Self-Care: Listening

Did I Just Hear That Come Out of My Mouth?

I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last week or so, but three really stuck with me. Three different women with three very different relationships in my life, but listening to each of these conversations was wildly different, and it showed. I am not proud of the way I handled all of them. I am going to be upfront and honest and say that. But I hope we can all glean some wisdom from these.

The first one I want to talk about happened with someone where my defenses were up. I was ready for boundaries to happen, not a fight, but an assertion of my rights. In the past, I didn’t know how to make requests of this person to stop things that bothered me, and I wanted to try. I did not expect it to go well, but I never expect anything to go well. She knows I have a religious background so she brought up a famous religious person whom she adores. “Do you know so and so? I love him!” My face dropped. “I hate him.” The next however long it took for this conversation to reach its brutal conclusion, neither of us happy with it, I learned a few things. Both of us were stubborn. Neither of us were going to change our minds on this matter at all. And she treated her opinion as fact and acted as if she was being persecuted if anyone went against her opinion. This I learned when I confronted her later on another opinion she happened to have on a completely different matter and was met with the same type of reaction.

The second one I want to talk about happened with someone where my defenses were down. I knew they were going through a rough patch. They needed some “me time.” During the conversation, she vented and whined and talked bad about people but at the same time, her heart was breaking for them because she wanted them to be in a better place. She just honestly didn’t know how to help them. And I didn’t know how to nor have the resources to help them either. So I listened to her vent, I rubbed her back gently for a few seconds. I told her it was going to be okay several times. I did all I thought I could do. She left feeling guilty that she spent all the time dumping on me, but I assured her that she needed people to vent to every now and then.

The third conversation was half conversation, half letter. I’ve been learning things that have helped me in my life, and people have commented that it helped me, so I’ve been trying to help other people heal and learn how to help themselves. That’s part of what this whole blog is about. For Christmas, I wrote a letter to someone who has been grieving a loss for years. There is nothing inherently wrong with grieving a loss for years and years. Grief takes as long as it takes, and there is no time limit to it. But people have been trying to get me to get over the car accident that happened in 2016, and I feel like I have made major headway in doing so…with the encouragement of other people. I wrote this person a letter basically saying it’s okay to let go of the grief that you feel for your deceased one. It doesn’t mean you’re letting go of them. It doesn’t mean you’re replacing them or you need to replace them or any of that. You have the love of family and friends and so many types of love without the couples love that we put on a pedestal. You don’t have to have that to be happy. And she agreed wholeheartedly. I also put in there that any time she wants to talk about her deceased one, she can tell me, email me, text me, Facebook me, whatever, and at the end of the year, I can take all the stories and help her compile them so she has something to remember him by.

There are different ways of listening and not listening. I think the minimum of listening is that both parties need to be open minded to changing even the slightest thing about what they think. That’s why the first conversation was never going to work out. We could both yell until we were blue in the face, but no matter what facts or beliefs we pointed in each other’s faces, it wouldn’t change each other’s minds. I think another thing we are all guilty of is finding the next thing to say before the other person is finished talking. In the second conversation, I wasn’t the only listening party, and at one point, they all looked at me and asked if something was wrong and I simply said, “oh, well can I jump in now?” because it was difficult to get a word in edgewise at some points. I think the third thing of listening is not to assume the other person’s intentions or what they want before you go into the conversation. I think I might have done that with conversation number three, and if I did so, I sincerely apologize. I apologized several times throughout the whole thing, pointing out that the only reason I brought it up was because we could see it was hurting her and we wanted her to stop being weighed down by the hurt and be happy by the honoring.

If any of this doesn’t make sense or if you have more tips on listening, leave a comment!