Why the Most Important Thing You Can Offer Someone Isn’t Words
On Active Listening and Silence
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There’s a session I return to often in my mind. My client had been talking about lyrics they couldn’t finish. They circled the same few sentences over and over, and I noticed myself doing something I’m not proud of: I began constructing a response in my mind. While they were still speaking, I was already three steps ahead, thinking about saying something that would be useful. The kind of thing that says, “I hear you” (the irony).
Then they stopped mid-sentence and looked at me. Just… looked. And I made myself stop, too, and just let the silence sit between us…
Many of us were never taught to listen. We were taught to respond, to be quick, articulate and prepared. Because silence is either “awkward” or “dangerous”. So we learned to “pre-load” and be ready.
The problem is that pre-loading is not listening but managing. You’re managing the discomfort of not knowing what to say or the impression you’re trying to make, or you’re trying to steer the conversation towards a solution. And whilst you’re managing all of that, the other person is still speaking, and you are functionally elsewhere.
And especially for creatives, that’s a pattern that can run deep. So much of our life is spent translating inner experience into something “communicable”. And the moments when someone truly perceives you (not interprets, but rather hears) feel almost shocking because they’re so rare.
The most common wound underneath presenting problems in my practice often isn’t a lack of confidence or a creative block. It’s the experience of not having been listened to.
What Active Listening Actually Is (And Isn’t)
Active listening has been somewhat ruined by corporate speak and the workshops that are teaching to nod emphatically and parroting back, “So what I hear you saying is…” Which, and I’ll be really honest here, can feel robotic rather than connective. It has nothing to do with being held.
Real active listening is a decision you make before the other person begins speaking: I am going to be present. I am going to resist the impulse to fix, frame, or outpace unless you ask me to. It means you have to clear space inside yourself so that someone else’s experience can actually land.
In practice, this looks like:
Following rather than leading
When someone is working their way towards something difficult, the instinct is often to help them get there faster. But the process of getting there is the point, because it’s about someone’s relationship to vulnerability and trust, or to the narrative that’s a bit ingrained. If you shortcut it, you skip the most important part.
Holding your interpretations lightly
This is hard, especially for people who are perceptive. Because when you can see something, there’s definitely a pull to say it. But that can redirect someone away from where they were actually headed, towards where you think they should go. A good question to keep in mind is: Is this for them, or is this for me?
What Silence Teaches Us
Silence in relationships can feel terrifying because we’ve learnt to read it as absence: Someone goes quiet and we assume disapproval or disconnection/absence. And that’s why we rush to fill it, because we think that way, we can avoid rejection somehow.
For creatives, silence has another component: Many of my clients spend large portions of their lives in “productive silence”, like writing, sketching, developing ideas. So you’d think they’d intuitively understand that silence is where things live before they take shape? And yet in relationships, they’re as prone as anyone to “pre-load”.
One of the most useful things we can offer in therapy is not rescuing someone from silence, and just letting it do what it needs to do.
Thank you for reading this far—there’s really so much amazing stuff on here, so I truly appreciate it. If what I write resonates in any way, a comment, restack or like is really welcome…
I want to be honest about another thing. The people I’ve found hardest to listen to have often been the ones I care about most. In close relationships, we start to believe we already know someone, and we build a model of them in our heads, and over time we stop updating it, so to speak. So we end up listening to the model instead of the person.
And the scary thing is that’s actually a form of disconnection, annd it’s not unlikely the other person feels it before they can name it. They might start self-censoring and give you an “edited version”.
The antidote isn’t a single conversation but a repeated decision to treat the person in front of you as someone you don’t entirely understand yet. Because you don’t. No matter how long you’ve known them.
If you’re a creative working through relational patterns (or simply someone who wants to be more present with the people you love), you could try things like asking yourself what you just heard before you respond. Not what you think they meant, or what it reminded you of. What did this person actually say?
Notice where your attention goes when it wanders. What pulled you away? Discomfort? Your own unprocessed stuff?
You can totally practise being curious, even with people you know well. Especially with people you know well.
Maybe that’s what listening really is: Letting something be what it is before you decide what it means. We need to create enough internal space so the other person (or the other person’s art, or our own, or…) can find its shape without being pushed into it.
It’s definitely a quieter (d’uh 🤣) way to show up. But in my experience, it’s the kind of presence people remember…
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