Cura te Ipsum
“When I can’t smell myself, do I actually stink?”
You know what I’m saying right? You aren’t aware of your own scent. You aren’t aware of most of what you project into the world and you are certainly entirely unaware of the concepts and imagery used to represent whatever you might be in the heads of others. I find phenomena like this difficult to integrate into any worldview that gives any sort of credence, explicit or otherwise to the notion of human individuality. It seems that there’s always little bits of ourselves that only exist in the consciousness of others and to attain an all-inclusive picture of oneself is an impossibility owing to the inaccessibility of any ‘truthful’ inner representation of us that others may maintain.
There’s an obvious problem with my logic here and I can see a few heavy counterarguments that I would have trouble wrestling to the mat. Screw em. They’re unimportant. I’m not convinced that the concept of Truth wasn’t the real curse levied upon us by the gods when we built our tower high enough to freak them out a little. The ‘confuse their languages’ bit is just misdirection…Regardless, I only set up stuff like this as a sort of needle to be used to pick at some of the more stubborn knots that constitute myself. They’re meant to be useful tools, not assertions of Truth.
The knot
In this case, I’m picking at a knot having to do with my role in my relationships. Generally, I want to bring value to the others that I interact with. I want to help. Failing that, I want to at least make sure that any interaction with me is harmless. I like to think that I’m generally gifted in this arena. I’m non-judgemental, I think that I find it easy to empathize with other folks, I’m decent at language, I’m an experienced traveler on the voyage to self-knowledge and sensitive to the fact that it’s a non-trivial trip. I’m a dripping cauldron of ‘reasoned’ opinion, observation, encouragement, and advice. Unfortunately, and I know that this is basic and mundane, I find it absurdly difficult to be an active listener. I will often find myself compulsively plugging the troubles and observations shared by friends and family into the algorithm of whatever the hell I happen to be thinking about at the moment and subsequently vomiting the output back up all over them. As shitty as this can be for them, it comes from a ‘good’ place. I won’t go into all of the justifications that I have held over the years for that claim. In the end, it’s a rather simple misunderstanding of the fundamental ways in which humans communicate. See, to my conscious thinking self, conversations are almost exclusively about exploration and problem-solving. Almost anytime someone strikes up a conversation, I take as it an explicit invitation to collaborate with their thought processes, and I am eager to share my take on their struggles. “My take helps me!” I think. “Maybe it will help them too”. If you are human, I imagine that you’re currently experiencing some sort of negative emotion as a consequence of reading that. I’m sure that you can imagine the quickness with which I can bring a gathering to a screeching halt. Maybe you even empathize with the folks in my life that just don’t seem to like me very much.
Once I began to understand this, and not from listening to anyone I assure you, I set about the task of learning how to listen. I quickly discovered that I didn’t like it one little bit. There are many reasons for this, but they all have fear at their root. I won’t go into the particulars in this installment, (or will I?) but it’s useful to have that little fact in hand for what’s to come.
And?
I’ve always been amused by the weird congruence between the Hippocratic Oath and the accusation of hypocrisy implicit in the phrase “Physician Heal Thyself”. I know it’s not directly related, but something about the juxtaposition pleases me. I have a particular fondness for hypocrisy. I even have a standard joke about it:
The best advice comes from hypocrites
Seeing how I am an unashamed and firmly committed hypocrite, this is a little self-serving, but I believe that it expresses a deep truth. Namely that if you don’t have personal experience in a given matter, then you have no right to comment on it. I am sorely tempted to attempt to head off any thoughts you may have about how this applies to my shitty listening skills. I assure you that I see your point, but this entire exercise is such an infinite recursive maelstrom of ignorance and arrogance that it would be impossible for me to break that loop even if I could bring myself to try. Plus seeing how this is a one-way communication I don’t have to fucking listen to you anyway! (I kid, I kid)
So we’ve established the following.
- I suck at listening
- I didn’t know that I sucked at listening
Right now, I’m stuck on number two: What the hell has kept me from knowing that I sucked so bad at listening for such a long time? Lack of listening skills is high on the list to be sure, but that’s too pat. Too easy to laugh off. There is a deeper reason I think, and the more I think about it, the more I think that I’m going to have to add another entry to that list. Fine.
3. Listening scares me
Chickenshit
I was recently engaged in a rather emotional conversation with someone very very important in my life and I was trying just as hard as I could to sit and listen. I mean every word and emotion. If it was said or emoted, I was going to absorb and validate it. Be there as a portal for them to use in transforming their fear, sadness, and anger into courage, joy and equanimity. As the conversation was unfolding, I began to notice the sensation of adrenaline in my body. This is a good indicator that I was experiencing something akin to anger. In me, nearly all of my anger is rooted in fear. And so I asked myself. “What in the hell about what this person is saying to me is causing my literally visceral reaction?” At the time, I set it aside as best I could and just continued to do my best to listen.
After a couple of days of chewing on it off and on, I began to see the source of fear as a perception that I might ‘lose myself’ in their emotions and thoughts. And that once I was lost I might never come back. It seems that I was afraid that I might empathize with them to the point of becoming them in some fundamental way. I don’t think that’s exactly what it ‘is’, but it’s at least in the ballpark. Its exact identity is not really important to this exercise, but it needs recognition.
How could I not know?
There’s something fundamentally vulnerable about listening. I’ve had moments listening to music when it begins to inhabit me. I cease to be ‘me’ the person. I become ‘it’ the music. In those moments, I’m not reacting to what the music is doing. I am the music being done.
I think something similar can happen when we truly listen to another person. And that’s what I am afraid of. I don’t want to lose myself to someone else. I don’t trust what they’ll do to me once they’re in there. I’ve had enough bad experiences at the hands of others that I simply mistrust almost everyone. Somewhat ironically, I’m a notorious oversharer. It might seem weird and hard to reconcile, but it makes sense in a way. I control what I say and am in no danger of becoming subsumed by their thoughts. In fact the heaviness of what I am capable of sharing may function as sort of a shield against whatever they may have to communicate since, if they’re truly listening to me, then processing what I’ve dumped onto them leaves them little to no room from within which they might deliver something of themselves to me…. uhh that last realisation needs more thought…
… Let’s leave it here, shall we?
This is early work.
As I was obsessively re-reading this, It dawned on me that maybe what I was feeling was what they were feeling and that it was just empathy in action, not some abstract fear of being subsumed within them. Maybe it’s both? IDK. Perhaps a better subtitle is “Dave’s absurdly complex explorations in the Obvious”.