If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of listening to others with as much enthusiasm as we seek to be understood ourselves.
In this quote, Harriet Lerner highlights a common communication issue where individuals often prioritize their own desire to be heard over genuinely listening to others. This imbalance can lead to misunderstandings and weak connections, suggesting that true dialogue and effective relationships require us to actively engage in listening just as fervently as we wish to express ourselves.
In practice
During a team meeting to encourage better collaboration.
It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run but, it will never make you less afraid.
Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.
Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.
An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.
Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.
I am now considered such a monster, that I hesitate to darken with my shadow, the doors of those I love, lest I should bring upon them misfortune.
Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low, bind them in marriage and then chastise them with menial service for life, or insults, or blows.
All farewells should be sudden, when forever.
Between husband and wife friendship seems to exist by nature, for man is naturally disposed to pairing.
No man is worth your tears, but once you find one that is, he won't make you cry.
I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.
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