When we are really listened to, we feel better.  We share our problems with a good friend and no decision is made, no action taken, yet our sense of emotional heaviness is so often lightened. 

By friend I include all sorts of relationships, because friendship is the least exclusive of bonds and combines happily with other, more clearly defined ones, like sibling and partner and parent and child and colleague.  Friends gather round in concentric circles and provide layers – annuli? – of support for one another.  The impact of the emotional stone-drop ripples out from the sufferer, ever more gently. Perhaps we don’t consciously form these circles.  Perhaps we are merely gathered together, close enough but in no particular order, and I am describing shock waves:  it is the emotional event which, as it were, creates the circles. That’s if we have people around us, close enough to form the wave.  Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum. Emotional support waves, similarly, can’t take shape if there is no-one around.  If we are lucky, however, relational proximity means we provide this support for one another, as best we can

Listening is an emotionally complex activity.  The top notes are all positive – the intimacy, the concentration, the sense of privilege.  It’s very heady to be taken into someone’s confidence, and there is the intellectual satisfaction of understanding something better and, overall, the hugely rewarding feeling of doing something, as best we can, which we believe to be good, altruistic and connecting. 

Then, lower down in ourselves, we are affected by proxy:  as we listen, we try to transfer some of the weight and bear it for them, or at least with them.  Is this sympathy? Empathy? I still get confused by these words and neither of them seems to match the feeling I’m trying to convey.  The image is walking through one’s own life with cupped hands, cradling the thought of that loved one, trying to carry a little of the weight for them. This takes energy. However willingly we do it, it is tiring.

And sometimes, at the bottom, we also have our own responses, which must be pushed to one side while we listen, but to which we must attend later.   Here are the fears we cannot express when we are trying to encourage a friend in their resolve – our fear that they might fail. Sometimes our fear that they might succeed, if we feel threatened by the change this will effect. Here lie our hurts when we experience collateral damage from a friend’s story.  Sometimes what we listen to is directly upsetting to us: it disturbs our values, or gives us knowledge we have never sought; it changes the way we view the world or people we know.   This is the entirely self-focused layer and I wish I could listen without this bottom layer building up but it accumulates, for me, like silt at the bottom of a tank.   I don’t want to dwell on these feelings but nor can I simply push them away and dispose of them. 

My metaphor for addressing this – facing up to the silt – is digestion.  A complex organic activity, with a natural pace.  It cannot be rushed.  Weighed down by what increasingly felt like an undigested, painful lump in my gut,  I found myself googling the term sin-eater.  Ignoring some rather weird more modern associations, this is a British, probably Celtic funeral tradition which lasted in some rural areas through to the 19^th century.  It’s the ritual consumption of food to take on the sins of, and therefore absolve, a recently dead person.  At core, therefore, sin-eating is an act of charity and transference, and in that it is not unlike listening.  We take in another’s burdens, and by doing so we are trying to take them away. 

Sin-eating was an unpopular task: no-one wants to take on the sins of others; most of us feel weighed down enough already by our own.  A counsellor, of course, is a sort of professional, modern sin-eater:  paid to be an emotional shock absorber, trained to listen without showing any personal emotion or reaction and, by doing so, ease the burden on the client.  In rural Shropshire and Monmouthshire, the occupation fell to those lacking better alternatives – those already poor, vulnerable, dispossessed, who, by taking on the role, were further ostracised, becoming feared and shunned by the same society which had endorsed the task.  A human scapegoat.  The conflicting drivers, both need and aversion, are deeply human, I think.  We identify the benefit but, having moved the burden across, we’d prefer to think it’s just gone away.  We don’t like to watch the sin-eater as they digest their meal.  We don’t like to see the exhaustion and pain we have caused a good friend who has listened to us.   I didn’t like to admit that I was struggling with, as it were, listener’s indigestion.  I didn’t like to admit that I have caused this in others. 

Nowadays, the popular word in this context seems to be ‘process’.  “I need time to process this”.  Process is a dull word, largely just meaning a course of action or series of events.  To me it’s mechanistic and the sphere of association is, most of all, IT.  The brain as inanimate computer.  As ever with computers, this creates a suggestion that the limiting factor is just capacity – add some more chips, increase the processing power, and the task will be completed more quickly.  If I can’t process things quickly, then I reveal an inadequacy in myself. Imaginary others, with more capacity, would process this more swiftly.  The unquestioned rule of modern life is – quicker is better. 

I prefer the metaphor of digestion.  Shifting the language into an organic framing and a human, physical activity eases something in me.  It keeps my brain, my emotions and my physical feelings all involved and connected.   Talking of the need to digest what I have listened to, and the responses it has generated in me, draws on, I think, a more deeply ingrained level of language.  It also feels more self-considerate (is that even a word?). Our sense of taste evolved to help us survive, guiding us to choose what is good to eat, what to take in to ourselves and assimilate.   We use the metaphors of taste to describe our feelings as we take in information:  a piece of news can be unpalatable; we feel ‘bitter’ about an undeserved slight.  When we learn something which offends our personal morality, we describe that inner recoil as ‘disgust’.  Etymologically, this means it does not taste good.  And if we are told something unexpectedly unpleasant, we may physically wince before saying ‘eeeugh, I wish you hadn’t told me that’.  It’s like biting on the unexpectedly rotten fruit, unable to respond quickly enough to spit it out before we swallow some of the unpleasant juices. There’s a strong linguistic link between consuming things physically and taking them in to our minds. 

While we try to protect our digestive system, it’s also natural we will work it hard from time to time (Christmas day, anyone?).  And it does its stuff admirably – assimilating as much as it can, absorbing the food and nutrients that are vital to us, and eventually dispelling the residue that is now waste.  This takes time and, as with most organic activities, there is no single exact ‘perfect’ timescale but a lovely wide range of ‘normal’.   It’s continuously interactive. And it’s normal to get it wrong:  we navigate our human selves most of the time by correction. It’s often easier to sense when we are getting something wrong (and the more wrong, the clearer the signal) than to appreciate the times when we are getting it ‘right’.   Digestion is a normal, essential, involuntary process and much of the time we are barely aware of it. We take it for granted.  But when it does malfunction, it’s one of the most debilitating and distressing and undignified of experiences.   But that’s also natural, and the body usually rights itself in time. 

It’s important to listen – it’s a privilege, a huge privilege, to be able to do this for one another.  It’s an essential bond of friendship and connects us at a deep and necessary level.  But it is also emotionally demanding and tiring.  I forget this.  And once we have heard something, we need time to absorb to it.  This also I forget. 

I’ve been listening a lot recently but I don’t think I have always been listening well. I am slowly trying to learn that I need to do it at a pace I can manage.   I’ve been giving myself indigestion and the benefits dwindle, are even quashed, when I misjudge or ignore my capacity. Mental and emotional fatigue mean I become stressed and overwhelmed, irrational and unbalanced, no good, as they say, to man nor beast.  No good to myself or – of course – ultimately, no longer any good to whomever I am trying to help by listening.  The risk is that I cause damage to us both. 

I leave in quest of emotional camomile tea.  And rest.  There’s a level at which my self knows what it is doing, even when I don’t.  I will have faith in my recovery.