David: Hey, in our family, we don’t talk politics. We avoid that topic like the plague. It’s just too divisive. Sound familiar? Well, we want to pass along some advice that will solve that problem for you. It really will. Interested?

Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife, noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David at Karen Mains.

David: Okay, we have promised a lot and now we need to deliver.

Karen: It’s not really advice as much as it is an unknown kind of method of relating to people that will keep things from becoming contentious and does deep, deep work actually in other people’s lives and your own. I mean, if you’re the one who’s using this methodology.

David: And I want to say that I’m not talking theory here. This is a practice.

Karen: This is proven practice. I mean, it’s not just practice that we’ve experienced. This comes out of the scientific data.

David: Most of the time when people talk politics, I find as an observer, they’re thinking in terms of winning the other individual over to their side.

Karen: They’re defending their side.

David: This is very different from that. And it doesn’t necessarily resolve all the problems because I’ve used this because it’s a part of who I am. And sometimes it bugs people because, well, they want me to get involved. And they’re interested, honestly, in what I’m saying. Anyway, let’s talk about the listening approach.

Karen: Well, this is a long journey. I hope you signal to me if I’m talking too much because it’s been an area that I have spent a lot of time in my life.

David: Totally welcome to talk as long as you want. I find it very interesting and you’re more informed than I am. I’m good at putting it into practice.

Karen: Well, you’re a better practitioner than I am because I get involved in the intellectual exchange and the informational, you know.

David: You have convinced me now. I need to convince you as to the value of what you’re going to say.

Karen: Okay. Now, listeners are saying, okay, okay, get out of it. What is it you’re talking about? All right. I started this process not really knowing what I was getting into. I’d read a book by a Catholic nun on spiritual growth groups through the listening process and it just intrigued me. I was very interested in it. We had a list of people we worked with, with retreats and different sorts of growth group things and I sent out a notice to everyone and said, we really don’t know what we’re talking about here. Would you like to be a part of this journey and help us figure it out and discover what’s about? But I’m interested in trialing the concept of listening groups. Well, we did listening groups for about seven years.

I’m not going to explain that as much as I am. The thing I learned from those listening groups because that’s a whole other topic into itself. But we ran listening groups for about seven years. There were about 250 people who were involved. Now the listening groups themselves were three to four people. In our formula they met once a month for about two hours and most of the people had never done anything with each other. They didn’t know one another.

David: We’re just giving background now. We’re not saying you need to become part of the listening group. We’re going to tell you what we learned.

Karen: What we learned. Yes. Well having been in ministry all of our married lives, we’ve been married for 58 years now and this was probably 10 years ago when this started. I know how long it takes for a person who recognizes a problem in their life that they need to face into. How long it takes for that to find fruition. It’s a good six months. Even counselors will tell you that where the ah-ha light goes on and then people start working out to change that problem. It’s sometimes longer than that.

Well, I began to see very rapid growth in these gals. It was mostly gals although I did have a mixed listening group and we trialed it in retreats where we put everyone into listening groups 90 people at a time and we were working with this from all kinds of angles. So, I began to see this rapid emotional and psychological maturity.

David: So, you’re talking about weeks instead of months?

Karen: Yeah. And it was I thought this is kind of unusual. Am I just imposing this on this or?

David: Am I the secret to all of this?

Karen: Am I the secret to all of this? So, I invited a friend who is a psychological counselor to come and participate in the group with me. And so we laid out the structure of the group. One person talks at a time and we can only ask questions and it’s surrounded by these whole moments of silence.

David: But the key is becoming a very good listener.

Karen: And asking questions. So the counselor sat in the group as a participant and afterwards we would debrief what was happening and she said, “Do you know how fast that group moved into safety? Became a safe place.” And I hadn’t been thinking of it in those terms but she did because she does a lot of group counseling.

David: That’s her deal.

Karen: And I said no. She said they were in the first meeting. And that’s when we explained the listening group rules.

David: So they felt safe.

Karen: They immediately started to feel safe. You and I have a dear friend, Dr. Roger Veeth who is a neurosurgeon. And I was talking with Roger about the listening groups and he asked me if I had read the latest brain science reports on the listening process. I was so tempted to say, I know Roger. Which of the brains?

David: You had no idea.

Karen: I had no idea. I wasn’t into brain science at all at that point in time. And it was just becoming part of popular literature. So I’ll give myself a little excuse on that. And he said well there’s been really interesting studies about the listening process and how it relates to what is actually the prefrontal orbital cortex of the brain. And he said there’s been this trial done with IRA Irish Republican Army terrorists.

What people would call terrorists. And they took MRIs. It was a study, magnetic resonance imaging. Oh you go in that big tube and took pictures of their brains before they went through this process and afterwards and there were noticeable positive changes in the brain. So here’s what happened. When a person feels listened to but particularly heard and understood, that actually changes the capacities of the prefrontal orbital cortex. And if it happens over a long enough period you have remarkable changes that can be measured on MRI.

David: So with these terrorists if they were listened to and heard and understood.

Karen: Over a trial period.

David: It tended to be a healing.

Karen: It was extraordinary. The anger diminished. It was an extraordinary. The reason to.

David: The listener didn’t have to agree. They just had to make sure that they were listening and that the person felt they were understood. Heard and understood.

Karen: Heard and understood. Okay. So that was my introduction to years of dipping into brain study and then the listening groups that we were running became very different as far as my capacity to understand what was really happening there. I could go on and on but let’s apply it to family relationships.

David: When they get into politics.

Karen: Well not just in politics. I mean let’s even look it up. So what we have learned to do is to ask people questions. Say well how do you feel about that or what was your experience with that or how did you learn this or what does this mean to you. These kind of open-ended questions. We don’t want to have an agenda when we’re asking those questions.

We want to be really interested in their human process. And so when they tell us then we don’t respond with argument or counter or with what you obviously didn’t know about this informing them receive what they have to say.

David: How could you possibly say such and such?

Karen: Obviously haven’t read the literature and you know whatever. Yes right. We say how interesting that is. Things like this. I see where you’re coming from. Oh that explains a lot. All of those sorts of comments which indicate that we have really heard someone and we might ask more clarifying questions. Well who was the most influential person you met in this area. I mean all kinds of questions. of clarifying questions that we can introduce.

And then when we say to those people, oh I understand what you’re talking about. Oh that helps me so much. I can put this picture together better.

David: Yeah and you’re not manipulating.

Karen: It should be genuine. Yeah.

David: I hear what you’re saying.

Karen: Oh I never knew that about you. Oh that explains why. Those sorts of things. That person then feels like they have been heard and understood. Now you may not agree with their conclusions or the way they’re living it out in their life and those things actually aren’t really very important. As far as the human dynamic is concerned, and the healing dynamic that goes on with this kind of listening process, it’s just extraordinary.

And this can be applied and should be applied in every marriage and in every relationship. More than just feeling heard and understood what was happening in this group. I’m getting a little choked up about it. Now was people who had had any kind of breach. Can be traumatic or neglectful or you know sometimes the thing we live with that doesn’t sound so bad when we compare it to other people’s experiences is as bad as those experiences. It’s a normal. We learn to live with it. So they began to reattach a coming together that begins to occur between those two people. So our daughter-in-law who was married to our son who died. She’s his widow raising three children on her own but she went ahead and got her degree in adult education. So I often get invited to go along with her to some of the training sessions.

Yeah it’s just great. So there was a high school who had troubled teens. The whole school was troubled teens. There weren’t hundreds of them. There were probably let’s say 20 in each class. Freshman, sophomore, junior, senior.

They began to work with these kids who were from traumatic or abuse backgrounds. Some of them were still in abuse and traumatic backgrounds who were just not succeeding in school. They were just seeing how best to get these kids from abuse backgrounds through high school so that they graduated.

Most of them drop out. After their experiment they did a video. So, I’m watching this documentary on them and all these kids they had chosen for this trial, this experiment, had graduated from high school and they discovered that when an abused high schooler had one adult that they could relate to who was there for them who would listen, hear and understand.

And they took the MRIs of these high schoolers before the trial started and then afterwards in those parts of the brain were healed. Wow.

David: Oh that’s thrilling.

Karen: I just want to say to our listeners it is extraordinarily important that we begin to activate the sorts of care and kindness and compassion and yes attachment that happens when someone feels really listened to, heard and understood.

David: Wow. This is very very helpful. Yeah I’m interested. My field is theology obviously and I’m going back to scriptures and what I come up with is Jesus when he talks to the people who says you have ears but you don’t hear.

Karen: You do not hear. Wow.

David: Isn’t that interesting? Yeah so and and that’s all in a religious context. Usually with religious leaders. If anybody should have been good at this they should have been but I think that in terms of our country we have people who have ears but they don’t use their ears to hear nearly as much as they use their tongues to tell. There is a time to say this is where I’m coming from.

Karen: Right and I feel strongly about this. Yeah that’s fine.

David: But if I say that and then the person begins to argue, I think I would take it back again and say you know what I was just telling you where I’m coming from. I didn’t necessarily want you to tell me where you’re coming from. I just wanted you to understand where I’m coming from.

Karen: Okay there are two things I want to say before we do in the podcast. One is that whenever I’m working with a group of people and I’m teaching them about this process, you need to sit down and take a listening autobiography of your life. Write out a listening autobiography. When I was in early childhood who was it who really listened to me? Okay great school years. I mean you divide your life up into these natural sections. When I was in junior high, when I was in high school. Were there people in my life at that time who really listened to me and did I feel at any in any of those stages of my life heard and understood. And then you write down whether you did. I mean you’re going to go through it no one here. Oh my aunt so-and-so at this age. She was always so wonderful. I knew she cared for me. She asked me what I was doing. Things like that. That’ll come up.

And then what I asked them to do after they do the listening autobiography is to say don’t tell me who that person was. Tell me how you feel when you think about them. How are you feeling now when you think about them? And they describe all these extraordinary things. I’m just flooded with love. I feel like someone’s got their arms around me. I mean this happens over and over. It’s just an extraordinary thing.

So even now in their lives, their adult lives, that one person who they remember who listened to them when they think about them, then this flush of well-being. It’s just extraordinary. Second thing and I will end with this.

I could go on and on. This is the remarkable part about it. So let’s think of two people sitting like you and I are. And one of them has discovered what gifts are given when you listen in this way. Now according to the literature, not only is the capacity of the brain to feel the positive effect of this, not only is that person’s brain impacted, the one who has done the listening’s brain is impacted as well. So it’s a two-way thing. Even when we don’t feel like that person is asking us things about ourselves, it’s just we’re giving it to that person. But we also are positively impacted. And that’s how this synchronicity that occurs between two brains through eye contact. We lean in and we engage. When that is replicated person after person, community after community, town after town, we create a better world.

I mean that sounds ridiculous but it’s true. And the result of that is this feeling of being at home with ourselves, at home with our family, at one with our community. It just is well-being. I mean this is really the end result of a community that begins to learn to listen to one another in this kind of way. It’s extraordinary.

David: I’m going to try to put this into a sentence. Okay. A profound way we can help to heal our broken society is to give one another the gift of hearing or listening and understanding. A profound way we can help to heal our broken society is to give one another the gift of hearing or listening and understanding. We bring healing if we can just learn to stop talking so much. And by listening we mean really hearing what is being said.

Karen: No, I agree with you. I’ve seen it happen.

David: And I find that even if I irritate someone because they say you’re not telling me where you’re coming from. If I just stick with what is being said there, I’m saying no, you’re helping me and this is a positive thing. It doesn’t bother me that you’ve been talking. I’m ready if you want to listen to me sometime. Fine. I’m not sure I have clear answers like you’re saying. Anyway, it opens up the whole ability to hear one another.

Karen: So what we want to say to people who are listening to this podcast is learn to listen and listen well because you do not know the impact of that, what that will have on another person’s life.

David: Yeah, don’t listen with, no, how am I going to respond? You listen with, how do I understand more?

Karen: Where this person is coming from. That’s the secret right there.

David: Yeah, I feel very good about it.

Outgo: You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all lowercase letters, hosts@beforewego.show. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2025 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.