Listening
I want to say something about listening, but I want to start by saying it is not the right word. Listening implies an activity—something you do with ears and attention, a skill you can practise, a virtue you can cultivate.
There are courses in it. There are books. Managers attend workshops on it and come back with frameworks and a vocabulary and a list of behaviours that look like listening when performed correctly.
The problem with this is that what I’m trying to describe is not a behaviour. It is, if anything, the absence of a behaviour—or more precisely, the absence of several behaviours that most people perform automatically, without noticing, every time another person speaks.
When someone says something to you, a number of things happen at once. You compare what they’ve said with your own experience. You interpret it—decide what it means, or what it really means, or what they probably mean beneath what they think they mean. You feel the pull toward advice: here is what I would do, here is what has worked for me, here is the obvious next step. You reassure: it will be all right, everyone goes through this, this is not as bad as it feels. You disagree, privately or openly. You identify with it so completely that it stops being about them and becomes about you. Or you begin telling your own story, because their story has reminded you of one, and your story feels relevant, and you mean well, and before long you are talking and they are listening, which is the opposite of how it started.
None of those responses is inherently wrong. Some of them are generous. Some of them reflect a genuine desire to be useful. Most of them come from a good place in the person who does them. But they share something in common, and the thing they share is this: the speaker’s experience becomes material for the listener. Something is extracted. The person who spoke has offered something into the space between them, and the listener, almost without realising it, reaches across and takes it. They absorb it, reshape it, run it through their own machinery, and hand back something processed. The thing that returns is no longer the thing that was offered.
I leave what someone tells me where it belongs. I don’t take ownership of it. I don’t feel obliged to resolve it, or match it, or redirect it toward something I can manage more easily. I don’t need to arrive at a position on it. I can receive it and hold it without it becoming mine. This turns out to be rarer than you might think, and it turns out to matter more than almost anything else I have offered in conversations with men.
The reason most people appropriate—I want to be fair here—is that receiving without appropriating produces a particular discomfort. A person says something and the space that follows asks for a response, and the most available responses are the ones described above: compare, interpret, advise, reassure, disagree, identify, redirect. They fill the space. They resolve the tension that an unanswered statement creates. The listener does them partly for themselves: to relieve the pressure of not knowing what to say, to demonstrate that they were paying attention, to show that what was said had an effect, to participate in the exchange rather than simply witnessing it. All understandable. All, in their way, human. And all, in their way, a form of taking.
Non-appropriation leaves the experience where it was. The person who spoke still holds it. Nothing has been extracted. And because nothing has been extracted, there is more space—not less—for them to move around in what they said, to look at it again, to add to it or revise it or contradict it or discover that they didn’t mean quite what they thought they meant. The experience remains theirs to do something with. I simply stay close enough to follow.
This explains something about how I sit with contradictions. Most listeners, when a person says two things that cannot both be true, feel compelled to resolve the contradiction. They pick one, or they find a way to reconcile them, or they point out which one seems more credible, or they ask a question designed to establish which account the person really means. The contradiction makes them uncomfortable, as contradictions do, and the discomfort produces a resolving move.
I let contradictions stand. I notice them. I don’t resolve them on someone else’s behalf, because they are not mine to resolve. They belong to the person who produced them, and the person who produced them usually doesn’t notice them at first—they exist below the level of conscious attention, embedded in the logic that structures how he understands his own life. When I sit with the contradiction, I create the conditions under which he might notice it himself. That noticing, when it comes, comes from him. I didn’t hand it to him. I just didn’t take it away.
The man who told me his parents had put him on a pedestal—I have written about him before, in another context—spent the following hour describing two people who sounded worried and fallible and perhaps loving in a pressed, anxious way, but who bore no resemblance to the parents who produced the child on a pedestal. Nothing in what he said matched the opening statement. Many listeners would have addressed this almost immediately—gently, probably, but immediately. They would have offered a reconciling interpretation. They would have asked what he meant by the pedestal, and in asking it would have handed him a framework for the answer. I did none of that. I let him speak until the two accounts had fully developed, and then I named what I’d noticed. Not what it meant. Just that it was there.
Help me understand something, I said. You told me at the start that your parents put you on a pedestal. But everything you’ve described since seems to point somewhere different. The invitation was simple and contained no preference for how he answered it. He might have said I was right. He might have said no, because—and explained something that resolved the tension in a way I hadn’t anticipated. He might have said I’d never noticed that, which was also a beginning. All were acceptable. The answer was his and so was the contradiction, and my only role was to reflect back what two sides of it looked like from where I was sitting.
Advice is a different matter, and I want to say something honest about it rather than simply dismissing it. Advice is not wrong. Advice is sometimes exactly what is needed, and refusing to offer it on principle is its own kind of unhelpfulness, a superior performance of restraint that serves the withholder more than the recipient. The question I asked myself about advice was not whether it was appropriate in principle but whether it was appropriate given the structure of my work. And the structure of my work made advice oddly presumptuous in a specific way.
A man came to see me. We spent an hour or several hours together. He left. In most cases, I never saw him again. That was not a failure of the relationship—it was the nature of it. He arrived with something, we spent time in its company, and he went back to his life. Advice presupposes something that structure didn’t contain: a continuing investment in the outcome. If I told a man what I thought he should do, I was making a recommendation about a life I would not be present in after the conversation ended, about consequences I would not live with, about a situation whose development I would not witness. The arrogance in that isn’t obvious until you name it. He was the one going home to whatever it was. He was the one who would wake up in the morning and navigate the next step. My investment ended when he walked out the door. His didn’t.
That asymmetry made advice feel less useful than creating the conditions for him to produce his own. And producing his own meant he left with something that was genuinely his—a thought he’d arrived at, a perspective he’d found, a question he’d noticed for the first time—rather than with an instruction that came from outside and that he had to integrate or resist or quietly discard. Advice that someone else has generated for your life tends to sit at a slight angle to the life itself. Conclusions you reach yourself fit better, because they were made from the inside.
I came to understand non-appropriation not as a technique but as a kind of respect. It treats the other person as the authority on their own experience, which is what they are, and places me in the role of attentive witness rather than expert interpreter. The witness doesn’t need to know what things mean. The witness needs to track what happens—to follow closely enough that when something significant occurs, when a contradiction surfaces or a gap opens or a new element enters the account, the witness can say so clearly and without investment in the response.
I notice how rarely this happens in ordinary conversation. Not because people are careless or unkind, but because the pull toward the comparing, interpreting, advising responses is genuinely strong and almost entirely automatic. It requires no effort to appropriate. It requires considerable effort, and a particular kind of discipline, to stay on the other side of the threshold. The discipline is not about suppressing response—it is about waiting long enough to understand what kind of response, if any, would actually serve the person speaking. Sometimes that is nothing. Sometimes it is a question. Sometimes it is the reflection of a contradiction. Rarely is it advice. Almost never is it a story from your own life.
The men I sat with were not looking for someone to take what they said and do something with it. They were looking for somewhere to put it down. They had been carrying their own experience—the weight of it, the noise of it, the unresolved tangle of it—and what they needed was a surface that would hold it without changing its shape. That is what I tried to be. A surface that held. What they did with it once it was laid out was, as it should have been, entirely their business.
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