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 wanna 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 and Karen Mains.

David:   Okay, we have promised a lot. 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 wanna say that I’m not talking theory here.

Karen:   No.

David:   This is a practice.

Karen:   This is proven practice. I mean, it’s not just practice that we’ve experienced as 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.

Karen:   Really?

David:   Well, they want me to get into the…

Karen:   To get involved.

David:   Yeah, to get involved. And they’re interested honestly in what I’m saying. Anyway, let’s talk about the listening approach.

Karen:   Okay. 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:   You’re 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:   And our listeners are thinking, “Okay, okay, get on with 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. 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 it’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 unto 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. And 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:   Which is giving background now. We’re not saying you need to become part of the listening group.

Karen:   No.

David:   We’re going to tell you what we learned.

Karen:   What we learned.

David:   Yes.

Karen:   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 lives 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 Aha! light goes on. And then people start working out to change that problem. 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 weeks instead of months?

Karen:   Yeah. And I thought this is kind of unusual. Am I just imposing this to serve?

David:   Am I the secret to all of this?

Karen:   Yeah, am I the secret to all of this? Pappy on the back.

David:   The answer to that was no.

Karen:   Unfortunately. 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 built in this whole, it’s surrounded by these whole moments of silence.

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

Karen:   Becoming a good listener 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? Become 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 field.

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 Veith, 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. I was so tempted to say, “Now Roger, which of the brain science”?

David:   You had no idea what you were saying?

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.” He didn’t use that terminology with it.

David:   Fortunately for you.

Karen:   Fortunately for me. 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, or you go in that big tube and took pictures of their brains. Before the studies, before they went through this process, which I will name in just a moment, and afterwards, and there were noticeable changes in the brain. So here’s what happened.

David:   Positive changes.

Karen:   Positive changes. When a person feels, when a person, any person, feel listened to, but particularly heard and understood. So, if the listeners would just repeat back with me, 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. This is the imaging, brain imaging.

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

Karen:   And understood 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.

Karen:   Yes.

David:   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. And I could go on and on, but let’s apply it to where we began this.

David:   Divided culture, where people can’t even talk to each other.

Karen:   Family dinners.

David:   They cut off friendship. Family relationships. Family relationships. When they get into politics.

Karen:   Well, not just in politics. I mean, let’s even look through that.

David:   Let’s keep it there.

Karen:   For now. So, what we have learned to do is to ask people questions. Say, “Well, how do you feel about that? Or how did you come to experience? 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.

David:   Yes.

Karen:   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, with counter or counter or with what you obviously didn’t know about this, you know, informing them. We just receive what they have to say.

David:   “How could you possibly say such and such”?

Karen:   Yeah, obviously haven’t read the literature and you know whatever.

David:   Yes, right.

Karen:   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 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. You’re truly a…

Karen:   It should be genuine. Yeah.

David:   “I hear what you’re saying.”

Karen:   “Oh, I never knew that about you. Oh, that explains a lot.” 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, but you don’t.

David:   Or who they’re going to vote for.

Karen:   Or who they’re going to vote for. Who they like politically. And those things actually aren’t really very important.

David:   Isn’t that fascinating?

Karen:   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. Now, let me take this back a little bit into the data. After the Second World War, there were a group of social scientists who became very interested to what had happened to those children whose parents had been slaughtered during the war. Who had been separated from their parents for a variety of times. And they were looking at what the psychological community calls the Attachment Theory. How do infants and young children bond to their primary caregivers? Generally, that should be a parent, father, or mother. But in these situations where they were, that process was disrupted. Then how did they rebond? And then the biggest question that I was interested in, because I was working with adults, and I’m reading Daniel Siegel, who is one of the top gurus in the psychological community in Attachment Theory. My question was, well, if that has been disrupted, or if it’s never been established, or if there has been abuse in the background, can attachment between individuals be then reestablished when someone has become an adult? And his conclusion was yes, it very definitely can happen. So that’s what 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 in their back.

David:   And you’re talking about traumatic.

Karen:   Can be traumatic or neglectful or 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 abnormal. We learn to live with it. So, they began to reattach and there’s a whole terminology for this but there’s a co-inherence, a coming together that begins to occur between those two people. You want me to give you some examples of this?

David:   Sure, I’m still listening.

Karen:   Tell me when I’m talking too much.

David:   You probably are but I’m still interested in what you’re saying. So, I expected the conversation to go this way because this is if we talk one of my worlds, I’ll talk a lot.

Karen:   Okay. So, our daughter-in-law, Angela Mains 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.

David:   She’s great that way.

Karen:   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, I don’t know, 20, let’s say 20 in each class. Freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. And 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. And then they did a, after their experiment, they did a videotape and that’s what I, a video documentary.

David:   Have you said what the experiment was yet because I-

Karen:   Well, they were just seeing how best to get these kids from abuse backgrounds through high school so that they graduated.

David:   Okay.

Karen:   And then drop out. Okay, thanks for bringing that up. 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. I’m getting the chills because the statistics would be that-

David:   They wouldn’t. They’d normally drop out.

Karen:   That just would not… That would not happen. And they discovered in this test that when an abused high schooler had one adult, one adult that they could relate to who was there for them, who would listen, hear and understand.

David:   Oh my goodness, okay, yeah.

Karen:   And they took the MRIs of these high schoolers before the test, the trial started. I mean, they’re going off to high school so it’s an extensive time. And then afterwards, in those parts of the brain, were healed.

David:   Well, that’s, oh, that’s thrilling.

Karen:   I just want to say to our listeners, it’s not so important where any of us land and this heated discourse that we’re having in our country right now. This too will pass. But 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:   Well this is very, very helpful. Yeah, I’m interested in my field of 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?

Karen:   Yeah

David:   And that’s all in a religious context. Yeah. 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 as much as they use their tongues to tell. And there’s a time there is a time to say this is where I’m coming from.

Karen:   Right and I feel strongly about it. 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 people, a group of people and I’m teaching them about this process, this extraordinary group dynamic that occurs.

David:   And again we’re talking the group dynamic – a listening group. A group that has learned to listen to the place where they understand where the person speaking is coming from. And at that point in time that’s it.

Karen:   That’s it.

David:   That’s a secret. It sounds so simple.

Karen:   Well, it’s hard to do but I mean it’s the hardest part is that the only way people can respond is by asking questions. They can’t give little sermons. They can’t quote scripture. So, I mean there are rules here.

David:   You’re going to remember the two things?

Karen:   I think so.

David:   Because I’m going back just in terms of our day is different than previous days since that television is not it’s mostly 24-7. Telling you the way you need to think.

Karen:   And it’s opinion.

David:   It’s opinion. Right.

Karen: Even the news is opinion. It’s not the kind of objective reporting we used to be proud of.

David:   That’s a fair statement and when you understand that it means you have to be very careful in terms of what you’re listening to.

Karen:   Yeah.

David:   So okay I’m sorry. Two things.

Karen:   Two things. All right so for our listener if they’re interested in this I would say, and this is what I do when I’m training people that you need to sit down and take a listening of autobiography of your life. Write out a listening autobiography. “When I was in early childhood who was that who really listen to me”? Okay, grade 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.

David:   It’s really, really fascinating.

Karen:   And then… now, listen to this.

David:   I’m still listening.

Karen:   Are you still listening?

David:   Of course I am.

Karen:   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 feel-

David:   Experiences, right?

Karen:   No, they feel how they feel. I feel warm.

David:   Oh when they’re thinking about that person.

Karen:   “I 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 that in their lives, their adult lives, that one person who they remember, who listened to them when they think about them, give them this flush of well-being.

David:   Wow.

Karen:   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 impact and the positive effect of this, not only is that person, 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.

David:   To ourselves.

Karen:   Yes. And that’s how this synchronicity that occurs between two brains through eye contact, we lean in, we engage. When that is replicated, person after person, you know, community after community, town after town, we create a better world. I mean, that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. And the results of that is this feeling of being at home with ourselves, at home with our family, at one with, one with our community. It just is well-being. I mean, this is really, really the end result of a community that begins to listen to one another in this kind of way. Extraordinary.

David:   I’m going to try to put this into a sentence. This is one of my annoying habits.

Karen:   It’s not annoying. It’s wonderful.

David:   Can we get this into a sentence?

Karen:   And how did you start doing this?

David:   I’m going to go ahead with my sentences. A profound way we can help to heal our broken society is to give one another the gift of hearing 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. Hearing what is being said.

Karen:   No, I agree with you. I’ve seen it happen. And I was working with a researcher on the listening groups, ran into all of his notes and the comments that people had after the listening groups as far as their assessment of them. And they just happened over and over. “I’m a better listener at home. My husband says to me, I’m a better listener.” You know, just has impact.

David:   Very interesting.

Karen:   Provable impact.

David:   Yeah. 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, but you know.” 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”? Yeah, you listen with “How do I understand more”?

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

David:   Yeah. And I feel very good about it. You did talk more than normal, but I think that was very good. And did you notice that I was listening?

Karen:   I’m feeling heard and understood.

David:   You satisfied?

Karen:   I am.

David:   Okay. Before we go, we wanted to talk about that, and we made it through.

Outgo:    You’ve been listening to the Before We Go Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2020 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60189.