When we speak, we are not asking to be advised, fixed, or given solutions. We are asking to be seen. To be understood. To be heard. And yet, people so often hear someone’s pain or confusion as a cry for help—something broken that needs repair. We rush in with suggestions, solutions, opinions and interpretations, convincing outselves we’re helping. We've been taught that love looks like solving problems and that care means offering the quickest escape from discomfort.
But love—real love—is slower than that. Love listens first. It holds space. It sees the other through their pain, not as their pain. It acknowledges their experiences as complete, not flawed. It allows someone to be whole, even when they may feel broken. True listening asks for stillness and presence without an agenda. It requires that we set aside the urge to fix, to judge, or to correct. It invites us to meet someone exactly where they are—not where we wish they were, and not where it would be easier for us to love them.
The rarest kind of love may not be based on usefulness, improvement, or potential. It is simply the grace of being loved for who we are, as we are.
What It’s Like to Receive (& Make Mistakes)
I’ve had moments where someone simply let me speak—and stayed with me. No interruption. No analysis. No direction. Just presence. It’s as if they opened a quiet room inside themselves and invited me in. In that space, I could be messy, uncertain, and unclear—and I was still welcome. When someone listens like that, something inside begins to untangle. I hear myself more clearly. I don’t need their advice because I start to discover my own clarity.
For 18 years, I participated in—and later facilitated—men’s support circles rooted in this kind of compassionate presence. Listening wasn’t just a skill; it was a lifeline. There was a man in our group who came every week, repeating the same story about how stuck he felt in his life. Week after week, for years, I sat and listened. I didn’t push him, didn’t offer solutions, didn’t ask for change. I was just present.
But one week, something in me shifted. He started in again, and I found myself losing patience. I snapped. I told him I was tired of hearing the same complaints without action. The room went silent. I knew immediately I had crossed a boundary. I felt my tail between my legs. That moment wasn’t just a lapse—it was a realization. Even with years of practice, I had limits. Even seasoned listeners get overwhelmed.
That experience taught me that listening is not about perfection. It’s not about never losing patience. It’s about noticing when we hit our limits, returning to presence, and honoring the relationship with honesty and humility. Listening means showing up with both compassion and self-awareness—respecting both the one who is speaking and the one who is listening.
The Contrast with What’s Modeled: In the Family
Most of us aren’t taught how to listen. In families, caring and love often looks like fixing. There's a rush to comfort, to offer advice, to smooth over someone’s pain. The intention may be care, but the impact is more often disconnection. We're taught to respond, not to stay. We’re rewarded for offering solutions, not for creating space where someone can be seen and heard without interference.
We become fluent in easing or erasing discomfort, instead of becoming fluent in holding it. Many of us grew up in households where the pattern of love was transactional: emotional struggles were met with instructions; feelings were corrected instead of welcomed. The result is a kind of love that’s efficient but not intimate. It can’t bear the silence of another’s pain without trying to cover it up. Listening, in these environments, becomes reactive rather than receptive.
The Contrast with What’s Modeled: In the Workplace
That same reflex appears in professional settings, though it wears a different mask. In workplaces, listening often becomes a tool for extraction—a way to gather information, manage perception, or streamline productivity. I remember a time at the college where I worked when the president attempted to balance the budget by laying off half the full-time instructors in the culinary department. The environment became tense and uncertain. I did my best to hold space, to listen to my colleagues as fear took hold.
Then the administration decided to combine two leadership roles into one impossible job. Everyone recognized how overwhelming it would be. Not even the vice president agreed with the newly created position. When the hiring process began, I spoke up and urged them to expand the candidate pool, to look for someone qualified who understood the scale of the job. But they dismissed my suggestions and hired someone with no culinary experience to lead the culinary arts department. I was told to “give it a chance.”
That moment crystallized the way institutions often pretend to listen without actually doing so. The decision was already made. Feedback was tolerated but not absorbed. It reinforced something I’ve come to understand more deeply over time: in many professional spaces, listening is not an act of recognition—it’s a tactic. The reward system prioritizes action and outcome. Presence, care, and trust don’t generate profit. The value of being seen is dismissed because it cannot be measured.
Where Trust Begins: The Space Rarely Given
The most transformative listening doesn’t come with advice, strategies, or timelines for healing. It comes with space. A space where we’re not interrupted, redirected, or evaluated. A space that doesn’t demand improvement unless we want it for ourselves.
Most of us were never taught to give that kind of space to others—or even to ourselves. It takes real patience to sit beside someone else’s pain without reaching for an exit ramp. It takes strength to stay emotionally present while setting aside the urge to fix. But true listening is a kind of quiet rebellion within ourselves; to quiet the urges to respond and offer unsolicited advice. True listening creates the conditions where people feel safe enough to be who they are. It tells us that our feelings don’t need justification, our stories don’t need polishing, and our wholeness isn’t dependent on being understood.
The truth is that life’s answers usually surface when we’re heard—not when we’re told what to do. This kind of space is rare. Most of us didn’t grow up with it. It’s not the default in families. It’s not built into the structures of work. And sometimes, even in therapy, we are interpreted before we are fully seen.
Real listening asks us to stay a little while longer, to soften a little bit more. To witness someone’s truth, someone’s pain, not through the lens of who they should be, but through the courage of who they already are. Maybe that’s the rarest kind of love: not the love that seeks to improve us, but the love that finds us most worthy when we are most real. Because relationships move at the speed of trust. And trust moves at the speed of being seen.
Carol Karpson Schoenleber
SO important! Thank you, Maurice.