"Just Listen." What I've Learned about Helping People Through Trauma
Traumatic things happen to people we love. It's part of the human experience. How do we support others in these situations? A humble reflection.
A couple significant things happened recently in my life. One of those things is that I completed a mindfulness-based stress reduction program (MBSR). The other thing is that several people I care about very much went through an extremely traumatic experience. I’m not going to share the details of that experience because it’s not my experience to share, but long story short, lives were changed forever.
I was indirectly affected by these events. For most of us, when someone you care about is hurting, you hurt too, albeit in a different way. There’s helplessness: You can’t make the pain go away. There’s frustration:You don’t know what to do. There’s sadness: You sympathize with the affected. Nearly everyone has been in this position at some point. It’s unfortunately a familiar spot. I’ve had my own set of traumatic experiences (multiple emergency brain surgeries), and there were times over the last few weeks I wished I could switch places with those in question because it felt like that kind of suffering would be easier to experience firsthand than watching it happen to someone I care about.
When I registered for MBSR, I had a few specific objectives. First, after self-teaching myself about mindfulness for the last couple years, I wanted some formal instruction. I needed to be reassured that I was on the right path and drawing the right conclusions. I needed some coaching. This would help me to expand my mindfulness toolbox. I’d learn more strategies to deal with different circumstances and deepen my understanding of those I was already comfortable with. Second, I was curious if my mindfulness experience would end as a practitioner or if I might want to take further steps to becoming an instructor or coach myself.
Mindfulness is fundamentally about paying attention. In fact Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed the MBSR program, defined mindfulness as “the awareness that arises through paying attention, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.” Contrary to popular belief, mindfulness isn’t about having an “empty” mind or being happy all the time. It’s an approach to life that emphasizes being present and aware of what’s happening right now—the good, the bad, and the in-between.
The acceptance is critical. Without accepting things as they are, we can’t begin to respond to things effectively. The acceptance isn’t a passive resignation, it’s an active embrace of our feelings, emotions, physical sensations, social situations, and family relations as they are.
Mindfulness also isn’t about ignoring other people. It’s not a retreat inward to escape the problems of the world. Developing an awareness of ourselves and the world around us is an important step toward deepening our compassion toward others. As we better understand our challenges, our shortcomings, our emotions, it becomes easier to recognize them in others, creating opportunities to help.
And here we come to the third objective. Mindfulness has helped me immensely since I started practicing it. I’ve written about it several times. I feel more present, I feel more calm. I have a better understanding of the neuroscientific processes in my own brain that cause the various emotions. In short, I feel more aware and more accepting. I think increasing awareness in and of itself helped me to be a more understanding and accepting person. At least I think it did. But that is a different kind of thing than seeing someone in pain and being able to help them through the storm. I had no answers for that.
I was misunderstanding the problem, even though the solution was quite literally in the definition of mindfulness: paying attention, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.
Listening. I was overlooking the most foundational aspect of human interaction: listening to others.
We don’t think of listening as an active solution. Instead, it’s a means to an end. You listen to what someone has to say, and then you respond in some way. You offer advice or solve a problem. Maybe in some cases, you push back and offer some resistance. At least this is how I thought. But that’s wrong. I failed to understand that being present for others means listening intently without thinking through what you are going to say next.
Things crystallized for me during a lesson on mindful communication. My anxiousness to do something with the information I was being given was 1.) failing the person who was speaking to me and 2) increasing my own suffering by creating unreasonable and impossible expectations for myself. To be clear, there are times when the expectation is to do something. But often, that isn’t what people need. They just need to be heard. A poem my instructor read drove this point home. It’s titled “Please Just Listen” by Jessie Swick1
When I ask you to listen to me And you start giving me advice, You have not done what I asked. When I ask you to listen to me And you begin to tell me why I shouldn’t feel that way, You are trampling on my feelings. When I ask you to listen to me And you feel you have to do something To solve my problem, You have failed me, Strange as that may seem. Listen! All I ask you is listen. Don’t talk or do—just hear me. Advice is cheap And I can do for myself; I am not helpless. Maybe discouraged and faltering, But not helpless. When you do something that I can And need to do for myself, You contribute to my fear and Inadequacy. But when you accept as a simple fact No matter how irrational, Then I can stop trying to convince You and get about this business Of understanding what’s behind This irrational feeling. And when that’s clear, the answers are Obvious and I don’t need advice. Irrational feelings make sense when We understand what’s behind them. Perhaps that’s why prayer works—because god is mute, And he doesn’t give advice or try To fix things, God just listens and lets you work it out for yourself. So please listen, and just hear me. And if you want to talk, wait a minute For your turn—and I will listen to you.
What I learned about trauma was that being there and listening was most important. It’s simple advice, but it’s not necessarily easy advice. It takes focus and restraint. Listening is an active pursuit.
My new year’s resolution was “Seek to understand.” Listening to someone is the simplest form of understanding. I write time and time again about empathy. Listening and empathy go hand in hand. In the darkest of times people need to know they aren’t alone. That sense of connection—of being related to another—is core to the human experience, so it makes sense that in these moments what they need most is someone genuinely trying to understand them, listening to them. That in and of itself is support.
Listening isn’t just a one-to-one activity, either. Trauma can happen on a societal scale. I can think of many examples over the last several years where social injustices were at the forefront of the public consciousness and for many, the instinct is to leap into action. What can I do? One thing you can always do is listen. In fact, regardless of what actions you eventually take, you should start by simply listening. It may not feel like you are contributing as much as you’d like, but as tough as it is to hear, your desire to prove something isn’t what is needed.
Sometimes it amazes me how I can enroll in classes and spend weeks studying something only for my dad to teach me the same lesson in a simple text message:
When someone is hurting, a lot of times it’s better just to be there to listen to them. I always have to remind myself of that. Sometimes you just wanna show people how much you know, and that’s not needed right now.
“Be there and listen to them.” Like my dad, I’ll remind myself of this often.
At least, I think it’s by Jessie Swick. I’ve seen this poem in several places with no author listed. I couldn’t find anything about Jessie Swick, but Jessie Swick is the only person I’ve seen this poem attributed to. If you have more information about this provenance of this poem, please let me know and I’ll adjust the attribution.