Heartfelt listeners will keep you alive
The life-sustaining magic of being truly heard
I have this one friend who leaves me five minute long voice notes. She lives out of town, so we mainly communicate over the phone. It’s usually me calling her, these days. I’ve been navigating an unprecedented and painful ending to a relationship I’d thought would be the one to last. Her attention has brought me some solace, and the reasons why have astounded me.
It goes like this: I call her after work. As soon as she asks how I am, everything that had weighed my heart down that day bubbles up like a dark spring. It pours down the phone and she listens, drinking it in. She periodically makes noises every so often to her two-year-old, who vies with me for her attention. But, even as she distracts him, she hears me. Even as she has to hang up to attend to him, I stay on her mind. When she ends the call with ‘I love you,’ what she means is ‘your grief is safe with me.’
Later on in the evening, once her little boy is down for sleep, I’ll get those voice notes back. But they won’t be her taking her turn to catch me up on the trials of young single motherhood, though she would be well within her rights, and I expect her to. Instead, she slowly and softly hands me back the things I’ve shared with her. She picks them up and turns them over and carefully puts them back in place, like heavy, shiny river stones. With all the gentle, expert handling of my deepest thoughts and feelings of a Jungian analyst, she makes me make sense. It floors me. I had handed her a rabble of untidy pain and she had turned it into something justified, logical, and okay.
I lie in bed listening to her words and feel held in the knowledge that I am understood, accepted, and loved. This is her magic.
The gift of mirroring
Being echoed like this has made me realise that the barrier between two souls is permeable — we have the capacity to feel into and share someone’s emotional experience. It removes the worst part of grief, which, in my experience, is sense of isolation it brings. No one has ever measured how much pain a heart can hold. How do we know if anyone has ever felt the way we feel? If anyone can relate?
The ones who can relate shine your pain back at you, holding it up like a glowing thing, affording some kind of reverence to your experience. They affirm the effort it takes on your part to bear it. This empathy dissolves their distance from you. You are together in your struggle.
This gift can literally keep us alive. It takes away the possibility of escapism, which is usually only attainable through denial and self-destructive habits. The escape artist in us wants the pain removed and will go to great lengths to drown it. Otherwise, it might do all sorts of mental gymnastics to place the blame for the pain elsewhere, scapegoating whoever is complicit. Having someone who will listen and validate the pain removes the escape artist from the picture by exposing the flaws in their magic trick. There is no way out but through.
Listening as a generative act
Far from removing hope, though, being truly heard is an encouraging thing. It keeps you moving. The struggle may be an unavoidable part of life’s process, but your perseverance is a worthy thing. It must be, if you’re both there, getting through it together, right?
As I do with most of life’s big, uncomfortable shifts, I have also turned to guidance from mythological stories. In the Sumerian tradition, I find archetypes that reflect my own experience of going into and coming back out of pain — and the connections that have helped me to make that journey. Ereshkigal is the dark goddess of death, woe and stasis. When the god of water and wisdom, Enki, seeks to help the goddess of life and fertility, Inanna, return from Ereshkigal’s underworld where she is captive, he sends two creatures down to allay the dark goddess. He created them as neither male or female. This sexlessness represents the fact that their consciousness knows no separation or discrimination. They are the embodiment of reflection, connection and empathy. They go down to listen Ereshkigal’s litany of woe, as she herself is in great pain. They echo her, turning her pain into prayer and poetry. She is so honoured and grateful to hear the song of herself that she grants Inanna’s return, so that life and abundance can be restored in the topside world. In the book, Descent to the Goddess, Sylvia Brinton Perera describes what it was that Ereshkigal really needed:
‘Complaining is one voice of the dark goddess. It is a way of expressing life, valid and deep in the feminine soul. It does not, first and foremost seek alleviation, but simply to state the existence of things as they are felt to be by a sensitive and vulnerable being.’
Feeling safe to accept our pain through companionship allows us to find resolution. It means we can accept that a new way of being must emerge — a new version of ourselves. A stronger, more confident self. One that trusts life’s process even when it sounds out its misery, like a woman striding purposefully with a wailing child on her hip. I think of my friend. She’s capable of dwelling with the emotions of a two year old and tending to them, bringing them with her into the next moment and the next — each more hopeful than the one before — until joy is restored. She has a duty to care for that sobbing child, and it’s honourable work. It’s an easier task for her if we revere and support her, rather than judge her mothering or whether the child should or shouldn’t be upset. And so it is when we need tend to the wounded parts of our own selves.
I feel renewed after listening to her soft consolations. It’s a lesson in how to empower people to transition out of their struggle by simply letting them complain, validating their experience, paying attention to their pain and showing them that you have heard them. The energy this provides can help us to re-ascend into a new, more generous, more capable version of ourselves. It comes from our own power to gently accept things how they are, right now. But to do that one, brave, simple thing, we need to hear that we aren’t alone.
