Talk:Hearing

Regarding "Social Listening":

This technique may be useful for a therapist or counselor who, by adopting this Buddhist practice, may enable the listenee to get more off their chest than they would otherwise, if the listenee is hyper-sensitive to the listener's comments, verbal or otherwise.

The point of course would be to get as much information as possible out of the listenee in order to help the person in some way.

However, to help the person will inevitably require the application of judgement to the elicited info, and so the platitudinous instruction to avoid judgement seems a bit nonsensical.

Alternatively, if the idea is just to experience, not to help the person, then why at the end of the segment: the sentence concerning not offering suggestions, but rather helping the listenee to come to his/her own decisions?

Aside from in a therapeutic situation, can "social Listening" have any meaning or use?

If one assumes that all human behavior is pleasure aquistion and pain avoidance, which by evolutionary theory it must be, then I suggest that "social Listening" and "caring" as described may in fact be a slave morality (ala Nietzsche), or at best a hobby of finding amusing the essentially meaningless thoughts in all persons heads. And is it then "caring" to be amused by another's nonsense? Is that not in fact demeaning, in that one needs the "cared for one" in order to feel the superior sense that one is "caring"? Human pride and arrogance know no boundaries beyond which they will not go to disguise themselves as virtue. This will never end.

reply

I agree the issue of being non-judgemental can appear to be nonesensical. Of course the listener is attempting to help the person to the extent of asking the right questions, making the right challenges etc. But one assumption I make here is that people are more likely to change if they can come to understand their own experience, and the thoughts and emotions that result, better (relying on their own thinking rather than advice). The second assumption is that the process of getting things 'off your chest' is itself a helpful in clarifying thinking.

I do not agree with your assumption that 'all human behavior is pleasure aquistion and pain avoidance'.

The word 'therapy' and 'therapeutic' has the association of being related to a professional practice that normalises its clients into a 'slave/consumer morality'. Social listening has itself virtues in sorting-out mixed up thoughts and emotions which we need to put to good use in everyday life.

Szczels 28 August 2005 11:22 (BST)