Ginnie Post: Listening without defensiveness

Up until a few years ago, a poster named Ginnie used to be a regular member of the Grandparents.com forums. She was a 60-something grandmother, psychologist, and guardian ad litem, and her posts were a thing of wonder. (She wrote the comment at the bottom of “The Missing Missing Reasons.”) Every so often I’m going to highlight something she wrote.

Today’s post is a discussion she began, titled “No Apology Will Be Given; Discussion Allowed?”

Okay, so there’s a camp of firm believers in not apologizing for parenting decisions made 20, 30 years ago. You did the best you knew, you did what was right and the kid just will have to accept that.

But will you discuss it? Without defensiveness and explaining yourself? Without giving reasons and explanations about why you did what you did unless your child straight out asks, why did you…? Without trying to make the adult child understand YOU? Are you willing to listen and discuss it from your adult child’s point of view and validate their experience–or is this like the apologies; it was what it was and the child just needs to suck it up, move on, get over it, and realize nobody–including them–is perfect.

The reason I qualified without explaining yourself is that usually these adult children have hurts left over from childhood that they could not articulate at the time, either because they felt powerless and dependent or because they did not have the ability to translate their thoughts and feelings into words. Explaining yourself without being asked is invalidating, it feels to the AC that you are overruling their feelings and impressions, imposing your feelings and impression on theirs. It often feels minimizing and invalidating.

My observation is most ACs don’t want apologies for their childhood, they want to be heard because they didn’t feel heard as a child, they want validation. They do want apologies though for recent things, but the old stuff they want to be empathized with.

Are you willing to do that? Or is the past the past and the AC just needs to understand whatever it is you want them to understand (move on, they are responsible for their own happiness, you aren’t perfect, whatever)?

The ensuing discussion rounds all the bases as members weigh in with every possible viewpoint. But the best part starts at the bottom of the page, when a user named “undecided” says,

This thread is really fascinating because so many response posts seem hung up on “how can I not explain?!?!”.  It make me wonder if 1) people are not really reading the OP all the way through because they’re getting hung up on one of their own triggers (Ginnie does mention waiting for AC to ask for explanations – she’s not saying don’t explain) or 2) they honestly just can’t imagine a conversation where one person’s feelings and explanations weren’t given any air time.

Then she shows how active listening works and explains why it succeeds in situations where giving explanations up front fails. It’s an excellent lesson in a communication style that, for many (most?) of us, is counterintuitive.

 

(With thanks to the person who emailed to ask me about fauxpologies and got me thinking about the subject.)