Why a 'Listening Ear' Isn't Enough
A post for the partners.
If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
Special Event: The New Science of Collective Healing
I’m delighted to invite you to join Danny Cohen, Jacob Kishere and myself for a free online event exploring the ‘New Science of Collective Healing’ on Wednesday, January 29 at 8pm Berlin/7pm London/2pm New York/ 11am Los Angeles.
This 90-minute session will offer opportunities to engage in dialogue on themes including:
What are the key principles of collective trauma and healing?
How can we build ‘healing communities’ to address legacies of unresolved inter-generational and collective trauma?
How can we reframe transformational work from an individual to a collective endeavour?
How can collective healing spaces help respond to the metacrisis?
This 2025 launch event of Jacob’s SENSESPACE Studio is free to attend.
We will also be hearing about Danny’s two-month Art of Communication course, based on the principles of Nonviolent Communication, starting on February 2.
You can read more about SENSESPACE Studio here.
For more on this event, please see this post on
.Survival Tool #45 Presence is the Best Medicine
When your partner’s stuck in a toxic workplace, you naturally want to do all you can to help.
You listen.
You problem-solve.
You offer advice.
You do your best to stay positive.
None of this works.
What’s Really Going On
The toxic workplace is not a chess game — though it can feel like one at times.
That means your attempts to coach your partner fall flat.
Nor is the toxic workplace a puzzle that can be solved by the careful weighing of options by the analytical part of our mind.
That means your attempts to come up with a solution will fail.
No, you cannot offer words of any value until you understand the fundamental nature of the toxic workplace.
That is to say, you must understand the toxic workplace to be an initiatory ordeal. (Survival Tool #7: Reframe Your Predicament).
You must recognise that your partner is undergoing an archetypal death-rebirth experience.
This process is systematically stripping away the unconscious vestiges of people-pleasing, and the endless search for validation, carried by younger, hurt parts of ourselves. (Survival Tool #32: Embrace Your Young Parts).
This process takes time.
And this understanding reframes your role.
A ‘listening ear’ is not enough.
Your job is to support your partner to discover that the toxic workplace is:
A way station on the path to empowerment.
A chrysalis for the emergence of a truer version of ourselves.
A necessary experience, however difficult.
And — provided we see our toxic workplace for what it is, an initiation — we won’t be the same person when we finally walk away. (Survival Tool #26: Become Trauma-informed).
Quality of Listening
As the partner, this reality places you in a special position of responsibility.
Humility is your friend, here.
Begin by recognising that the process unfolding for your loved one is way deeper and more subtle than it may appear.
Yes, there will be stories of awful behaviours by bosses and co-workers. (Survival Tool #8: See Through the Confusion).
Yes, the toxic workplace will affect your partner’s sleep, cause them to snap at you, and sap their sparkle. (Survival Tool#9 : Don’t Let Your Anger Come Out Sideways) (Survival Tool #19: Protect Your Partner).
But the meaning of what’s unfolding will elude you — will elude both of you — until the concluding stages of the process.
It’s an innate feature of any true initiatory ordeal that the outcome or destination cannot be seen from the early, painful stages where there seems to be no way out.
This phase can last many months, and be profoundly disorienting and destabilising — for both of you.
The quality of your listening matters here — a lot.
In a culture ruled by a narrow frequency band of consciousness that loves to rationalise, calculate, analyse and strategise, it’s very easy to succumb to the impulse to jump in with solutions, or spend a lot of time agonising over possible next steps.
This is a normal, well-intentioned response.
But it makes the problem worse.
Beyond Strategy
Here we approach the heart of the paradox.
Yes: It’s necessary to weigh your moves carefully in the toxic workplace, to engage in the proverbial game of three-dimensional chess.
But the toxic workplace is there to teach you something more fundamental than strategy.
The lesson is this:
Any moves you make, any words you speak, and any choices you embrace must come from a deeper ground within you than you’ve yet managed to access.
This ground lies beyond the superficial level we reach when two left brain hemispheres come together to rationalise and plan.
Your job is to know this — and help your partner reach this deeper ground.
You cannot do this through words.
You can only do this through your presence.1
By becoming the space of awareness that can receive the totality of your partner’s experience — with all its contradictions, trauma, unresolveability and pain — and allow it to be exactly as it is.
This is the greatest offering you can make.
Sharing your presence in this way means you must listen not with your ears — but with your whole body.
This means noticing what’s coming up in you as your partner describes the torments and indignities they suffered during their day.
Ask yourself:
What physical sensations do I feel in my body (they may be very subtle or intense)?
If you’re numb and disconnected, notice that too.
Don’t judge.
Just notice.
Then ask yourself:
What emotions am I experiencing?
You may feel angry on your partner’s behalf.
You may share their sadness.
There may be other shades of feeling that are harder to name.
Or maybe you can’t feel very much at all.
That’s okay, too.
Then inquire:
What thoughts are coming up in my mind?
Be very alert.
What mental commentary are you generating about what you’re hearing?
Are you really listening — or is your mind wandering?
Are you thinking about the past, or the future?
Is your mind very busy? Or is there some space?
Are you really here.
Just notice.
Notice the physical sensations, the texture of your emotional landscape, and the internal commentary in your mind emerging in response to your partner’s story.
Don’t speak.
Be with what’s there, in you.
Emergent Future
By doing so, you are tuning your system to a different channel than the frequency band that trafficks in fixing, problem-solving and consoling — which is always filtered through your experiences in the past.
By being present, you’re opening a space for you both to connect to your authentic future selves.
Your partner can now feel that you can feel them in their anger, grief, anxiety and shame.
No words can be a substitute for this felt-sense of shared awareness of the parts of our experience we normally hide or repress.
If this felt-sense could speak, it would say, to quote Thomas Hübl: “I feel you, feeling me.”
This is the most powerful medicine we can offer.
It is precise, personalised and in infinite supply.
Once it is administered, no words are needed.
Though if words do arise, they will reflect a much greater intelligence than the mind that likes to analyse, fix and advise.
So don’t offer a “listening ear.”
Offer the depths and fullness of your presence.
And then watch everything start to change.
Summary:
Your presence is the transformative agent. Go beyond merely offering a ‘listening ear’ to your partner’s workday horror stories, and bring your full embodied self. That simple yet radical step will open a portal to new possibilities that can’t be reached any other way.
I consult on surviving toxic workplaces; and can also help you navigate your toxic workplace via the Tarot. Click here to inquire:
I write Toxic Workplace Survival Guy during my spare time from working as an editor at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog (a model workplace). Subscribing, sharing, liking, commenting or buying me a coffee helps make this project sustainable. Thank you!
This section draws on the work of Eckhart Tolle in the Power of Now and the Transparent Communication practices of Thomas Hübl, with whom I’ve been studying for more than three years, and whose work I write about in
.