‘All sorrows can be borne’, the writer Karen Blixen once said, ‘if you put them in a story, or tell a story about them’, and this belief is often thought to lie behind much of the work of psychoanalysis: not just a talking cure but a telling cure.
Green, Kelda. Rethinking Therapeutic Reading: Lessons from Seneca, Montaigne, Wordsworth and George Eliot (Anthem Studies in Bibliotherapy and Well-Being) (p. 7). Anthem Press. Kindle Edition.
Listening, attentive listening without interruption, is such a rare and healing experience. Being a sounding board, a shoulder to cry on, an empathic presence who becomes what Alice Miller calls "an enlightened witness" is one of the most difficult and significant activities of helping. Edwin Friedman calls this kind of listening the activity of providing "a non anxious" presence.
Suffering shared is reduced in intensity and creates a perspective of of increased objectivity so that it can be managed.
After this kind of listening I will sometimes ask, "What do you call it?" or "What do you make of all this?" or "What is the moral of the story, the lesson to be learned." We discuss this for a while struggling to find a name for the causes of the suffering. I often point out, "If you can't name it, you can't manage it. Naming it is 90% of getting on a better track."
Then, I ask, "What more did you want to get out of our meeting" and the person often says, "This is good. I feel so much better."
