My last post was about empathic reflection—the practice of reflecting back the desires and emotions of the person you’re listening to.  While this may sound simple, it’s trickier than it sounds.  When an interaction starts to feel emotionally intense, it’s easy to fall back into old, reactive patterns of thinking and behaving.  If someone is angry and we’re feeling attacked, for instance, it can be hard to avoid the temptation to stop listening and start defending ourselves.  Similarly, if the other person is sad or worried, it can be difficult to stop consoling them and actually listen to what they’re telling us.

In this post, I’ll talk about some ways we can stay centered, and continue caring about the other person, even when faced with a lot of emotional charge.

Recognize That It’s All Just Sensation.  If the emotional intensity of the conversation is starting to feel overwhelming, pause for a moment, take a breath, and notice what you’re experiencing in your body.  Is some part of your body—maybe your shoulders, neck, pelvis or somewhere else—feeling tight?  Is some place—perhaps your face or hands—getting uncomfortably warm?

Usually we mentally label these sensations, calling them “anger,” “joy,” “fear,” and so on.  What’s more, we come up with a mental story about why they’re happening—for example, “what she said made me angry,” or “he hurt me when he looked away from me.”  Still further, we tell ourselves we’ve “got to do something” about what we’re feeling to “make things right”—“I’ve got to hurt him back,” “I need to make her feel better,” “I must prove my point,” and so forth.

What I invite you to do is experiment with letting go of these labels and stories, and purely focusing on the physical sensations arising in you.  What I think you’ll find is that, without all the mental stories about what other people are doing and how you need to respond, those sensations no longer seem so threatening or intense.  It’s just a tension in your shoulders, a heat in your forehead, or something else that, in all likelihood, will quickly pass, leaving you intact and unharmed.  In other words, it probably won’t kill you.

For some people, it seems difficult to slow down and notice the sensations they’re feeling, because emotionally charged interactions feel really fast-paced.  Maybe, for example, the other person is demanding to know why you did this or that, and you feel an intense pressure to answer them as quickly as possible.

In these moments, it’s useful to remember that you, as one of the parties to the conversation, actually have some control over its pace.  You don’t have some kind of “moral obligation” to talk as quickly as the other person, have every bit of information they demand at your fingertips, or otherwise follow their lead.  (In fact, as I wrote in an earlier piece, sometimes it’s more enjoyable and meaningful to stay silent.)  It takes practice to keep this in mind, but when you really internalize this, relating with people can become less stressful.

Ask Yourself What You’re Really Defending Against.  As I said, it can be tough not to slip into our old habits of defending ourselves when we feel attacked.  And, what we usually don’t stop and wonder is what we’re really trying to defend ourselves against in those moments.  In other words, if someone is criticizing you and you’re feeling defensive, try asking yourself:  what am I trying to prevent from happening right now?  What goal am I really trying to achieve?

If you’re able to slow down and observe what you’re thinking and feeling in moments like these, you may notice an inner voice making comments like:

“If I hurt the other person, I won’t feel as hurt.”

“I need their approval, love or respect to survive.”

“This conversation is a fight or a competition that I need to win.”

“If I don’t convince them I’m right, I’ll be punished or even killed.”

Once you recognize what your inner voice is saying and why it feels so important to defend yourself, ask yourself if what that voice says is really true.  What I suspect you’ll notice is how paranoid, childlike and disconnected from reality that voice often sounds.  Usually, the assumptions it makes simply aren’t true—you don’t need the other person’s approval to live, and hurting them isn’t really likely to make you feel better.

When you have this realization, you may begin taking your urge to stop listening and counterattack a bit less seriously, and feeling like you can actually choose how to respond in a conflict situation rather than automatically reacting.

At a deeper level, I suspect that the voice that urges us to defend ourselves is a relic of very early moments in our lives, when the world looked unfamiliar, scary and confusing.  While I think it’s helpful to treat this frightened, young part with compassion, we don’t have to leave it in charge of how we relate to people.

Connect With Your Curiosity.  One thing that tends to happen in emotionally charged interactions is that we lose our curiosity about what’s going on for the other person.  If they’re feeling frustrated, despondent or something else and blaming us for it, we stop trying to understand why they’re feeling and acting the way they are, and instinctively start withdrawing, attacking, tuning them out, or whatever else we normally do to protect ourselves.

The next time you find this happening for you, see if you can consciously choose to stay curious about what’s having the other person be this way.  What’s going on at a deeper level that’s having them blame, belittle, ignore, or do whatever they’re doing in this moment?  What are they really concerned about or afraid of?  What ideas might they have about the world and their place in it that would cause them to be like this?

What I think you’ll find if you can consciously choose to stay curious about the other person is that, even if there’s a lot of anger, sadness, fear or something else coming up in the conversation, the interaction can actually stay interesting and fulfilling to be in.  Seeking to understand someone else and where they’re coming from, even when they’re expressing intense emotion, can actually be an adventure.

As Juliet from LifeMadeGreat recently observed, our desire as human beings to be understood is at least as important as our desire for money, relationships, “six-pack abs” and all the other typical “personal development” goals.  Just having a genuine interest in understanding what’s going on for another person, in my experience, can defuse conflicts and bring a peace and depth to our conversations.

If you enjoyed this post, check out the rest of the series:

The Joy of Listening, Part 1: Overcoming The Barriers
The Joy of Listening, Part 2: Empathic Reflection
The Joy of Listening, Part 4: Setting Boundaries
The Joy of Listening, Part 5: There Are No Rules, Only Requests

Related posts:

1. The Joy Of Listening, Part 2: Empathic Reflection
2. The Joy of Listening, Part 4: Setting Boundaries
3. The Joy of Listening, Part 5: There Are No Rules, Only Requests
4. The Joy Of Listening, Part 1: Overcoming The Barriers
5. Inner Productivity, Part Three: Listening To Ourselves