Are You Listening?

When Mila shared about her mother, she was full of tears. Everything was bottled up inside her for decades.

In session, she became open about her mother in relation to the past, present, and future.

Listening to her story opens up the possibility of her accepting her self. To complete the incomplete cycle where she got stuck.

How marvelous to witness her freeing moment to make healing changes, learning to face and solve problems, and realize her full potential.

Psychotherapist Paul Tournier, M.D. writes,

“How beautiful, how grand and liberating this experience is, when people learn to help each other. It is impossible to overemphasize the immense need humans have to be really listened to, to be taken seriously, to be understood ... Modern psychology has brought it very much to our attention. At the heart of all psychotherapy is this type of relationship in which one can tell everything, just as a little child will tell all to his mother. No one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person ... He who would see himself clearly must open up to a confidant freely chosen and worthy of such trust.”

I like to say that listening is a work of courage. It can be not easy. Yet, as Dr. M.Scott Peck once pointed out, it’s “what love is.”

What listening have you done today? Or, in another way, what loving have you done today?