If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of listening to others with as much enthusiasm as we seek to be understood ourselves.
In this quote, Harriet Lerner highlights a common communication issue where individuals often prioritize their own desire to be heard over genuinely listening to others. This imbalance can lead to misunderstandings and weak connections, suggesting that true dialogue and effective relationships require us to actively engage in listening just as fervently as we wish to express ourselves.
In practice
During a team meeting to encourage better collaboration.
It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run but, it will never make you less afraid.
Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.
Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.
An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.
Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
You are in a partnership with all other human beings, not a contest to be judged better than some and worse than others.
Groups break up because they never got across what they wanted to do personally, and they have creative differences, and egos start to clash.
Why was she always so craven, so apologetic? He had always seen Ruth as separate, good and untainted. As a child, his parents had appeared to him as starkly black and white, the one bad and frightening, the other good and kind. Yet as he had grown older, he kept coming up hard in his mind against Ruth's willing blindness, to her constant apologia for his father, to the unshakeable allegiance to her false idol.
Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
I have come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason, I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.
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