Although we hear many things throughout our lives, as psychological counselors, we must listen to our clients in a special way. First, we need to know how to listen, and then we must think about what specifically we need to hear.
1 How we listen
Listening is not a singular activity. Depending on whom we are listening to, the methods of listening may vary. Consider how you approach listening to the following different things:
Conversations
Music festivals
Noise on the street
People chatting in a restaurant
Poetry readings
Someone speaking a foreign language
Your friend chatting with you on the phone
Listening to a teacher lecture on stage
Can you imagine that your state is the same when listening to these things?
2 Types of listening
What you just did was listening in different ways. When you are listening to a client in psychodynamic counseling, you need to employ various methods:
Ambient listening—Ambient listening is a way of listening when you are not particularly focused on anything. It allows sounds to wash over you—just like listening to all the sounds in a forest, the waves crashing on the shore, or the noise on the street. Imagine you are at a cocktail party—many people are chatting, but what you hear is just the noise. If you are not particularly focused on anything, it is hard to pick out any specific sounds. In fact, when we face clients, we must train ourselves to listen this way. We have to maintain an open attitude toward everything the client says. If we become too interested in one thing or another, we may miss important things the client says or doesn’t say. As counselors, we have to work hard to achieve this. It is very difficult not to listen to things when we try hard to understand them (like transference). Ambient listening is crucial in many instances during the interview, but it is generally used in the initial stages when you don’t know what important topics the conversation should delve into.
Filtered listening—Continuing with the banquet example, once you enter the banquet hall, you start filtering out the background noise as you begin to pick out specific sounds. Perhaps you hear someone you know speaking, or you catch snippets of conversation that interest you. The same thing happens when we listen to clients. When the client speaks, we start to hear certain things standing out from the background material, such as recurring topics or strong emotions. Although our attention is not yet focused on any particular thing, we begin to filter out some background content and ponder what seems to be most important.
Focused listening—When we concentrate our attention on specific matters and filter out most of the background noise, our listening becomes focused. At the cocktail party, you hear a voice you recognize, so you direct your attention to that person and start chatting. Although the room is still noisy, you gradually can only hear that person talking to you. This is focused listening—listening to a specific subject while blocking out the majority of the background noise. When we select an important topic or emotion and begin to exclude other content to focus entirely on it, we are engaging in focused listening with the client.
While ambient listening is particularly important at the beginning of the interview, being able to fluidly transition from one listening mode to another throughout the counseling session is crucial. Even when focusing on major topics or emotions, we must be able to detach from the focus and return to ambient listening. Visually, this task is akin to a film director sitting in their chair, zooming the lens in and out. This metaphor applies to many aspects of psychodynamic counseling techniques because we must both capture the big picture and focus on specific points.
3 What we listen for
In the silence
