Active listening: A path to true presence

Selim Baouz
4 min readFeb 6, 2024

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Hello everyone, in this article, we’re going to talk about something very important and unfortunately so forgotten … Active listening.

This article contains various sources whose authors I don’t know (I haven’t managed to find them), but which I thought worth sharing because of the importance of the subject.

Let’s get started.

Listening is one of the hardest things to do. We often think we’re listening, when in reality we’re only in our fears and our own history.

We think we’re listening, when in reality we’re only reacting, not really being there for the other person.

Our habit is to give advice, to judge, to be afraid of the other’s reaction, to push away the other’s feelings, to find solutions for the other, to panic, to cry, to get angry, to give sympathy…

But that’s not listening…

To listen to the other person, we have to learn to listen to ourselves without pushing away our own feelings, without judging ourselves, without being afraid.

Hard, isn’t it?
It’s amazing how something as simple as listening is so hard to put into practice. :)

There’s a quote I’m very fond of, which for me represents what true listening is all about:

“True listening requires self-forgetfulness.” Scott Pec

Lack of communication is the main factor in the rift that develops between two individuals, and while it’s true that most of the time the fault lies with one or both parties, it’s nonetheless a subject that deserves our attention and serious discussion.

It’s obvious that the lack of attention to each other is the cause of this problem we have to face.

To illustrate what I mean, I’ll give you two examples of the parent-child relationship:

First example

A father learns that the day before, the janitor has been robbed of money, so he starts a long speech about the consequences of dishonesty in front of his children. The children, not having been involved in the misdeed, are perplexed, as they don’t feel concerned by the speech.

Some parents imagine they know everything about everything, and when they launch into grand speeches they believe themselves to be the guardians of the moral order, forgetting to listen to the accused party and his or her point of view on events.

Once their tirade is over and their advice has gone unheeded, they wonder how they can get their children to listen to them at all.

Second example

A young girl complains that her mother doesn’t listen to her. She claims that her mother doesn’t understand her problems, and that when she tries to talk to her about important matters, she blows her off on the pretext that she’s boring her.

This situation is the opposite of the first; here we’re dealing with a parent who feels tired or bewildered by their child’s incessant changes, and whose outbursts are misunderstood.

Just because you’re asked to listen doesn’t mean you’re asked to have an answer for everything; indeed, this request may be aimed solely at finding someone who can listen to problems, talk therapy, or be a roundabout way of giving keys to one’s life (the speaker’s life), and so on..

But if parents turn away from this request and this attitude becomes customary, they shouldn’t be surprised to find that their children become strangers to them, and that in time they no longer share anything together.

Just as young people don’t always express their problems correctly or show the purest intelligence, we don’t always find the most effective solutions to the problems raised, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen.

How can we understand problems if we refuse to listen?
It’s our duty to lend an attentive ear to problems.

If we don’t listen to others, how can we ever be heard?

I’ll conclude with a poem by Virginia Satir that describes listening so well:

Listen
When I ask you to listen,
And that you give me advice,
You don’t do what I ask.
When I ask you to listen to me,
And you tell me I shouldn’t feel this way,
You trample on my feelings
When I ask you to listen to me,
And you think you have to do something,
To solve my problem,
You’re hurting me,
Strange as it may seem to you.

Just listen!
All I ask is that you listen to me.
Not talk or do, or just hear me.
I don’t need advice.
I can do things:
I’m not without resources;
Maybe I’m a little discouraged, or hesitant,
But I’m not helpless.

When you do something for me
And I can do it myself,
You contribute to my fear and weakness.

But when you accept as a simple fact
That I feel what I feel,
No matter how irrational,
Then I can stop trying to convince you,
And work on understanding what’s going on inside me.

And, if one day, you wish to speak,
“I’ll listen to you too.”

Virgina Satir (1916–1988)

I hope you enjoyed this article and I’ll see you soon for new articles. Don’t hesitate to add a clap and subscribe if you liked the article, it will help me a lot :)

Don’t hesitate to send me a message if you have any questions or problems.

See you soon

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Selim Baouz
Selim Baouz

Written by Selim Baouz

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