In the summer of 2020, as my now ex-wife and I worked on our divorce, we hired a couples therapist to help us separate peacefully. Seeing that we were both in pain, the therapist suggested two sessions. In the first, she would talk and I would only listen. In the second, we would switch. The rules were simple: while listening, I wouldn’t interrupt, correct, or explain. My job was to stay present and listen. While I didn’t expect it to be easy, I thought that, given my training and experience, an hour of listening shouldn’t be that bad.

Within the first minute, I realized that I was wrong.

The noise

Nearly everything she said set off a rebuttal in my head. That’s not what actually happened. That’s not what I meant. You should have told me earlier. You left some things out. The thoughts formed faster than I could push them down, and it felt like she was trying to rewrite history against me. My stomach churned the whole time.

I only heard enough of what she said to craft my own responses. Most of my attention went to my own defense, rehearsing it and waiting for a chance to speak up. The only thing keeping me quiet was that I had said I would be, and I took that commitment seriously.

About fifteen minutes in, I started feeling light-headed. Holding back from speaking was taking more energy than arguing ever had.

Somewhere in that light-headedness, as I tried to relax the anger in me, I got curious. At first, I wasn't curious about her. Rather, I started wondering whether this session would be easier if I stopped fighting. Would I be able to sit still and listen, if I accepted that she is who she is, and just tried to understand what she wanted me to know?

What I saw

I’m not going to write about what she said. That’s hers to tell. But I can describe how I started to see her.

As I settled into listening and seeing her, I saw someone who was tired. Someone who had tried, in ways I hadn’t always recognized. And someone who was in pain, even though she had given up on our marriage.

That last part caught me off guard. I had believed that the person who gives up is the one who has stopped caring. Watching her, I realized that what I believed wasn’t always true.

What didn’t change

It would be easy to say everything changed after that, but it didn’t. In the second session, we switched, and she listened while I talked. She never told me what that hour was like for her, and I never asked. As far as I could tell, it didn’t change anything. We were still getting divorced, and the negotiations were still hard. I still had to protect myself. Seeing her more clearly didn’t mean I trusted her, and we didn’t become friends. We still aren’t.

What changed was how I understood her. For months, I had seen her as someone who was against me. Now I saw a person in pain, looking out for herself, the same way I was. Someone looking out for herself isn’t the same as someone trying to hurt me, but until that session I hadn’t been able to tell the difference.

What it gave back

Before that session, any conversation or argument with her wrecked the rest of my day. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t be present with anyone. I would keep replaying what she said and rehearsing what I should have said back.

Afterward, things started to feel lighter. It wasn’t a big shift, but I noticed I could let go faster after a difficult conversation. I could go back to work, and I could be with my children. I was building my own practice at the time, and I started making progress.

The anger didn’t disappear, but there was less of it, and less hate. I had more of myself left for the people around me and for my work.

A few weeks later

Not long after that session, I met with a couple* to work on their financial plan. One of the goals they had was to move into a bigger house someday. While we were mapping that out, I asked what seemed like a routine question: once you move, do you want to sell the house you’re in now?

They gave me different answers.

He wanted to sell. Financially, it made sense and would make the move much easier. She wanted to keep it. When I asked why, she talked about how much she loved the house and their neighbors. He pushed back. She explained again, more strongly, but he still didn’t agree. Then she started crying, and he got angry. She always cries to get her way, he said.

I recognized that anger. Just a few weeks earlier, in our therapy session, I had felt it myself.

With that realization, I slowed down the conversation and watched her instead. She wasn’t trying to win. She was distressed, and the reasons she was giving didn’t quite match the distress. So instead of asking why she liked the house, I asked what she didn’t want to lose.

It took a while to come out. Her husband worked long hours and often came home exhausted. She always had a lot she wanted to share at the end of the day. Her friends and neighbors listened to her, so on the nights he was too tired, she didn’t have to put that on him. She was afraid that if they moved away from those people, she would lean on him more, he would grow more and more frustrated with her, and eventually he wouldn’t want her anymore.

The house was how she was trying to stay close to him.

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had softened, and he reached over and touched her gently. He didn’t change his mind on the spot, but it was obvious he had heard her. What he wanted was the same thing she did: to stay in love and stay married.

Why they tell me the story

I think about that meeting often. People can’t always say what’s really on their mind. They tell me about the neighbors or what makes sense on paper, and all of that can be true without being the whole story. When something isn’t landing, I stop pressing on the details and wonder instead why this person needs me to hear it.

That habit started in a therapist’s office, where I was the one who couldn’t hear, and where I was sure the person in pain across from me was against me.

Fifteen years

I still think about the moment that husband reached for his wife. I felt something then that I can’t quite put into words. It made me think about my first marriage.

I don’t wish I had stayed married; by the time I started my divorce, it was clear she was no longer the person for me, and nothing in that therapy session changed that. But I sometimes wonder how things might have turned out if, fifteen years ago, I had been a different husband: not working constantly, not coming home with nothing left, noticing what she was trying to tell me. Maybe the marriage still would have ended. I’ll never know.

*Identifying details in the client story have been changed to protect privacy.