I want to be a better listener—but I can’t stop interrupting my partner!
Al writes: I have a habit of listening and interrupting my spouse when she talks, because I feel the need to respond to something she said. How can I move away from this behavior? I know it’s not fair to her.
Dear Al,
As hard as this is for me to admit, reading your question is like looking into the mirror. I’m a great listener with most people in my life. My work as a therapist depends on my ability to listen well and listen deeply.
But put me into a tense discussion with my partner, when I’m inwardly churning with lots of feelings, and suddenly I lose my ability to truly listen. The Interrupting Gremlin overtakes me, and my partner can barely get out a whole thought before I’ve jumped in to respond.
Obviously, this is not great. Listening well is one of the simplest (but not necessarily easiest) ways that we can communicate to our partner that they matter to us.
Even though we typically think of being a good communicator in terms of how well we speak and share our ideas, thoughts, and feelings, good communication actually relies on our ability to listen. And this is where many people struggle.
So, let’s talk about what gets in the way of good listening and how you can work with each of these stumbling blocks so you can learn how to be a better listener in your relationship.
I think it’s important to begin by repeating something I say a lot, which is that even though there is a unique set of essential communication skills for couples, we’re never systematically taught what these skills are.
So, unless we are lucky enough to grow up in families where we have great role models for how to communicate in an intimate relationship, we’re basically left to our own devices, figuring it out in real time with our partner, and inevitably making lots of mistakes along the way. If we grow up with models for what not to do, we have to work even harder to break bad habits of communication that we internalized early in life.
If you think about your own habit of interrupting your spouse, you might be able to recognize some of the things that trigger your interrupting reaction.
While interrupting is often viewed as evidence that we are not listening, in reality, if you weren’t engaged with what your partner was saying, it would probably be a lot easier to just sit there and let her talk without jumping in to add your two cents.
In other words, it’s not that you don’t care about what your spouse has to say—it’s that you care a lot.
The solution isn’t to care less, of course. The solution is to develop the capacity to better contain the feelings that get stirred up inside of you when you are listening to what your spouse has to say.
My guess is that you’re feeling a lot of inner emotional discomfort and interrupting is part of your way of relieving or discharging that emotional discomfort.
Building your capacity to contain that emotional discomfort is one step toward being a better listener.
One way to start building your emotional capacity is to focus on intentionally taking deep breaths when you feel the impulse to interrupt. Taking intentional, deep breaths does two things at once. First, it gives you something to focus on doing instead of interrupting. Second, it helps to soothe the intensity of those feelings that are coming up.
Listening well requires that we’re calm. The more emotionally activated we get, the more likely we are to interrupt. Emotional activation also makes it more likely that we will misunderstand what our partner is trying to say.
While this often isn’t recognized or acknowledged, when we are in a difficult, stressful, or upsetting conversation with our mate, we are hearing two voices at once.
One is the voice of our partner speaking to us. The other voice is an inner voice—it’s our inner translator that interprets and sometimes wildly distorts what our partner is saying.
Here’s how that works. Let’s say your partner says, “Would you mind taking out the garbage. It’s starting to overflow.” That’s a request—Will you take out the garbage?—followed by a neutral statement of fact—it’s starting to overflow.
But your inner translator hears something very different. Your inner translator distorts the message and turns it into a criticism, like, “I shouldn’t even have to tell you this, but since you’re so oblivious to the state of the garbage and since you never actually do what you say you’re going to do, I guess I have to say it. Take out the garbage, you lazy jerk.”
Now, obviously, I’m exaggerating a bit. Maybe your inner translator wouldn’t distort your spouse’s statement so extremely. But while your particular sensitivities may very well be different here, we all have an inner translator that distorts what our partner says at times. We hear criticisms and judgments and complaints that trigger our insecurities and self-criticism and shame in ways that make us very reactive.
Learning how to distinguish what our partner is saying from what our inner translator is saying about what our partner is saying is vital for being a better listener and a better communicator in your relationship.
One of the easiest ways that you can start to disentangle what your spouse is actually saying from what your inner translator is saying about what your spouse is saying is to engage in reflective listening.
This is a way of listening to what your spouse is actually saying and trying to hear the core of her words. Now, in the example I gave above, the content is simply a request for you to take out the garbage, followed by a bit of context: It’s overflowing.
But, of course, much of what’s shared in conversations has a far deeper, more significant emotional core. For example, if your partner were to say something like, “You’ve been working late every night for the last two weeks and I feel like I’ve hardly seen you,” the emotional core of that message would probably be something like, “I miss you. I wish we had more time together.”
This is where communication so often goes wrong when we’re not able to listen well, especially when we have experienced a lot of criticism and blame in past relationships or in childhood.
If we are sensitive to being criticized, our inner translator is likely to hear any variety of a partner’s communication of “I would like things to be different from what they are” as a criticism of us as a partner.
Our inner translator might take our partner’s expression of “You’ve been working late so often that I’ve hardly seen you,” and turn it into something like, “You’re choosing work over me. You’re really letting me down and I’m unhappy with you.”
If we hear something like that, interrupting to defend ourselves is going to be almost inevitable. We might say something like, “That’s not fair! I was here last Tuesday night and you were gone at yoga all evening!”
Or, if we feel even more intense feelings, we might pull out the big guns and say something like, “That’s rich coming from you! You’re hardly ever here, and when you are, you don’t even want to spend time with me. You just want to order me around and complain about what I’m doing wrong. Nothing’s ever good enough. No wonder I would rather be at work.”
You can see with this example how quickly things go off track in conversations when we’re not able to distinguish between what our partner is saying and what our inner translator is saying.
The simplest way to interrupt our own inner dialogue instead of our partner is to really focus on the words that our partner is saying and then to take a guess at the emotional core of what our partner is saying. We don’t have to get it right, by the way. But we do need to try.
That might sound like, “What I hear you saying is that with the amount of overtime I’ve been putting in, you’re feeling like we need to reconnect.” That’s a pretty good restatement of what your partner said, which goes a bit further by guessing that your spouse might be feeling disconnected and wants to spend more time together. If you’re feeling like your spouse is unhappy with you, you can follow up with something like, “It sounds like you’re not happy with me for taking these extra hours.”
Notice how different this is compared to responding to a perceived criticism by going on the attack.
Here, you’re not assuming you know what your spouse means. You’re taking a guess at it by saying, “It sounds like you’re not happy with me taking on more work.”
This gives your spouse the opportunity to affirm your guess, by saying something like, “Well, if you remember, I did express concern about the toll this might take on us, when you agreed to these extra hours.”
Or, if your guess was off track, your spouse might say something like, “I’m not unhappy with you. We made this decision together. I just miss you, and I’m looking forward to when things go back to normal.”
Feeling misunderstood is something nobody enjoys. When we feel misunderstood—especially by our intimate partner—we want to clarify ourselves.
So, it’s possible that feeling misunderstood by your spouse might be at the root of your impulse to interrupt instead of listening. If being misunderstood is particularly upsetting to you, so that it makes it difficult to listen and really take in what your partner is sharing, it’s okay to ask your partner to pause so you can get clarification.
The key is to do this calmly and without taking over the conversation.
That might sound something like, “I don’t know if I’m hearing you correctly, but I’m getting the impression that you think it was my choice to take on this overtime. But actually, I wasn’t asked. I was told I needed to fill in.”
Saying, “I don’t know if I’m hearing you right” gives your partner the chance to clarify if there is a misunderstanding. And it’s not defensive or a counterattack, so it’s not likely to derail the conversation or take it away from what your spouse wants to share.
Sometimes, when conversations often devolve into arguments over whose perspective is right and whose is wrong, you may assume that listening openly and without interrupting is the same as agreeing with what your partner is saying. But that’s not really the case.
Listening is about trying to genuinely understand your partner’s perspective and experience. You can be an amazing listener without agreeing with your partner’s perspective. In the example we’ve been working with, she might respond to your attempt to clarify by saying something like, “I know you say you didn’t have a choice about working overtime, but I think if you’d really tried to get out of it, you could have.”
At this point, your impulse might be to argue with her perspective and to prove to her just how wrong she is about this. This is the root of many couples’ habits of battling about every difference of perspective in their relationships.
A happy, healthy relationship doesn’t require that you and your partner see everything the same way. That’s not actually healthy, nor is it realistic.
Instead, a happy, healthy relationship requires that you and your partner seek to understand each other’s perspectives and individual experiences. You can respect each other’s perspective without having to agree. Just as humans are gifted with two eyes and the slightly different perspectives we get from our eyes create our depth perception, partners’ different perspectives enrich a relationship with more depth than it would have were we to always see things exactly the same way.
And on that note, Al, I am wishing you a wonderful adventure as you learn to be a better listener. May you keep the Interrupting Gremlin at bay as you learn to distinguish the voice of your inner translator from the voice of your spouse, and as you get to know her better through listening with an open heart.
~Angela
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DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical condition.
about angela Amias, LCSW
Angela Amias, LCSW is a relationship therapist and nationally-recognized expert on trauma and relationships. She’s the co-founder of Alchemy of Love, which provides trauma-informed relationship programs and resources. She’s also the founder of the Institute for Trauma Informed Relationships, which provides training and education to therapists and coaches who want to help their clients heal past wounds and create more fulfilling relationships.
As an expert on trauma and relationships, Angela has been featured in numerous publications, including Today, Oprah, Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Well + Good, Inc., Forbes, Business Insider, Salon, MSN, Women’s Health and the Toronto Sun.
