Crafty Listening for Parent and Carers
Curiosity Responsiveness Assertiveness Focus Thoughtfulness ‘Yes!
By momentarily setting aside your own feelings and giving total attention (instead of Rescuing), crafty listening can encourage your child to recognise and to communicate deeper pains. Here are some tips on Crafty Listening.
Curiosity
A sense of wonder.
Yes, it can be difficult to keep on wondering what your child will say or do next
when s/he is so full of sadness, fear, rage, confusion and frustration.
However, if you assume that your child's present and future difficulty and distress
is a hundred times worse than yours at that moment, and if you remember that
there is always more behind the mask and beneath the surface, that might give
you the strength to respond instead of react. And one of the best and most
effective responses can be to ask questions and to be crafty!.Responsiveness Respecting your child’s feelings can be difficult, especially if your own feelings are churned up. If you keep stopping your child from sharing more of hir troubles and traumas and s/he may believe you won’t be bale to encompass hir painful memories and deeper hurts.
To ask questions with genuine concern and curiosity requires that we bcome more
focused on the child's pain than our own.Assertiveness
This is necessary because, for your own sake as well as your child’s,
it is vital that you are in appropriate control. If you are not, there is the danger that
you will become the wicked wimp of the world, or become aggrieved and aggressive,
neither of which is a desirable thing to be.Focus
What we focus on grows! Crafty listening means you need not be bored by
your child’s boredom or whinging. You probe deeper, genuinely interested and
fascinated by hir efforts to communicate. When a child knows that s/he is a fascinating
being even if s/he is not entertaining, amusing, pleasing or compliant, even if s/he is shy,
timid, angry, sad or scared, it can reinforce your child’s self-esteem and sense of belonging.Thoughtfulness
Hold your child’s pain and potential in your mind and think deeply about
how you respond when you are together so that your responses can assist hir journey
from Hurt, through Hate, on to Healing and beyond - to Wholeness.Yes!
An affirmative assumption that you, your child and partner and, ideally, all your family
are all in it together! You approach each conflict, argument, struggle, obstacle and set-back
believing that, together, you will come through. After you have listened craftily, even if only
for three minutes or so, leaving plenty of time for your child to think, ask a question that has
any of the following words but nothing else, “And is there anything else you think,
[feel or want to say] about that?” Then, even if they say, “No, that’s it!” trust your intuition and
lovingly wait, just being there, attentive, patient, kind! The silence need not be prolonged,
it simply allows your child,and you, to reflect, ponder, consider.If you are uncomfortable with a few moments silent contemplation, and if your discomfort has
more weight than your child's pain, at that moment, then your child will just have to hope that
you eventually deal sufficiently with your own attachment issues so that s/he can get the kind
of healing responses that you might have wished for when, as a child, you were in distress!By the way; If your child also senses, in that moment, that you are feeling
Intuition and Love, you will be listening CRAFTILY!