Shut Up and Listen: The Importance of Active Listening in Internal Work

Staying in therapy and staying with therapy can be a difficult proposition for a dissociative group, even when there is no specific programmed response or therapeutic conflict getting in the way. Each person in the group has to work through their own individual issues with trust, connection, feeling dependent, being independent – and beyond that, there are the interpersonal dynamics that happen between members of a dissociative system, just like they would between different outside individuals.

Our group has had members interfere with therapy for a variety of reasons, including because…

- they actively wanted things to stay exactly as they were for very specific reasons, so they discouraged change because it was specifically and directly contradictory to what they wanted.

- they were afraid of what change would mean for them, so they discouraged change for others to keep from having to change themselves.

- they believed that change was unsafe, and they were attempting to protect others by discouraging change.

- they were just being a pain in the ass, discouraging others from change for no personal motivation other than not wanting someone else to have what they wanted.

Realizing that someone else in the group is interfering with therapy is incredibly frustrating. Therapy is hard enough work already – who wants to discover that their own system is making it even harder than it has to be? But it’s also pretty much par for the course for a dissociative system – we’re never going to enter therapy with everyone in agreement, and it’s more likely than not that, at some point, someone for some reason will try to interfere in the process.

For us, the most effective first step in dealing with this has been to identify who was causing a particular disruption, and then to understand why they felt the disruption was necessary, from their perspective.

This sounds pretty simple. Granted, it’s hard to find the patience to understand someone when all you really want is for them to stop arguing and just do what you want right now, but even that generally acknowledged difficulty doesn’t really make the process sound too difficult – which might be why it feels like such a monumental and inexplicable failure when the days and weeks and months drag on and nothing changes. Since it appears to be something we should be able to do, it can’t say anything good about us if we can’t do it.

Well, we can all cut ourselves a break on this one, because saying it’s harder than it sounds doesn’t even begin to encompass how difficult this process can actually be. Even when we think we’re doing what we need to do in order to understand the others in our systems and build bridges with them, we might not actually be anywhere close to doing what really needs to be done.

In order to make the complications clear, let’s put this in the context of external individual people for a moment. Imagine there are forty, or ninety, or two hundred people who are all forced to live together for the duration of their lives, whether they want to or not. Nobody asked them, it wasn’t an invitation, it wasn’t a choice. They can’t get out of the situation, they can’t get rid of anyone else, and there’s nothing they can change about the external reality.

The ideal result, the result that would bring the most harmony to the most people, would be for every member of that group to accept the situation and learn to work fully within the situation.

But how realistic would it be to expect that result? Everyone in the group has their own personality, their own strengths and weaknesses, their own thoughts and beliefs, their own way of doing things…

Isn’t it more realistic to expect that there will be people you like and people you don’t, people who like you and people who don’t, people who can be relied on or trusted for anything and people who can’t be relied on to do anything and people at every point in between, people who irritate you, people who are irritated by you, people who think they’re right about everything, people whose opinions change based on who’s standing next to them, people you wish you didn’t know, people you really don’t know or don’t know that well… etcetera… etcetera…

The larger the group of people, the more diverse the individuals are, the more complex the relationships between them all will be.

And this is just as true for our internal groups as it is for an external group. That’s a lot of complication right there.

And there’s the further complication that listening really is a lost art. Everyone thinks they’re great listeners, but very few people actually are. Often we’re so focused on the next thing we want to say – how to present our own opinion, or something nominally relevant that we want to share about ourselves – and we’re just waiting for the other person to stop talking so that we can talk instead – so we’re focused on ourselves, instead of really listening to the other person.

This is especially true when the other person is saying something we don’t want to listen to in the first place. And yet, it’s a guarantee that any explanation of why someone else in our group is interfering with our therapy (or anything else) is going to include something we don’t want to hear. It might not agree with what we believe ourselves, or it might sound incredible or unbelievable or just plain annoying, or it might be related to a terrible memory (or lots of terrible memories) – and of course we don’t really want to hear about any of that. All we really want is for that other group member to shut up and stop getting in the damn way.

So how closely are we really listening to them? How genuine is our attention to them or our desire to get to know them for who they are, as opposed to our desire to just change them into who we want them to be as fast as possible?

It is really really hard to put aside yourself, your own thoughts and reactions and what you want and what you think is right and what you think they should do and what you want to say to them to convince them to do what you want them to do… and just listen to them.

It’s so hard that most people can’t do it, even when they think they are doing it.

And I’m certainly not saying we’re an exception to that. We’re not. The only possible difference between us and anyone else is that this skill is something we are acutely aware of lacking – but the lack is still there.

But it’s also something we are actively working to learn and improve – genuine listening, genuine understanding – not merely expanding our own view of the other system members, but learning to see them as they see themselves.

This is something that mind-control programmers understand very well, and they use it to their advantage. Programmers know their subjects inside and out and through and through – and they didn’t come by that knowledge through some magic window into our heads, or even because most of what’s in our heads was their creation. The best programmers are the ones who can make use of a person’s innate skills and tendencies in order to make what they’re creating more effective, and they learn what they have to work with in each individual by listening to them as much as by observing or testing or any more objective means of gathering information.

It is compelling and seductive to be the complete center of someone’s attention, to know that they are focusing only and entirely on you, that they are listening fully to you… and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever find anyone else who will listen to us with the same attention and focus as the people who programmed our minds once did. At best, we usually have to pay someone to listen, and even a therapist is not guaranteed to be a very good listener. Even they can be focusing more on what they need to say next instead of focusing closely on what we’re saying at the moment.

The fact that the programmers gave us something we can’t easily replace contributes its part to explaining why any part of us would ever wish to remain with or return to the programmers, even when freedom beckons. It’s certainly not the whole explanation for why that connection is so difficult to break; there could be a hundred different elements contributing to that difficulty. However, this is one element. Genuine listening, if done right, can feel like love – and it is something that every person wants from someone else in their lives, but yet very few people can give it to someone else, so there is a perpetual deficit of feeling heard, or of feeling appreciate or loved in the way that being truly heard gives us.

So – genuinely listening to each other not only allows us to understand the other members of our systems, thus opening the door for real and lasting change, but it also addresses the need and the desire we all have to really be heard by offering it without the abusive price tag.

We need to listen to each other – not from a place of looking for the weak spot in the defense or the logical flaw that we can exploit to further our own agenda, but just for the sake of listening and learning and trying to see our world and our overall self and our activities through the eyes and perspective of someone else. If we listen genuinely and attentively, then we will learn everything we need to know about the other person without having to watch for it – but genuine listening might also change how we want to use that information once we have it.

And we must be open-minded about hearing what these other aspects of our self have to say, rather than listening from a perspective of judging, condemning, or immediately changing the other – because listening from those perspectives will likely cause more damage, and it certainly won’t resolve anything. If it were you and someone approached you that way, how would that go over with you?

Before we can ask someone else to change what they’re doing for the benefit of the group, we need to listen and understand them as and where they are and appreciate their perspective. Sometimes understanding can be a gateway to acceptance; if we truly understand why they feel and think and believe the way they do, we might be more accepting of their viewpoint, even though we don’t necessarily agree with how they see things. And although this is an incredibly complicated and difficult balance to achieve – on the few occasions that our group has achieved it, it has so far never failed to work something very like a miracle.

If listening leads to understanding, which leads to acceptance – acceptance can lead to a shift in the unconscious pressures within a system that dictate what is permissable and what is not – and the end result is that the system members who were so recalcitrant, so resistant to change, so beyond reach and entrenched in their position… are suddenly free to change.

Internal system dynamics have a complexity which simply can’t be addressed entirely on the surface level. But some surface actions can have very profound effects, if the actions are genuinely and honestly performed – and they can result in change at a level that we would never otherwise reach, if we went to therapy every day for a hundred years. These are the kinds of things that can only happen through the efforts we make on a daily basis, simply in the way we choose to interact with the world and with our selves and with our lives.

“But choose wisely, for while the true Grail will bring you life, the false Grail will take it from you.” ~ Grail Knight, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade