Hearing people through their pain.
The first goal in this clinical and theoretical essay is to specify what it means to hear people through their pain, by articulating intuitions that are seldom put in formal terms. "What" and "how" and "whom" we hear shift depending on whether we are (1) uncovering the facts, (2) appreciating their meaning with another's life, (3) drawing out and enlivening the one who has to live with and make sense of traumatic experience, or (4) engendering, by having others hear that they are heard, enough relatedness to establish a meaningful precedent for their lives. A second goal here is to show how the meaning of trauma changes as hearing deepens. Accordingly, we may hear in people's trauma (1) psychophysical reactions to events; (2) the playing out of themes from a lifetime; (3) violations whose inner message is a demand to awaken beyond self-protective ways of being; and (4) a uniquely powerful opening for communion.
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D000163:Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome / Q000523:psychology; D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003142:Communication; D018451:Homosexuality, Male / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D010553:Personality Development; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011613:Psychotherapy / Q000379:methods*; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy*