Autobiographical listening

Published Categorized as Empathy, Wellbeing

A dear friend recently introduced me to the term, ‘autobiographical listening’. She described it as something along the lines of, ‘listening only from inside your own frame of reference’. This means that if someone is doing autobiographical listening, everything the other person says is processed through the visor of:

  • How do I relate to that via my own experiences?
  • What does that mean to me?
  • How might that affect me? Or even….
  • Might what I just heard be a threat to me?

…as it is generally the listening of someone who is quite fragile – as many of us are.

An extreme example would be if someone said, ‘I went to X Italian restaurant last night.’ The autobiographical listener might respond with, ‘I don’t like Italian food.’ The visor is applied and a judgement made about the other person’s experience relating solely to their own experience rather than with the intent of wanting to know what the other person’s experience was. We are often left feeling very dissatisfied when we converse with autobiographical listening – especially if we have something bothering us that we want to talk about.

The impact of autobiographical listening is that the conversation is frequently switched back to being about the person doing it and the original speaker feels like they have not been listened to and certainly not understood.

One of the most common examples of autobiographical listening is when a listener identifies with what the speaker says and feels the urgent need to share their experience. For example, if someone was stating that they were facing the possibility of redundancy, the autobiographical listener would override the conversation with their experience of redundancy and leave the speaker feeling their situation was unacknowledged and certainly not feeling their experience or feelings were understood. Other ways of preventing the speaker from feeling truly understood are to judge or evaluate what they shared, bombard them with advice, ask probing questions to fulfil our own curiosity or making assumptions in our understanding based on our own experiences etc.

Some people do autobiographical listening more than others and I am certain I did when I was younger. I suspect in my case it was born out of never really having felt listened to as a child and therefore, my desperate need to be heard or even noticed. I have been on quite a journey with listening! I think there are probably many of us who don’t always feel truly listened to and the more we feel this, the more likely we are to engage in autobiographical listening. Whatever the reason that drives listening in this way, it can be unlearnt with awareness.

With age, however, I have grown to think of listening empathetically is one of the kindest gifts we can give to another. Listening empathetically is a about trying to understand what it must be like for the speaker, experiencing the situation that they are in (not how you would feel in the same situation). Empathetic listening makes the conversation about the other person as you focus fully on their need to tell you what they are and for you to demonstrate understanding best you can. It does take practice but everyone can get better at it once they increase their awareness of how they listen.