How to be a good listener

The people in autism research these days, at least on the sociological end of things, well tell you about the "double empathy problem" (after Milton, 2012 - it's enough of a "thing" now that it has its own wikipedia page). The idea is that if you put one autistic person in a group of "neurotypicals", it'll seem as if they are bad at relating to people - but in a group of (sufficiently high-functioning) autistic people, sometimes everyone gets on just fine, and if you put a single non-autistic person in a group of autistic people, an observer might conclude that they are the one having difficulty "reading the room" and relating to the unspoken norms of the group. It's as if, to make an analogy, autistic people are not worse at picking up "signals" from other people, they're just signalling on a slightly different wavelength.

And certainly, relating to others by sharing your own simliar stories is a big thing in some neurodiverse groups, where it is often experienced as a positive. But that then intersects with other cultural aspects, for example the stiff-upper-lib Brits versus outgoing Americans stereotype, with neurodiverse people acting as their own subculture if you like.

Sharing your own story is hardly a uniquely autistic trait though: imagine you meet a new co-worker, share that you like Nightwish, and they go "oh, I love them too! I saw them live in Helsinki back in 2022!" and before you know it, you've made a new friend over shared taste in music even if what they did is technically story-topping.

But, if you are line-managing a "neurotypical" person and they're in your office crying because of some bad thing that happened to them, it's an essential skill for your job to know that you don't make the story about you. Same if you're training to be a therapist.

This is actually one of my favourite aspects of HN. People chiming in with their own experience and stories.

On the other hand I'm not exactly a neurotypical person, so there's that.

Level 2, nice human

Level 3, therapist

Roughly it comes down to:

1. Listening but focussed on yourself, interjecting with own experiences and sometimes in the process take over the conversation with your own experiences.

2. Focussed listening but on a factual level. Asking clarifications about events, etc.

3. Focussed not only on what is being told, but the emotions behind it. Asking about how certain things impacted the person sharing something with you.

I am hugely oversimplifying here, of course. But for point 1 it doesn't mean that you can't briefly let someone know you have a shared experience. It does mean that you shouldn't make your experience take over and then dominate the conversation.