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    you”), and authorship of action (“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”).
    In so doing, parents are responding to and helping create an emergent self.
    Such motives and intentions make human behavior understandable, and
    parents invariably treat their infants as understandable beings—that is,
    as the people they are to become (just so long as they become the people
    their parents want them to become).
    Who we are and what we say triggers other people’s
    response to us. That response and our connection to others
    remain vital to our psychological well-being.
    When babies are too young to talk, their parents have to understand
    what they feel but cannot say. When a baby cries, the parents must figure
    out what’s wrong. Does he want to be fed? Does she need a diaper change?
    Does he want to be held? (Imagine the baby’s feelings. What a chasm sepa-
    rates her from these two giant, nervous creatures nature has assigned as
    her waitpersons. Would they ever catch on?) When the baby grows up and
    learns to talk, she becomes better at putting her needs and feelings into
    words. Better, but not perfect. Sometimes we all need a little help making
    ourselves understood.
    5Aiden Macfarlane, The Psychology of Childbirth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
    1977).
    30 THE YEARNING TO BE UNDERSTOOD
    Infants are helplessly dependent on their parents. When the parents
    are absent, angry, or otherwise unresponsive, the child is alone and terri-
    fied; he feels the bottom dropping out of his whole world. This primal con-
    nection to others begins as a matter of life and death, over which we have
    little control when we’re infants. Gradually we become aware of our own
    half of the equation (some people more gradually than others).
    Okay, so it’s been a while since you depended on your parents to hear
    your cries and recognize that you were a person with needs and feelings.
    What significance does this stage of dependence on being heard have for
    us as adults?
    Unlike infants, we don’t have to be listened to in order to know that
    we are persons— existential agents who are initiators of actions. But what
    listening does provide for us as adults is an opportunity to articulate and
    integrate deeper layers of ourselves. Attention and appreciation on the
    part of a listener create an interpersonal experience in which we open
    up and experience a fuller version of ourselves. The experience of being
    listened to promotes an unfolding of aspects of experience that may have
    been closed off because they were never vitalized by being shared and
    acknowledged. For an infant, being listened to helps confirm that he or she
    is a self. For an adult, being listened to helps that developmental process to
    continue— enabling us to provide a fuller account of ourselves and a fuller
    acceptance of our multidimensional selves.
    Adrienne had been going with Phillip for three years when she met
    Cliff. She hadn’t made any promises to Phillip, but they’d been together so
    long that she didn’t really feel okay about seeing another guy. After about
    a month of wondering what to do, she finally talked to her friend Judy.
    Judy had been married long enough to know that you never know
    how relationships are going to turn out. So when Adrienne told her about
    Cliff, she just listened. She asked a few questions, like what did Adrienne
    want, what was she afraid of, and what did she hope would happen, but
    mostly she just allowed Adrienne to talk.
    Adrienne didn’t make any final decisions as a result of that conversa-
    tion, but she did get a lot clearer about what she wanted. She knew she
    didn’t want to be alone, but she wasn’t ready to get tied down, either. Phil-
    lip was a genuinely nice guy, but she wasn’t really in love with him. Cliff
    was more exciting, but she wasn’t sure he was the kind of person she could

    How Listening Shapes Us and Connects Us to Each Other 31
    count on. She was happy to have Phillip in her