Incompetent Listening In Relationships

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Listening is a core concept for relationships and when someone takes part in incompetent listening it can cause issue for the people involved. I have been the recipient and the partaker in incompetent listening, I understand how it feels and I know that we need to look deeper with empathy before making judgements.
At one point in time my best friend and I were dating a set of brothers. She was having the time of her life and was extremely happy with their relationship where as I was not sure if it was what I wanted to be doing. So naturally with her being my best friend I would talk about the issue my boyfriend and I were having but rarely would I be able to get more than two words out before she would partake in narcissistic listening. McCornack (2016), describes narcissistic listening as, “self-absorbed listening: the perpetrator ignores what others have to say and redirects the conversation to him- or herself and his or her own interests” (p.183) She would do this by immediately turning the conversation over to how great her relationship with the brother was and all the great times they were having. This caused me to become extremely aggravated because I got tremendously tired of listening to her boast about her relationship in attempt to make my sound worse. …show more content…

According to McCornack (2016), empathy is when, “we ‘feel into’ others’ thoughts and emotions, making an attempt to both understand their perspectives and be aware of their feelings in order to identify with them” (p.92). I should have used empathy to see that she was just excited to have someone supportive in her life because for most of it she had been alone with people constantly going in and out of her life. This situation was a just of misinterpreted communication and with a few adjustments on each side it could have been more

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