When I have done couples therapy in the past, on occasion I asked one partner to sit in a chair off to the side while I worked with the dreams and life stories of the other. My idea was that the people did not really know each other. Maybe by listening to each other and exploring their psyches they might have more empathy and a deeper appreciation for what the other was dealing with. As couples share their lives, they may come to think that they really know the other well. But that kind of intimacy can be misleading. Familiarity is not knowledge, and, in fact, it may be a block to really knowing the partner as a separate person. Some distance is necessary, hence my practice of attending to one person at a time. I encourage the one partner to be a close observer, perhaps gaining some empathy for the other. By listening to the soul I mean hearing the story that can’t be told.

This is what I think it takes.

Two things.

One, we have to get it, really get it, that one person’s generative attention produces another person’s new thinking.

Don’t rush that.

Two, a person’s generative attention loses its power the very second it wavers. Attention like this has to be continuous.

Take that in, too. It defies 3,000 years of instruction in how to listen.

Most important is that feelings are so interwoven with thinking that to allow one and not the other is to diminish both. We can listen to words and we can listen to tears. It is all the same thing. I know that at the moment the world of brain talk is full of the separation of these two systems. But that will pass soon enough, just as almost all efforts at human compartmentalization have. Life is enough, just as almost all efforts at human compartmentalization have. Life is everything all at once. Even space is stuff that hugs us. Life is one lavish act of touching. Thinking and feeling are no exceptions. So we can rejoice.

And when someone is thinking along and starts to cry, let’s just be glad they felt psychologically safe enough with us to do that. And then watch the fresh thinking that follows. And the bright eyes that say so.

To think afresh about an issue by listening with interest to an extreme opposing view feels, therefore, like risking personal annihilation. This assumption of ‘core difference’ is nothing less than the fear of ceasing to be.

Sometimes this difference is not even substantive. Sometimes it is a shift internally that the listener cannot see, but the thinker can feel. Sometimes it is a new emotional relationship with the thought.

So I have become impressed by those thinker-‘repetition’ moments, now understanding that, yes, it matters what the thinker says, but it matters more what happens for them because they say it.