The healing art of talking to one another
“When we are conversing and listening, we are engaged in the process of making meaning. And when we can make meaning in times of hurt and pain, we can start to heal.”
On a recent trip to Manhattan, I found myself in awe of the hustle and bustle. I felt gloriously lost in the noise that whirled around me. This was the city of my dreams. And I felt like I belonged there, in Tom Wolfe’s words, “as much in five minutes as in five years”.
My husband, Jason, and I were on our way to The Met for the second day in a row; it was hot and sunny, and I was regretting my melting ice cream cone. We stopped to cross a busy intersection where I tried to keep an eye on my feet, the sidewalk, and the trail of ice cream dripping down my hand.
Jason turned to me and whispered, “I can’t even imagine that September 11th happened here now.” That instantly sobered me. And, on this bright and sunny New York afternoon, I realized that I had forgotten. It felt inappropriate and irreverent. As if we should all remember, all the time, always.
Time and healing
Thankfully, that’s not how trauma works — we heal through time or distance or talking about it. We get to have moments, days, months, years in our lives when we are able to forget to feel the pain of loss and grief. We heal. And we do it in marvelous and different ways. As someone who navigates conversations around trauma, loss, and grief daily as a profession, I find that one of the most powerful ways we can heal is through conversation by listening and being listened to.
We think that conversation is a natural process.
That’s a myth. Much like sex, conversation is a learned process. We have to learn how to be close to another person and how to love — just as we share the intimacies of listening and talking with others. Conversation is an art and a skill that is learned, developed, and honed. When we use that skill, we make meaning. And when we can make meaning in times of hurt and pain, we can start to heal.
Hashtags as means of creating community
As I look around at the social movements like #metoo or #blacklivesmatter, I see those hashtags as ways that we form collectives — ones that develop out of (and lead back to) deeper conversations. These collectives provide us with a forum, sometimes on a national or even global scale, to find connections around a common, personal cause that impact us on the micro-level.
Conversations like one between a mother and daughter who discovered only when they saw each other’s shared #metoo stories on Facebook that they had both experienced similar trauma. It created a moment of tragedy and sorrow, but it also created a space where they could connect and heal.
Conversation connects us.
Are we having the conversations we need to have in our lives? Are we listening? Are we being listened to? Do conversations include or exclude, connect, or isolate us? Not just on the national or global scale, but in our individual and personal day-to-day interactions. These are the questions I wrestle with on the sidewalks of New York and in my bed at home at night: how do we make space in our lives, where we can find common ground and let ourselves recover and heal from those seemingly impossible places in our lives?
