Today during a marriage session a woman asked me why I thought it was that people’s first tendency while trying to listen is to get defensive. She was reporting how her husband had done something different and listened to her without defensiveness. Sometimes people ask me things and I have to pause for a moment and think about what to say. But with this question the answer came to me almost instantaneously. I said it was because we are naturally self-centered.

And suddenly it was like it was all making sense. When we hear things, we hear it through our perspective. Everything people say is being filtered through the experience of the self. She said it wasn’t just him who does it, but that she does it too. I said that yeah typically in counseling we’re addressing in the man first because the woman is the one who brings up most of the problems. But I have seen it in sessions too that if he brings up a problem she does the same exact thing.

I made the mistake again of asking a couple during an intake to talk about why they were there, before getting to my other questions. It was back and forth in the most predictable fashion. One said something but then the other had to explain, which continued into an even further explanation and on it went until I had to say again that we needed to finish the other questions. I hadn’t done that in a while but I was wanting to switch it up and just see what would happen. if it’d be any different.

But back to the self-centeredness. I was completely shocked at myself that I had said this so easily. I wasn’t trying to make it softer or even say that being self-centered was understandable. And they shook their heads in full on agreement and told me that I was the one who made sense. The woman explored her own continued examination, that even when you try to understand the why behind what you do what you do, that is still focused on yourself and your own experience. Yes, exactly.

So what then is change? Change is to focus on the experience of the other person. What they were feeling. What they were thinking. And to eliminate the self-interpretation. It sounds so harsh though and I don’t know if there is softer or better way to say it. There’s nothing to defend when this is not about you. There’s nothing to be threatened when you are not even there, when your self is not in the way. It’s like a miracle undoing for all human relationships, this profound “other” orientation.