Closing up for more opening up

“I’m a professional listener”.

This is my standard response when people appear confused as to how a performing artist could also be in the role of clinical psychologist.

For me, the link is a no-brainer. Listening is an inherent and useful skill to both performance and psychology work. “Were you listening?” “Listen!” “Did you listen to what just happened?” are heard as frequently in director’s notes as within the walls of my clinical supervisors’ rooms.

In therapy, I’m listening to the content of what people are saying. I’m listening to the cues of process that are unfolding between me and a client. I’m listening to my own responses to what people bring to the room. As a performer, it’s similar but with different words. Call and response. Be available. Listen to what your performance partner is offering. “Yes, and… “

The act of genuine listening, both in performance and therapy, involves a constellation of events that we learn to enact seemingly on body memory. It’s a collaborative and relational process. There has to be something to listen to and some kind of relationship to whatever that something is. There is also a comfort with being genuinely curious and open in our perception of the available information.

Next, we are open to making meaning and the possibility of being changed. Our listening stimulates body memory, sensory processing and cognitive evaluation of what we have ‘heard’. We can self-reflect over our repertoire of biases and learned patterns, and how they influenced the evaluations we have just made. We perhaps notice our restricted repertoire, we aim for authenticity.

Finally, we learn to listen to our impulses. How to amplify the helpful ones and suppress the unhelpful. How to let go of the old favourites, to let in and provide what is truly needed in the present moment.

And so it is. This how we, as professional listeners, spend most of our days.

Today I noticed, and acknowledged for perhaps the first time, that this can be exhausting. I listened to my fatigue, flatness, fogginess, feels… my body and brain starting to do the closing up for me, because I’ve made being in open and listening mode my baseline.

Being perpetually open - at work, as a parent, as a partner, as a person in this big world - is not a helpful balance. In therapy, we think about resilience as when we are cognitively flexible, and able to shift modes of being. Being stuck in a mode, even if it initially seems useful or desirable, is not sustainable for our mental health.

I love doing the work of being open to listening. Now seems a good time to learn to be adept at closing up to it, too.