Not only is it important to listen to how people speak to you, such as their tone of voice, it is equally important to listen to everything they say to you and I mean everything!
You need to develop 20/20 hearing—perfect pitch, in a way. You need to hear exactly what people say and process the words coming out of their mouths. You can't hear only what you want to hear or what you think (or hope) they mean.
Steve was devastated when Linda walked out on him. “How could she do this to me? There were no signs. She just left for no reason at all. She took the furniture and everything,” said a perplexed Steve during his therapy session in my office. I probed and probed, until he finally realized that Linda in fact had told him she was going to leave him if he didn't start to open up and share himself emotionally as well as physically.
After some intensive soul searching, he finally was able to remember one conversation where Linda screamed and yelled at him for not reacting to anything emotionally. He remembered that she called him a “coldblooded lizard with ice running through his veins.” She said that she would clean him out of house and home, and then maybe he'd react. Had Steve really listened to what she was saying, and had he gotten some therapy to help him more freely express himself verbally, the two of them might be together today, and Steve would at least still have a chair on which to sit and a bed on which to sleep! He thought she was “only kidding” when she gave him this ultimatum.
You need to develop 20/20 hearing—perfect pitch, in a way. You need to hear exactly what people say and process the words coming out of their mouths. You can't hear only what you want to hear or what you think (or hope) they mean.
Steve was devastated when Linda walked out on him. “How could she do this to me? There were no signs. She just left for no reason at all. She took the furniture and everything,” said a perplexed Steve during his therapy session in my office. I probed and probed, until he finally realized that Linda in fact had told him she was going to leave him if he didn't start to open up and share himself emotionally as well as physically.
After some intensive soul searching, he finally was able to remember one conversation where Linda screamed and yelled at him for not reacting to anything emotionally. He remembered that she called him a “coldblooded lizard with ice running through his veins.” She said that she would clean him out of house and home, and then maybe he'd react. Had Steve really listened to what she was saying, and had he gotten some therapy to help him more freely express himself verbally, the two of them might be together today, and Steve would at least still have a chair on which to sit and a bed on which to sleep! He thought she was “only kidding” when she gave him this ultimatum.
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