Why Listening Works: The Theory Behind the Practice

Last week I wrote about the role of advice in therapy and how therapists try not to give advice in ways that rob the client of their victory in forming insights.

However, I took care to mention that a therapist can still punctuate good therapy with their thoughts and suggestions, despite this not being the main point of the exercise.

What does a therapist bring to the table?

If we accept my assertion that your therapist is not there to read minds or give advice, we are still left with the question of what they ARE doing. What does a therapist bring to the table? After all, a client can always talk to someone else in their life or even just the bathroom mirror. Why seek out a stranger?

Carl Rogers had the deepest grasp of the essence of therapy, and the reasons that conversation with our friends does not equal proper therapy (and that proper therapy requires two people). Of course, I may be biased in this claim because Rogers is my personal hero.

My Hero

There are several tapes of Carl Rogers doing short therapy sessions; many are available online. Watching him work is like watching a real-life Yoda or Gandalf.

Rogers honed his skills over decades, focusing only on the basics, on close attention to what his clients were saying and conveying. He focused on honing attention rather than analysis, because he wanted to see the world from the client’s own perspective during sessions.

What’s more, he focused on what they were ‘saying and conveying’ rather than ‘thinking and feeling’ out of acknowledgement that you can never truly read someone’s mind. Empathy can be a false idol if we treat it like Telepathy.

By paying close, sustained attention to his clients, he was able to hear what they were trying to express and present it back to them in a way that conveyed maximum understanding and minimum judgment.

Where the Magic Happens

That’s an important combo, because his clients were human beings at the end of the day. We are social creatures, and when we can hear ourselves being understood AND accepted by another person, it fires up a neural pathway for us to also accept ourselves. It’s a dry run for self-acceptance, like briefly flicking on the lights in a darkened, cluttered room.

From there, the client takes another step forward by saying something else that’s true or brave, and the process begins again. 

“It’s a dry run for self-acceptance, like briefly flicking on the lights in a darkened, cluttered room.”