Avoid Reflective Listening ($)

Communication is the synchrony between brains.

“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”
— Peter Drucker

Listening

The psychotherapist Carl Rogers (1902-1987), considered the most influential psychotherapist in history (Smith, 1982), is said to have taught us how to listen. As a result, therapists and counselors are taught a technique called reflective listening wherein the listener stops the speaker to summarize what they’ve heard. Through this means, we are taught, the listener is both affirmed, encouraged, and invited to further develop and reveal their deeper thoughts and feelings. This is nonsense. Don’t do it.

At the start of his career, Rogers was dissatisfied with how therapists communicated with their clients and at the end of his career, when his ideas were widely accepted, he was dissatisfied with how therapists communicated with him. In typical pedagogical fashion, Carl Rogers’ message was diluted, trivialized, and recast in pedagogical form. It was restated in a form that could be taught to teachers as a formula, conveyed in textbooks, and tested by people who neither listened nor understood. It was made into a salable commodity.

What Carl Rogers advocated was not listening, it was understanding. And understanding is not strictly a verbal skill. At its root, understanding is associative and emotional; it is rarely declarative or intellectual. What a person says is rarely what they mean. What they say is a story, a narrative that carries a message in the way that a myth carries a lesson. You can memorize and repeat a speech, even translate into another language, and have no idea what it means.

Avoiding

Repeating the story is the province of scribes, computers, and tape recorders, not communicators. We’re not actually told to repeat verbatim, though many teachers of psychology think so, we’re taught to summarize. This is a slightly more enlightened version of Rogers’ insight but still more in the way of armor.

We’re told not to interpret, but a summary is always an interpretation. There are no extraneous elements in emotional communication, nothing that is your right to leave out. To pretend that you can present a Cliff Notes version of someone else’s story is a rejection of an invitation to become emotionally involved. In this bastardization of Rogers’ instructions for listening, counselors and psychologists are clinging to the behaviorists’ charade of objectivity and immunity.

There is no such thing as objectivity in human affairs. The only person who can hope to summarize their statements is the person themself, and in that they create a different story. For a listener to summarize is to interpret and reform. You may be enlisted as an expert, but replacing what you’ve heard with what you understand is pretentious.

Misunderstanding

The fallacy in reflective listening, the illusion that your selection of the words you think are essential is being confirmed, is made clear by the recognition that less than 10% of a person’s verbal intent resides in the words that are spoken. Not only is there a plethora of essential body language but a good deal of communication lies in the music of speech, it’s cadence, inflections, fortissimos, and rest stops. Not only is our silence significant, but different durations of silence convey different meanings.

Imagine being taught that to summarize a piece of music was a way of clarifying it. If you were to summarize Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with its leading notes, “Ta-da-da Boom!”, or summarize John Lennon’s “Imagine” by humming the tune,

you’d be considered a musical moron. The same is true when you summarize another person’s emotional content with a parroted summary that begins, “What I hear you saying is…”

We’re told that this kind of parroting back affirms our attention and strengthens rapport. But any astute speaker knows far better whether you’ve heard and understood just by watching your face. You can be absent and still, with perhaps 10% of your attention, parrot back a summary of what’s been said.

What reflective listening affirms is not connection but disrespect, your lack of courage in putting your own insight on the line. You are shying away from the very dispute that the client is having with him or herself.

This is what astute observers will notice. I find this plainly obvious in the many demonstrations of this technique proudly presented to us by supposedly astute teachers of therapy, counseling, and coaching. This buffoonery is why the stereotype of counselors as artificial people continues to this day.

It is true that a speaker will feel the need to elaborate as a result of your parroting their statements, but that’s not because you’ve understood them, quite the opposite. It’s because you have not. They will elaborate because you don’t get it, and what you say demonstrates your inadequate understanding.

It’s also true the speaker will feel welcomed and emboldened to express their feeling, but that is more because of your absence rather than your presence. The counselor truly poses no threat not because they understand you, but because they don’t.

Understanding