2.1 Active listening
Active listening became a professional skill largely thanks to the American psychologist Carl Rogers (1902–1987), who developed a ‘person-centred approach’ to therapy. This approach involved focusing closely on the speaker, not only listening to their words but also to the expression of their voice and other aspects of body language. It also involved portraying warmth and care, helping the speaker feel safe to share unsettling thoughts and feelings (Barrett-Lennard, 1999). Counsellors often undertake many hours of training to achieve this type of skill. However, it is important to note that on a basic level, a lay person can learn to offer warmth, support, guidance and structure to help someone find solutions.
In the next activity you will reflect on the importance of listening to young people who are experiencing distress.
Activity 3: Just listen
Timing: Allow about 20 minutes
Watch Video 3 where Pooky talks about different strategies to talk with and listen to your child. As you watch make notes on the four key messages.
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 3: 4 ideas for supporting a child with anxiety
Transcript: Video 3: 4 ideas for supporting a child with anxiety
POOKY
Hello. It’s Pooky and Buddy, of course, as always. Now today’s video is a quick one. And it’s for parents or teachers who are worried about a child who’s struggling with anxiety. It’s in response to a query from someone who asked, what are some simple things that I can do because I’m concerned about my child and I don’t know how to help? So I’m going to just share four really basic ideas. We’ll expand on these and explore more in other videos, but hopefully this will give you a start of a 10.
So the first thing and I say this about everything all the time. The first thing is to listen. Just stop and listen. Let the child, let the young person talk to you. Allow them to explore their story. Allow them to tell you how they’re feeling, when and why, how this feels physically, how this feels emotionally, what are the kind of things that are triggering It. Just let them get it out. Let them explore it. And just, yeah, give them a little bit of your time.
This isn’t a time for you to try and problem solve or try and fix it. It’s just a time for them to get it out and for you both to begin to understand the problem a little bit better. Secondly, you want to begin to encourage your child, a young person you’re working with to question the thoughts and feelings that they’re experiencing. So commonly, when we experience anxiety, there may be a reason for it, but it might not be a valid reason, if that makes sense.
So we begin to question these thoughts and these feelings as they come into our mind and they kind of drive our emotional and physical state. And we say, is this feeling true? Is it accurate? Is the way-- the thing I’m worrying about likely to happen? As these thoughts, as these feelings come into their mind, they begin to question the validity of them. The next thing you want to do is to take a really practical approach.
And again, listening to them as they talk through maybe a typical day and try and work out within that day what are the trigger points, when are the moments that things that start to go wrong, which are the moments that cause anxiety or panic to happen. When we can begin to isolate that it’s with-- when you with a certain person, you were in a certain place, it’s in the lead up to a certain activity, then we can begin to understand whether these are things that we can do something about, whether we need to be addressing our feelings about them, whether we might avoid them.
Although, we have to be careful because sometimes avoiding stuff can make it look kind of loom larger in our mind and we don’t address the crux of the issue, but some things we might want to avoid it. Might be that a certain person is a really bad influence on us or our child, and so we might suggest maybe spending less time with that person. So having to think about what are the triggers and what might we be able to do about them.
Even just understanding what those triggers are can really give a bit of a sense of empowerment, and boost our self-esteem, and confidence somehow. And that is a real kind of help when we are trying to, yeah, boost our confidence and reduce our anxiety. Finally, and this is a slightly more long-term approach, you can work with the child to think about things that they can do that help them to feel soothed and calm.
Now we can’t do this at the point in which anxiety is raging because we can’t do anything at that point. We are incapable of thinking of anything other than fight, flight, freeze. What we need to do is during a time of calm, when we’re having a nice time together have a think about what things make me feel good? What are some simple things that I can do that might help me feel calmer during times of anxiety?
These might be things like, you might explore breathing techniques, some people like to write, or to draw, or to sing, or to listen to music. It really doesn’t matter. It’s absolutely up to you and your child and what works for them. But the important thing is to practice these things, to have a go at them when you’re feeling OK and calm. So then, you can put them into place at moments when either you’re beginning to feel anxious or you’re worried that your minds are going back a step thinking about our triggers, then we can begin to then put those two things together.
So for example, we might have identified that I always feel anxious on a Wednesday afternoon because I know I’ve got games coming up. So I might have discovered that I can make myself feel calm by doing coloring and listening to my favorite Ed Sheeran album. And so I might decide that every Wednesday lunchtime I’m going to do some coloring and listening to my favorite album in order to help me feel prepared and less anxious ahead of the thing that I’m anxious about that afternoon.
So you see how it kind of begins to tie together. Whistle-stop tour again, I hope it’s a few helpful ideas. I will happily expand, share more ideas in another video. Let me know what you want, always happy to respond, and also still very, very new to this. Please like. Please comment. And please subscribe. I’m still working on the whole pointy finger thing. Please subscribe.
Video 3: 4 ideas for supporting a child with anxiety
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Discussion
| 1. Just listen. Do not fill in the gaps or try and fix things. Try and remain calm. |
| 2. Do not be afraid of silence. |
| 3. Prompt young people to talk. Ask questions and use their words when you summarise and reflect back to them. |
| 4. Agree some next steps. |
Active listening is a technique that shows the young person you are giving them your attention and are doing your best to understand what they are telling you. It can encourage young people to talk because it shows that they are being understood and that the information they are sharing is being listened to and acknowledged.