Facilitator Skills: Creative Listening
Welcome to a collection of personal reflections from our dedicated facilitators and peer specialists. Each member, bringing a wealth of experience and insight, has written a piece as part of our facilitators manual to share their wisdom and highlight the unique strengths they offer. We hope each reflection shows the gift of shared experience and the healing possibilities of a supportive community. Explore these reflections for inspiration and guidance on your own learning journey.
Trish – Creative Listening
As a lived experience addict/alcoholic/artist/mother/daughter/sister/partner in recovery, I have found that each label comes with it’s own sense of “rules” and “expectations”. Coming from a family steeped in addiction, I never felt wanted. As an alcoholic I always felt ashamed and shamed. As a mother, I never felt good enough. As a daughter, I always felt like the “black sheep”. As a sister, I felt pitied. As a partner I never feel good enough. As an artist, well this comes with it’s own sent of rules again; I hear “get a proper job”, “conform” to societies expectations of you. Words can be traumatic and leave a lasting scar on the mind. I’ve felt misunderstood and not heard.
So Creative Listening is actually HEARING what the other person is saying. It serves as a compassionate and VALIDATING approach, acknowledging and respecting your peer’s emotions. By offering a NON JUDGEMENTAL and supportive presence, creative listening can create a safe space for trauma survivors to share their experience.
As someone who seeks to better myself and help heal, I am constantly looking for ways to tailor my recovery that suits me and eventually have started to listen to my own inner voice. I recently read a woman’s insights as a sponsor in recovery and it suddenly dawned in me, that she could have been talking about my experiences so far. She said that some of her sponsees rarely took her advice, even if they had asked for it. They were really looking for something else, even if they didn’t know what that something else was. As she experimented with not giving as much advice and instead asking more questions, it came to her that her sponsees were not looking for answers to their problems but for somebody who would listen as they sorted through them. Through practice she earned to listen carefully and restricted herself to questions of clarification or ones that might help the other person connect more deeply with their experiences and feelings.
So perhaps Creative listening is what embodies a caring desire to understand the other person. It is something we can give to others that promotes more healing than our best advice giving?
