Radical Listening (Part 4 of the How To Heal series)

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Welcome to part 4 of the How To Heal series. In this episode about radical listening, you’ll learn strategies for listening more carefully and trusting your intuition and inner wisdom so that you can build a better relationship with your core self.

Healing is really about wanting to feel better. To feel freedom, joy, gratitude, peace, safety, and calm. To be kinder to yourself, become a good friend to yourself, notice your patterns, and make small changes to influence them. Those are our goals here.

The closer you move to your authentic, core self, the more content you will feel. This truest version of you feels peace no matter what is happening. 

As my mentor, Martha Beck, says, “Your true nature, the part of you that always remembers what it is meant to be and never stops trying to be what it is, no matter what happens to her. Your birthright is to feel peace and joy and gratitude and love. And in your core, you carry all of that.”

Radical Listening

The goal of radical listening is to find your inner guidance to move away from the patterns that you've created to protect you from pain and toward new patterns that help you get what you actually want. 

We all have patterns in ways that we think, feel, and act. We need to look at them and ask ourselves where they’re coming from. Are you trying to avoid pain? Are these patterns protecting you, or are they sabotaging you because you don’t think you’re worthy of feeling freedom, love, peace, and joy? 

The statements we’re working with as we learn to radically listen are:

I will listen to my needs and wants and see those as valid and important.
I will listen to my intuition and trust my inner wisdom.

Who Are You Listening To?

When you practice radical listening, you are having a conversation with yourself. But who are you talking to? In his book No Bad Parts, Richard Schwartz outlines four parts that live within each of us:

Your Inner Child

You may have wounds or patterns that you developed in childhood. These were really important to you as a kid, but they might not be necessary now. These wounds are often based on attachment or authenticity. 

Perhaps you were conditioned in childhood to believe that you don’t matter or that your needs aren’t important. Or your need for security and attachment wasn’t met, so you didn’t feel safe. You may have been told all sorts of negative things about yourself. Or you were taught that you had to look or perform a certain way in order to be loved, valued, and accepted. 

For example, I grew up in a household where it often felt like there wasn’t a grown up. As a result, I developed patterns of hypervigilance, overthinking, overplanning, overstructuring, and then getting easily dysregulated when things weren't going to my plan. Now that I am the adult, I’ve had to teach myself (and my inner child) that I am safe. The grown-ups are here.

Were you taught that your value depended on your grades, performance in sports, or how nice you were? Did you hear that you were dumb, ugly, mean, selfish, lazy, rude, or a problem? What messages did you hear in childhood that you might still be acting out today? 

Maybe it’s time to look at those messages and examine them. Where’s the evidence? 

Your Pain

Our wounds and patterns can also come from culture - religion, materialism or consumerism, racism, or other social problems that make it hard for us to feel safe, free, and loved. 

When you start to look more closely at your patterns, you might see that they are your protectors. They’re there to prevent pain. To keep you safe and stable. But these protectors are in what I call “fix it” energy. These patterns are trying to manage the narrative, manage the moment, and perform. 

On the other side of the coin, we have patterns with “fuck it” energy. This often happens when we get overwhelmed. You say, “Fuck it. I don’t care anymore,” and you sabotage all the work that you’ve done. 

Your Essential Self

This is where it gets good! You have a bunch of dreams and goals and wishes, and they need to be heard.

There are beautiful seeds inside your core self that want to be expressed and shown - things that make you super happy, ways that you feel joy, ways that you feel purpose, ways that you feel love and express love. 

You already have all of that in you. What you want to start doing is listening to your core self and figuring out how she can feel more safe to express those parts of her.

Sometimes, a seed can get buried too deep, so it doesn’t receive the light that it needs to sprout and grow. So a part of listening to those dreams and goals that we’ve buried is figuring out how to bring them into the light. How can we get them closer to the surface so that we can cultivate them? 

A Future You

There’s an exercise I often do where I imagine myself in the future - 5 years from now, 10 years from now, on my 50th birthday, etc.. Visualize a future you, and ask yourself the following questions:

• How do you want to feel? 
• What do you want to be doing? 
• What do you want your habits to look like? 
• What patterns do you want to have healed from? 

You don’t have to know how you’re going to get there. It’s a way to help you get more clear on what you actually want. If you were in a perfect unicorn-magic-wand world, what would you create? 

Tips for Radical Listening

Your relationship with yourself doesn’t need to be a toxic one. It can be very beautiful and loving. Let’s get to know ourselves and then grow into who we want to become. 

Pay attention. Think about it. You can't get to know someone if you don't pay attention to them and listen to them. Look at yourself and notice being aware. 

Notice. Notice if something doesn’t feel good or right to you. Notice what you don’t like and what you do like. Notice your pain and your delight. When do you feel joy? When do you feel present and content? When do you feel purposeful, like you have meaning? 

Look for patterns. Look for thoughts that hold you back. Look at behaviors that are blocking you from getting what you want or helping you avoid pain. Look at the feelings that you have in any given situation. When you look more closely at how you think and feel and act, you will start to notice patterns, and you can start to get curious about those patterns.

Some patterns you might notice include making promises to yourself and breaking them, feeling out of control, having extreme reactions, feeling disconnected or distracted, doing a lot of people pleasing, struggling to tune into your own needs, feeling overwhelmed and unable to cope with your feelings, using buffering behaviors, feeling jealous or insecure in relationships, or being judgmental.

We all have our own patterns for our own reasons. We don’t need to judge our patterns (and not all of them are necessarily wrong). We’re being kind to ourselves and being honest about what we’re doing. Then, you can get curious about why you developed that pattern in the first place. Is there another way you can get that need met? Is there a way you can heal that pain so that you don’t need this pattern anymore? 

Practice compassionate listening. Radical listening doesn’t mean harsh. It's listening with unconditional love, unconditional acceptance, and deep, profound curiosity.

Ask really good questions. Journaling or a spiritual practice like prayer can be really helpful here. Ask yourself questions and then answer them or imagine your divine being answering them. 

Here are some examples to try:

• What happened? What am I bothered by?
• What are my thoughts about it? (Do a thought dump and free write whatever you’re thinking) 
• What was my reason for doing that? How am I justifying it?
• What do I feel about it?
• What are the facts?
• What’s the story I’m telling?
• What am I making this mean - about myself, about someone else, or about the future?
• What feeling am I chasing? 
• What feeling am I avoiding?
• Why now? Why am I showing this behavior now? Is something happening that is triggering it?
• If I could “magic wand” this situation, what would I do? If there were no rules, no restrictions, and I could solve this problem right now, what would the solution be?
• If I could change just one thing about this, what would it be? Why would that be better?
• What if there’s nothing wrong here? What if nothing is broken? What if I’m doing everything right? How would I think and feel and act if I believed that was true?

I love this last question because it can help you find your wisdom with a very small (or no) tweak. You might not have to work so hard to get what you want. I could just be available to you with one small shift of believing you already have it. 

Through radical listening, you are becoming the best friend that you've always longed for, the intimate partner that you've always dreamed about, the perfect parent that you wish you would have had. You are building a deep relationship with love, acceptance, and safety within yourself. 

The essential self in you is completely capable of getting you all of the joy, peace, love, hope, gratitude, purpose, meaning, safety, and everything that your heart desires. 

And I promise you that she is unstoppable. 

You’ll Learn:

• How to practice radical listening with compassion 
• The 4 parts within you that you are listening to
• Examples of patterns that might not be serving you
• 5 steps to radical listening and a deeper understanding of yourself

Resources:

• Episode 161: Radical Self Love [How to Heal, part 1]
• Episode 162: Radical Self Trust [How to Heal, part 2]
• Episode 163: Radical Honesty [How To Heal, part 3]
• No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard Schwartz
• Your 3 Inner Guides