Active listening

Active listening is a technique that is used in counseling, training, and solving disputes or conflicts. It requires that the listener fully concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what is being said. This is opposed to reflective listening where the listener repeats back to the speaker what they have just heard to confirm understanding of both parties. Empathic listening is about giving people an outlet for their emotions before being able to be more open, which is sharing experiences and being able to accept new perspectives on the troubled topic that is the reason of emotional suffering. Listening skills may establish flow rather than closed mindedness, negative emotions include stress, anger and frustration.Active listening asks couples to perform Olympic-level emotional gymnastics when their relationship can barely walk. . . . After studying some 650 couples and tracking the fate of their marriages for up to fourteen years, we now understand that this approach to counseling doesn't work, not just because it's nearly impossible for most couples to do well, but more importantly because successful conflict resolution isn't what makes marriages succeed. One of the most startling findings of our research is that most couples who have maintained happy marriages rarely do anything that even partly resembles active listening when they're upset....a careful reading of the Hahlweg et al. (1984) study reveals that Gottman cites only certain (one-sided) results from the study. He also overlooks several important considerations that call into question his implied dismissal of the RE model as a legitimate therapeutic intervention for distressed couples. Active listening is a technique that is used in counseling, training, and solving disputes or conflicts. It requires that the listener fully concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what is being said. This is opposed to reflective listening where the listener repeats back to the speaker what they have just heard to confirm understanding of both parties. Empathic listening is about giving people an outlet for their emotions before being able to be more open, which is sharing experiences and being able to accept new perspectives on the troubled topic that is the reason of emotional suffering. Listening skills may establish flow rather than closed mindedness, negative emotions include stress, anger and frustration.