RULE 9

ASSUME THAT THE PERSON YOU ARE

LISTENING TO MIGHT KNOW SOMETHING

YOU DON’T

NOT ADVICE

Psychotherapy is not advice. Advice is what you get when the person you’re
talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just
shut up and go away. Advice is what you get when the person you are talking
to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you
weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems.
Psychotherapy is genuine conversation. Genuine conversation is
exploration, articulation and strategizing. When you’re involved in a genuine
conversation, you’re listening, and talking—but mostly listening. Listening is
paying attention. It’s amazing what people will tell you if you listen.
Sometimes if you listen to people they will even tell you what’s wrong with
them. Sometimes they will even tell you how they plan to fix it. Sometimes
that helps you fix something wrong with yourself. One surprising time (and
this is only one occasion of many when such things happened), I was
listening to someone very carefully, and she told me within minutes (a) that
she was a witch and (b) that her witch coven spent a lot of its time visualizing
world peace together. She was a long-time lower-level functionary in some
bureaucratic job. I would never have guessed that she was a witch. I also
didn’t know that witch covens spent any of their time visualizing world
peace. I didn’t know what to make of any of it, either, but it wasn’t boring,
and that’s something.
In my clinical practice, I talk and I listen. I talk more to some people, and
listen more to others. Many of the people I listen to have no one else to talk
to. Some of them are truly alone in the world. There are far more people like
that than you think. You don’t meet them, because they are alone. Others are