5 ways to increase safety while listening

While Focusing or in other contexts, how we listen can greatly affect the interaction we have with the other person we are connecting with. Here are five ways to increase safety while listening which ultimately can allow for more flow in experiences (felt shifts!) or generative conversations.

1. Send cues of safety

Society often gives the impression that lack of threat equals safety. However, as Gabor Mate’s says “Safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection.” Similarly, Stephen Porges says that “the removal of threat is not the same thing as the experience of safety”.

Co-regulation is a biological imperative. It is the need for safe enough connection; the reciprocal sending and receiving of signals of safety. So when listening, not only do we not want to give cues of threat or danger, but we want to send cues of safety.

Safety cues that can be used while listening include:

• Making eye contact (may vary depending on your culture)

• Using a soft, caring tone of voice and prosody (again, this can also vary and be triggering for some)

• Facial expressions that are positively valanced: calm, relaxed, smiling

• Posture: leaning in and facing the person directly

• Show interest, empathy and understanding

2. Don’t use too much empathy

According to the University of California, Berkeley “while empathy refers more generally to our ability to take the perspective of and feel the emotions of another person, compassion is when those feelings and thoughts include the desire to help.”

While empathy is very important while listening—after all, it is one of the three core conditions in Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Approach—we can have too much of it. Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki point out that too much empathy can lead to empathic distress. Singer developed a hierarchy model of empathy and compassion. In short, empathy can either transform into empathic distress—excessive empathic resonance with others' emotions—or into compassion with empathic concern, see figure below. (It should be noted that this is not to discount the compassion fatigue that caregivers experience, and that empathic distress may be a precursor to.)

Figure: Singer’s hierarchy model of empathy and compassion.

In regular conversations, this is probably why it can often feel icky when someone shares their own related experience in a way that takes up a lot of space. There is too much self-related emotion. Versus the common humanity (one part of self-compassion) that can come with an empathic share that one gets consent to share.

3. Use more compassion instead

In Polyvagal Safety (on page 68), Stephen Porges proposes some explanations as to why compassion can work so well in listening, and why empathy can sometimes backfire:

“A cornerstone to compassion is respecting the individual’s capacity to experience their own pain. By respecting the individual’s capacity to experience pain, compassion functionally allows the individual to have their experiences witnessed by another without hurting the other, by empathically sharing their pain and activating the defensive sympathetic nervous system of the other. This allows the pain to be expressed without fear of negative evaluation or the potential shame that emerges from evaluation.”

Compassion lives in what Jan Winhall calls Flock and in polyvagal theory is called the ventral branch of the vagal nerve. Porges is proposing that compassion keeps the listener in their safe and social energy, while empathy can activate the sympathetic nervous system which is used for defence. Compassion is also one of the 8Cs of Self in Internal Family Systems. So in both polyvagal and IFS models, compassion lives in the place of safety.

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These insights provide implications for what one might mirror/reflect back in listening to someone, especially in a Focusing session. I divide these into “small” or low arousal emotions and “big” or high arousal emotions below (regardless of whether their valence is positive or negative):

4. Empathic listening responses for small emotions

In my experience, when a Focuser or person is sharing smaller emotions, like some anger or happiness, it is fine and even helpful to mirror back the tone that the person used. The same goes for small gestures and sounds like sighs. We can use our empathy and feel their feelings and use that emotion in our saying back what we heard from them—whether using absolute listening or rephrasing with active listening.

At times, however, we may use a slightly more gentle tone of voice than that used by the Focuser or speaker, to help convey our empathy for their situation. This can also build rapport and safety.

5. Compassionate listening responses for big emotions

When I hear more tender feelings, like some deep sadness, or I see tears, then I switch into compassionate holding space mode. I don’t try to feel what is being shared or use the tone of the emotions, but rather ask the Focuser “Is it ok to be with that?” or “Can you welcome/receive that?”

Important here is that I don’t assume they are outside of their window of tolerance. I ask if it is ok for them to be with that? (Of course if you’ve worked with someone enough to know they must be, you wouldn’t ask.) And only take them away from those emotions and felt sense to ground if they say it is too much. This allows them to—as Porges said above—“experience their own pain”.

Very important in this is for them to experience their painful emotions with their self-compassion and Self energy also present. In my experience, this is profoundly healing—maybe even the most healing thing we can do. When our inner child knows that our adult Self is there for them, so much can change. Protectors can relax, and we can rekindle a direct relationship with that part of ourselves.

This ability to be with and accept our experience with compassion is part of the Focusing Attitude and Step 6 Receiving. It is key to what makes Focusing work!

Typically, Focusers will spend just a few minutes in that self-compassion holding. The process then carries forward and something else comes. Sometimes their inner child is ready to play. Or some other facet of the felt sense or another part comes forward for attention. They may need to return to this painful place again in future sessions, especially if it was traumatic, as slightly different contexts bring up the need for more of those tears or emotions to be held and processed.