Listening by Robin Daniels, Instant Apostle, 192pp, £8.99
“Eloquence wins far more praise and prizes than its vitally necessary counterpart: the quieter qualities of patient, understanding, self-effacing listening.”
True enough. These words belong to the late psychotherapist Robin Daniels. The value we in the modern West attach to this skill has, he felt, been even further eroded by the rise of new technology, over-population and the increasingly frantic pace we live at. The world is “in a manic phase”. Listening is “one of speed’s victims”.
In Listening, Daniels advocates for the healing quality of listening. Being listened to well – that is, hearing one’s feelings spoken aloud, and then accepted and reflected back by someone else – helps a person “regard himself anew”. It can bring clarity where once was confusion – and from this comes “conviction, choice, decision”.
An unselfish listener sets an atmosphere: “open, unjudging, alert”. He is “a co-watcher at the growing edge of the client’s psyche”, with one aim only: “assisting the speaker to interpret self to self”. Salvation, however, “does not necessarily or always come in the form of solution”. Whatever resists cure will have to be “patiently endured – perhaps for the rest of one’s life”.
Such is Daniels’s philosophy of listening and, judging by the portrait provided in the introduction by his widow, Katherine, he had a natural disposition for living out the qualities he championed. His book dives deeply into its subject: from the obstacles to good listening, some of which we erect ourselves – to the nature and value of silence.
Listening is an amalgam of deep reflection and practical advice (with lots of checklists). Some of the latter feels like common sense, helpfully fleshed out and thoroughly filled in. Some of it, though, made me (not someone who reaches naturally for self-help books) think again, think afresh – whether it be the short analysis of the ways in which tiredness hampers the listener, or reminders about “allowing the speaker to break most of the silences”. Daniels mentions a study that found that the more interventions a therapist made, the worse the outcome for the patient.
Inevitably, perhaps, Daniels can come out sounding a touch too pat (“expectation narrows; hope widens”) and in places, he somewhat buries his case under fuzzy generalities, mounting reformulations and minute recalibrations of his themes. But, even if I sometimes felt the book might have been better as a pamphlet, he ends in credit. Listening is a valuable elaboration of St James’s precept, “Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak.”
Daniels was a Christian. Listening is, in part, a way of locating a person’s “God-given uniqueness”. He recommends “inwardly kneeling at the feet of your Maker, and being open to His power and mercy”. Many of the wise words he summons to add ballast or a flourish to his own come from Scripture or other spiritual writings.
The book is intended primarily for those in caring professions or those with “listening ministries” (including priests), though its applicability could extend far into everyday life.
A couple of wilder psychoanalytical theories briefly erupt into the text, somewhat rocking my faith in the author as a steady guide. On the other hand, it might be disappointing to pick up a book by a psychotherapist and not be hit by anything from left field.
Daniels believed in an “authentic, original self”, which could be found through being truly listened to and “freed at last of conditioning by family, schooling, workplace, society’s trends and fashions and shallow values”. Am I wrong to detect a baring of the teeth here, a whiff ofjudgmentalism, slight only but still incongruous?
What if, when the chips are down, I find my true self is clinging to, and gaining strength and succour from, my family, my school, my work? From values that someone else calls “shallow” but that I find life-enhancing? From ambition and competition, which Daniels seemed to think are modern values only? Might a counsellor following this advice actually end up “casting himself as the authority on another’s inner world”, a cardinal sin against Daniels’s theory of listening?
Daniels argues for an ongoing process of self-listening, self-learning and self-healing. I, for one, could not sustain this. My hunch is that I would not be cut out for therapy on either side of the consulting room, but I put down the book at the end determined to listen better. I also finished the book with added respect for therapists. To live life at this pitch, this intensity, and with these responsibilities for the well-being of strangers, would be beyond me.
Before becoming a therapist, Daniels was a music critic. The final pages are devoted to listening to music – to Beethoven and to his Violin Concerto; in particular to the 1955 recording by Nathan Milstein. Through it, Daniels contends, we can “draw closer to the heartbeat of God”.
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