I had a client who struggled with creating romantic relationships. Everyone around them was in one, so this person felt lonely and isolated. Whenever they tried to talk to their friends about this issue, their friends would say that there was nothing wrong with them, or that they’d benefit from a more positive attitude, or that maybe they had to lose some weight or drink more alcohol to loosen up a bit when chatting up new people. Their friends’ advice and suggestions without really listening to this person would only isolate them more and would increase the feeling of not being good enough.
What happens when someone feels unheard?
If you grew up being consistently unheard on emotional, psychological and /or verbal levels, the effects of it are deep, pervasive and often invisible to you. In essence the wound may be described as “My inner world (feelings, voice, needs) doesn’t matter.” However because of the patterns you may be displaying, this is how you can tell what may have happened to you.
Due to lack of mirroring in your childhood, you may:
- not know what you want
- finding it hard to make decision
- feelings empty or disconnected
- adapting to others to feel accepted
You learnt that expressing your emotions was pointless or unsafe, so now you:
- shut down in conflict
- avoid vulnerability
- struggle to name or feel your emotions
- appear calm when overwhelmed inside
Due to emotional abandonment and because your voice wasn’t valued, you developed hypervigilance by reading the room and now you:
- apologise excessively
- overthink how others perceive you
- try to be low-maintenance
- feel responsible for others’ moods
Because of lack of attunement from your caregivers in your childhood you learnt that your opinion wasn’t invited, so you assume that this is the case now, and:
- you don’t speak up
- you don't ask for help
- stay in dysfunctional relationships
- you have strong tendencies of placating others
What do you feel when someone genuinely says to you: “I hear you” or inquires how you’re doing? Do you feel relieved (“At last someone hears me!”) or scared (“Oh, no! I’m exposed and there’ll be consequences!”)? It’s trickier for you in life if the latter is your answer.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is it true that you feel insignificant and that you don’t matter?
- Do you share your opinions infrequently?
- Is it easy to sway you to a stronger speaker’s opinion?
- Do you shut down completely in discussions and confrontations?
- Do you say something like: “I’ll just say this quickly” as if someone is rushing you?
- Are you a deep thinker but rather a poor communicator?
- Are you loud, opinionated and joke around to compensate for the fear of becoming insignificant in someone’s eyes?
- Could you be called an overachiever or hard worker who tries to impress and prove your worth to whoever you deem important?
- Do you sometimes blush or even space out after you share your opinion or dare to ask a question in a group setting?
- Do you often say: “If that makes sense?”
- Do you sometimes feel resentful and envious to those who take time to express themselves and who can think and respond on the spot?
- Do you tend to please people at your expense, perhaps have anger issues and are quite resentful?
- Are you someone who talks behind people’s backs because you don’t trust yourself that you could have it out with those particular people?
If anything from a list above resonated with you, chances are that in young age you were told that children do not speak when adults are around; you were silenced by an adult or an elder sibling; you witnessed conflicts between your caregivers and you internalised that it was your fault somehow; you were praised for being a good girl/ boy who didn’t inconvenience the adults “with your little whims”; you had to manage the adults’ in your life feelings; or something else squashed your feelings/ needs/ emotions and you ended up abandoning your true self. I feel a sense of loss and despair every time I hear that my clients were not taken seriously when they were small….
What are the key differences between friendly advise and professional counselling?
If you’re like the majority of the population, when opening to your friends you most likely:
- will get advice (which worked in their life – good on them!)
- hear friends starting talking about themselves
- will find out that “your case isn’t that bad”
- get discouraged, judged and inevitably unheard!
It happens because people generally:
- don’t think too deeply or are not choosing to get into your shoes
- don’t like silences and come with a quick solution
- feel the heaviness of the situation/ your feelings and want to fix or alleviate it
- prefer what’s generally proven to work; speak from generalisations and stereotypes.
The above is rather common and it’s because our brains try to protect us from over expending our vital energy, hence automated thinking and advice giving. The problem is that you end up feeling unheard, again.
Now, with the majority of counsellors it’s different because we are trained to actively listen, which is listen to understand. It doesn’t seem like a big deal but when you truly experience it, it shifts everything. When you feel deeply understood, your defensiveness softens, your scattered thoughts start to organise themselves, your emotional intensity starts to regulate naturally not because a counselor told you what to feel but because you felt safe enough to feel it. When you hear your thoughts reflected back in your words or in a metaphor pertinent to your unique situation, it feels relieving, you notice a sense of safety coming up and you feel heard, maybe for the first time! Something opens in your heart a bit more and somehow you slow down and direct your curiosity towards yourself. When you feel heard and safe, only then you can see your life changing for good.
Ilona is a great listener and has this ability to see in others what they do not see themselves – FJA
What It Feels Like When Someone Finally Does Listen
To mirror your experience, I repeat or paraphrase your own words back to you, or I use analogies and sometimes. I feel that it’s useful to ask a related question so that we could delve deeper into your subject. And you’d just know that I asked you this particular question because I certainly understood where you’re coming from. Because of my heightened curiosity and presence what you most likely will feel is that time slows down, something in your mind or heart opens up, a level of vulnerability increases and although to feel vulnerable may feel uncertain, the trust between you and me is going to hold and support your openness, courage and progress.
I think for someone who hasn’t been used to being listened to and taken seriously, to be heard in a therapeutic space may feel like a solace, a sense of hope and empowerment to make a lasting change.You start believing in yourself more and the wound “My inner world doesn’t matter” starts to heal.
What You Can Do About It
Remember when I wondered if you’re that person who speaks behind other people’s backs? And if it is so because you don’t trust yourself that you can have it out with them? Good news is it’s not all on you because some people are not safe to have it out, and it could be that your subconscious susses out who’s safe and who’s not. Bad news is that you’re wasting your precious energy gossiping when you could be creating life on your terms…
The first thing you can do is to recognise and own that you feel:
- latent anger
- regular resentment or
- frustration or
- annoyance towards someone
- maybe you feel envious regularly
- you don’t tend to genuinely applaud others’ successes.
If you recognise that you feel any of the above, this acknowledgement doesn’t mean you are a bad person having “bad” feelings. This shows that somewhere somehow some of your needs were not met properly. Fortunately, you can do something about it now, as an adult.
One exercise I love suggesting to my clients in my private practice is the Radical Honesty Exercise and it brings great results. It’s very simple but will require a level of courage from you especially if you avoid confrontation.
Let’s say you are someone who’s into self-development and you want your current romantic relationship to work [for once!] because your previous ones collapsed due to you bottling things up and exploding later. What you’re particularly unhappy about in this relationship is that you either clean the apartment yourself or you need to make a request to your partner to clean it every time because they don’t usually initiate it. Are you ready?
Say to your partner these three statements:
- “I have something to say to you.”
- “You don’t need to do anything about it, just to listen to what I have to say”
- “I’m doing this because I want to take ownership of my part in our relationship because I know I used to mess it up when I’d bottle up and then explode. So, I want to sort this out.”
And then depending on how you truly feel about the situation:
- “I took time to observe that it’s either me who cleans the apartment or I have to specifically ask you to do it. I feel that responsibility for cleanliness in our home is on my shoulders and I feel that it’s too much for me.”
This exercise does two things: takes the pressure from the listener away in point 2. and gives you a chance to express your needs and feelings like in point 4.
For this exercise to work you, need to:
- understand that the only person you can control and change is you
- drop the expectation that the other will start behaving in the way you’d like them to just because you mustered courage to speak up
- realise that you’re going to express how you feel about the problem rather than coercing or blaming your partner
Although point 2 is supposed to take the defensiveness away, it’s important to understand that you won’t be able to do this exercise with whoever, as not everyone has earned your trust. It’s because some people would get defensive: “I know I know, I’m a bad mother”; or they would dismiss you: “It didn’t happen/ I don’t know what you’re talking about”; or they’d attack you: “Yeah, alright, I smoke but what about your online shopping addiction?”.
If you don’t feel safe to address the issues with the problem person, you may want to work with a professional to gain some clarity in your situation so that you’d have a better understanding of how to approach it with more satisfactory results.
