I’m Listening

By Sonia Neale
September 6, 2009

Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouths and others scoot down the birth canal with their size elevens firmly wedged between their nose and their chin.

Personally I like to wear my favourite Chanel slingbacks between my lips because that way there’s no room to say anything I will never regret in the first place. Plus a full mouth means a pair of ears that’s not only listening intently but progressively learning in a very astute and meaningful manner.

My psychotherapist, whose black flatties are firmly planted on solid industrial-strength carpet, has been listening and learning very carefully for several years now. To her credit never once have I seen her stifle a well-deserved yawn, watched in dismay as her eyes glazed over or seen her slowly fall to one side suffering from stultifying sleep-inducing boredom as I tell the same old story over and over and over and over again.

She’s done such a good job on me that I now find myself wanting to study and collect books on psychoanalytic psychotherapy pretty much in the same way Angelina Jolie collects other people’s husbands and overseas orphaned offspring.

Psychotherapy is all about active listening and active listening is inherently exhausting. So is trying to promote and sell the “open ears, shut mouth” concept to a household of strongly opinionated teenage boys and men who start off every other sentence with “Just listen to ME………” accompanied by aggressive finger-poking in the general direction of the errantly perceived non-listening party.

Enduring long, pointless and quarrelsome arguments is part and parcel of parenting teenagers. Taking a leaf out of my therapist’s book I close my mouth and open my ears and let them rant and rave about what ails them at this particular point in time and space, without interjecting with:
“What you SHOULD do is this….” or
“What you MUSTN’T do is that….”

My parents once said about my younger sister that if she would only listen to what they had to say then she would never make any mistakes.

Boys and their fathers can argue loud and incessantly about who’s not listening the most but I was rather taken aback and secretly thrilled to hear my teenage son say to my husband, during a very recent argument, that HE never listens to me, but Mum always does.

Looks like I might have a career in psychotherapy after all and I should be qualified to practice just in time to help my beleaguered progeny make sense and recover from their own tortured and traumatized upbringing.

Sonia Neale started therapy writing for post-natal-depression and anxiety. Thirteen years later she is the author of two books, The Bad Mother’s Revenge and Death by Teenager, both published by ABC Books. She lives in Western Australia, is married with three teenagers, has a certificate in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and is studying for a psychology degree. Her website address is www.sonianeale.com.