Dr. Alison Wood Brooks

This is so, this is incredibly common.

Okay.

So listening is three steps.

The first step is hearing and seeing your partner, all of the cues that the person is giving to you, their words, the sound of their voice, their nonverbal behaviors, everything that comes in through your eyes and ears.

That's the sort of physical part of listening.

Then your brain does step two, which is I'm going to think about some of the stuff that I'm hearing and seeing.

I'm going to elaborate on it in my mind.

Step three is this unique thing that's offered by conversation, which is I can show back to you that I heard you and that I was thinking about it.

Okay.

And that's how we get our credit.

And that's how you get our credit.

So the decades of research on active listening have mostly focused on non-verbals.

So the fact that you turn your back on your husband makes him feel like you're not listening to him because your non-verbals were sort of incongruent with what was going on in your mind.

Correct.

Okay.

So he's sort of like, well, if you're going to put in the hard work to actually listen to me, like, why don't turn your back on me?

That makes me feel like you're not, you don't care about what I'm saying.

Okay.

So many decades of focus on these nonverbal cues, making eye contact, nodding, smiling, facing someone, leaning forward as you're talking to them.

That's all great.