The advent of pandemic was registered emotionally by individuals as loneliness, fear, nostalgia and a feeling of forgetting one’s self as a relational being. Perhaps as a consequence of the same, the world witnessed an increase in listening spaces devoted to mental health concerns, where the primary vehicle of care was hearing the other’s distress in the present moment without an emphasis on looking for solutions. However, the vast reports on listening work during the pandemic differed both in their aims, and targeted population.
The Mental Health Foundation in 2021, for instance, emphasized the importance of peer support groups where individuals gather without an expert with an aim to share knowledge, provide emotional support, and engage in social interaction. Gather Sisters (2021) is also an organization that came forward to provide a listening space to women who shared their everyday struggles and meditated together, with an aim to find collective meaning to moments of struggle.
The Value of Listening Spaces for Young Adults
The Morningside Centre for Teaching and Social Responsibility (2019) highlights the value of such spaces for young adults, as they are given an opportunity to articulate all that they feel without interruptions which makes one come close to the therapeutic moment of witnessing one’s private inner world without swiftly moving to a search for cure. Sneha, Therapize India, Peak Mind, and Sumaitri are a few examples of the many mental health helplines that primarily offer listening services to distressed callers. Many therapeutic models such as psychoanalysis and humanism have theorised about the transformative power of listening, which in itself provides the receiver with a feeling of being cared for:
A study undertaken by Wilbur in 2001 is useful to understand the origin of a listening circle as a recreation of a Native American ritual of sitting in a circle and passing around a “talking stick” holding which each member would in turn expressing one’s feeling in an uninhibited manner, where the group aims to provide the speaker a feeling of respect and “complete acceptance.”
It was this feeling of being attended to and accepted that was missing during the peak of the pandemic as a number of people reported feeling overwhelmed by their own thoughts and feelings. In most of the initiatives mentioned above we can see that the act of listening takes up the center stage, instead of other modes of support such as advice, suggestions, or confrontations with reality.
Listening as a Nuanced Approach to Mental Health
It is my aim to use these recent reports to suggest listening as a skill which was increasingly put on the back burner in favor of more directive approaches to suffering, has once again entered the limelight as a nuanced approach to mental health. Evidence of this can be found on multiple forums ranging from the popular New York Times, with it’s article “Listening During a Pandemic” by Kate Murphy (2020) to new organizations within the Indian subcontinent such as Press Unstress (2021) which trained and certified a group as listeners to run a mental health helpline. It is also interesting and heartwarming to note that a number of university students began independent listening groups with a desire to provide psychological safety and support free of cost to struggling students.
Numerous researches conducted on the effects of the pandemic on mental health have noted a feeling of paranoia, and hyper awareness of one’s body and mind to detect the “bad virus” or the “invisible enemy.” This state becomes easier to work through as one is able to put into words their fear, and experience it as carefully attended to by a listener who is not dismissive or carefree with speakers’ vulnerability. Listening in fact can work as a grounding exercise to bring a person back to themselves, by rendering the unthinkable anxiety open to the cathartic effect of speech and dialogue.
Key Considerations for Effective Listening
Models on individual and group therapy work with this tenet, to strengthen the relationship between the therapist and the client. Developmental psychology through the works of Donald Winnicott also contributes to the importance of listening as we realize that a child only feels real when s/he realizes that their words have an effect on their caregivers. That is to say, one begins their journey of feeling real due to the impact they have on those who listen to them.
However, one must not throw caution to the wind and note without reluctance that listening is a nuanced activity that requires effort. As Graham Bodie, a professor at Oxford in his research on listening notes, less than 5% of individuals are emotionally attuned while listening. Without emotional attunement, that is, grasping the inner state of the speaker while listening to them, we might unknowingly make things worse by alienating them from their narrative. Thus, while listening a few important things to note are:
- Letting the speaker be the center: This is easier said than done. Words, feelings and stories of the speaker often encourage the listener to bring their own stories to the forefront, leaving the intention of the conversation behind. Using your own life experiences to facilitate the listening process serves as a valuable tool only when one can use these to help imagine the listener’s context and emotional state.
- Your own emotions are a powerful indicator: While listening to a distressing or overwhelming narative, one experiences intense emotions of sorrow, confusion, dread, fatigue etc. These emotions are not to be discarded/dismissed but used to understand the listener better, as they have probably emerged from the conversation itself.
- Starting fresh: If one is aware that they have to listen to overwhelming experiences as a part of a helpline or a listening group, it is helpful to use 15 minutes before this commitment to enter a self-reflective state through grounding exercises. These not only help one get into the “zone” of listening, but serve to declutter one’s mind to make space for another person’s story and experiences.
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