I discussed the benefits of listening already, I also mentioned the challenges posed by the culture of the Pillars in community work. This post expands on those topics.
In matching our response to spontaneous, impulsive, irrational expressions of anger practitioners can do both themselves and people in distress a great favour by listening, simply honouring the anger for what it is.
Now most of us find it easier to listen to coherent anger than incoherent anger [1]. I propose some reasons why this might be so:
~ We are conditioned over many years and probably decades to give left-brain coherence far higher esteem than right-brain incoherence.
~ In our childhood, if we associated expression of anger with violence, our emotions (usually fear but also anger) might be triggered by the incoherence that we are faced with.
~ We may not want to hear the bit of truth that might be hidden in incoherent anger directed at us.
Incoherent anger is a very visceral, intimate thing and if our education, family life experiences etc. tended toward insecure avoidant attachment we may fear the intimacy of the encounter.
Suppose it all gets out of control – will someone get hurt?
We may associate coherence with winning – and, generally, incoherence with losing.
So, the left-brain response to the right-brain, spontaneous burst of incoherent anger often involves, during the event:
~ Arguing using logic and/or trying to calm the other with reason (fight).
~ Leaving the scene (flight).
~ Ignoring until the moment passes (freeze).
After the event, in a more enlightened workplace, it would not be uncommon to present the angry person with a rationale, a kind of summing-up, a neat explanation or the last word, as to why the person is the way he is, or might have done what he did. This may be accompanied by encouragement to apologise, and, often, a suggestion that he enter a process to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.
And, I stress, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But it is usually a logical, asymmetric response, sometimes perceived to be punitive, or at least depowering, and rarely does it match the spontaneous burst of anger.
Now when I say matching our response I do not mean that if someone shouts at us we shout back, or if someone cries we burst into tears too!
What I mean is, if the hurt person is emotional, we are appropriately emotional – and listening respectfully and empathically has an emotionality that is totally different to the non-emotional, logical or defensive response. The angry person also perceives our emotional presence to have stability, solidity and sincerity, and – most importantly – we are modelling that being emotional does not necessarily mean being out of control.
Listening with no agenda is also a refreshing response to a person who is used to telling their story and being fobbed off (or fogged off, as is sometimes said in Limerick) by explanations.
Referring it on to some specialist, getting a form and assessing the person, or, just as bad, rationalising it, (i.e. explaining it away quickly with terms that discourage or dampen spontaneity) sends out a strong signal that we don’t really want to listen.
The good news is that in my experience, almost always, people who express a lot of anger and hurt, if listened to, and allowed sit with it, will, in time, balance what appears to the listener to be irrationality with their own cognitive awareness.
The fact that this awareness emerges naturally, i.e. comes from within, makes it far more powerful than awareness that comes from the neat explanation or rationalisation offered by the practitioner, however benign and well-meaning.
I remember reading once that insight is like a spotlight that illuminates, whereas awareness is like a warm glow that reaches into our psyche – a lot deeper than insight [2]. Understanding a problem (i.e. having insight) has the potential, but only the potential, to be of use in solving it.
I believe that the neat explanation is like the spotlight whereas awareness that emerges from within enables a more complete creation, a warm glow of personal satisfaction and fulfillment.
I deliberately said above that by listening we’d be doing ourselves a great favour too.
The reason for this is twofold. Firstly we will probably learn a lot. Secondly by listening, we are matching our response, thereby increasing the level of safety of the person in distress – and our own safety too.
One of the difficulties with assessment is that, being a very explicit process, it implies a significant power difference. In not formally assessing, we may put out the message; I’m not going to do it for you, but we can try and do it together.
And anyway, it is my belief that the hurt and angry person is continually assessing the agency and/or worker – this is as it should be – the customer is usually right!
[1]. Though maybe I’m wrong. Coherent anger can also be very challenging to listen to. In fact, it might be easier, from our high horse of judgement, to go through the motions of listening to incoherent anger, then dismiss it altogether, and maintain that the person is not entitled to express it that way!
[2]. I think that this description was in a book entitled In and Out of the Garbage Pail by Fritz Perls, one of the founders of Gestalt Therapy, but I’m not sure.