bad" to the neighbors. My friend here in Argentina, the subject of my story, was also hit with a belt at age 13 by her father for refusing to obey him in the grocery store one day. So she has lived in fear of her parents all her life.

I will admit that I have sometimes felt judgmental of her and criticized her for putting up with the abuse from her parents and from her ex-boyfriend, but judging her has not helped us become closer, as I would like us to. So I have had to listen to her talk about things while trying to practice everything I preach here on my website.

Yesterday morning it seems to have worked because by the end of the day she had put down a deposit on her first apartment away from home. I feel optimistic because this means she will be able to make her own decisions from now on, if she decides to actually move into the apartment, something which is as of yet still a bit uncertain. Speaking of making her own decisions, one day about two weeks ago her father was verbally attacking her for being gone all day without telling him where she was. She told him, "I went to work in the morning and stayed there until just now," to which he replied, "Vos no te mandas sola", which means roughly, "You don't make your own decisions" or "You are not in charge of your own life." This is still the mentality of many parents of 22 year olds in South America.

But while being in South America has had its moments of frustration, I am still relatively happy here, so for now I will stay. I suppose it has given me a chance to be a more accepting, less judgmental listener. Had I not been a good listener yesterday morning, and instead had started attacking her with questions, there is a good chance my friend and employee would have just walked off.

Fortunately though, I didn't start off saying "I thought we agreed you would come early this morning" or "Why didn't you answer my texts last night?" Instead I held off on my need to question her and just let her talk. We then got to work and later I suggested we get a paper and start looking for apartments for her. Though she has been afraid to move out of her house because she is afraid she won't be able to go back and see her sister and brother, and she is even afraid her mother will turn her two aunts against her and she won't even be able to see her cousins, nieces and nephews (again a common threat and way of controlling females here in South America where the family is supposed to be so important. -- but only if you obey the authoritarian parents) -- she agreed to at least go with me to look at some rooms. Had I not been a good listener, it is unlikely she would have felt this cooperative and open to my suggestion.

We looked at several places and then came back to my office and I asked her what she thought of each one. Then I just listened. We then talked again about her fears of breaking free from her parents' control and I listened to her concerns, helping her clarify them and assess the probability of each one. After our talk we decided to go back to take another look at two of the places and she ended up putting a deposit on one of them.

By the end of the day she was in a totally better mood than when she first arrived at my office. And instead of me feeling suicidal last night from the prospect of losing her, completely there is now an exciting chance that our feelings for each other will have a chance to flourish in an atmosphere of freedom.

Had it not been for what I have learned about listening, validation and invalidation, such a big turn in the emotional tides would have never taken place. That is one thing I am absolutely sure of. So I want to encourage people to take the art and skill of listening seriously.

I have been alone for so long, searching for someone young enough to still feel rebellious and able to understand what I talk about when I use terms like "teen prison", yet old enough to legally get away from their abusive parents, that I have had moments where I think "I will never find someone", which often led do feelings of suicide.

Tonight though, because I was able to just listen, suicide is the last thing on my mind. Instead, I am thinking about all the possibilities of us working and traveling together, and of all the things I can finally start to concentrate on if my search for a life partner is now finally over. Of course I don't know that it is, only time will tell that, but what I am certain of is that my ability to listen to her today has helped us both immeasurably.

S Hein
Salta, Argentina
Jan 12, 2007