Thoughts
Accompanying someone is the art of looking in a way that allows a person to begin to see themselves again.
This page gathers short essays written alongside the book. Each begins with a real experience and follows a single thought. The four texts here are the founding thoughts of the series; all the others are arranged by the occasions that gave rise to them.
The Art of Staying
On the difference between wanting to help and being there.
When someone in distress speaks of something that cannot be solved, almost the same impulse stirs in us every time: we want to help. To say something consoling. To find a question that leads onward. To point to a way. The impulse is good. It comes from care. And yet it often stands in the way of what is needed just then.
Whoever wants to help is already a step ahead. They are with the solution, while the other still stands in the middle of it. A subtle distance opens between them. The one presses forward without noticing; the other senses that their pain makes someone restless – and begins to make it smaller than it is.
Staying is something else. It means not going on ahead. Not explaining, not consoling away, not solving. But letting what is there remain – and remaining beside it. Being present, even as it grows hard. It doesn’t sound like much. It is the hardest thing.
For staying asks us to bear our own restlessness. Not to fill the silence at once. Not to turn not-knowing into advice, only so that we have something to do again. Anyone inwardly afraid of the emptiness will speak. Anyone who can stay opens a space in which the other can hear themselves again.
And then something sometimes happens that no one had planned. Out of that staying, something steps forward that was hidden before – hidden by the quick ways, the good advice, the urge to make it better. Not because someone found the right words. But because someone stayed long enough for what had always been there to become visible.
This is not a technique. It cannot be applied. One can only become ready for it – again and again. Staying is not another tool in the toolbox. It is a way of being. And perhaps the only one that truly holds when there is nothing left to be done.
What Good Questions Do
Some questions look for an answer. Others open a space.
There are questions that want an answer. What time is it, which way do we go, what happened. They are useful, and most of the questions we ask in a day are of this kind. They close a gap in what we know. Once the answer is there, the question is done.
And there are other questions. They want no information. They open a space. When I ask someone what they are trying to hold on to in all of this, I am not expecting a fact. I am inviting them to look for themselves – at something they may never have put into words. Such questions are not there so that I know more. They are there so that the other meets themselves.
The difference does not lie in the wording. The same question can be either. ‘How are you?’ can be a courtesy that expects a brief reply – or a real opening, ready to hear whatever comes. What makes a question the one or the other is not its form. It is the stance of the one who asks.
An interrogating stance wants to know. It gathers, orders, looks for the cause in order to reach the solution. It stays with itself – with what it wants to find out. An opening stance wants to find nothing out. It wonders alongside the other. Not ‘Why is this so?’ but: what shows itself when we look together? The first stance places the other under observation. The second places itself beside them.
That changes everything. Someone who is questioned defends themselves – often without noticing. Someone who is invited to look for themselves relaxes. Not because the question is easier, but because no one wants anything from them any more. They may search without having to supply the right answer. And in that easing of pressure they sometimes find something that lay hidden beneath it.
The strangest thing about good questions is that their effect does not lie in the question itself. It lies in the space the question opens – and in the silence that follows. Whoever asks a good question and then at once adds to it, explains, asks the next one, closes the space again almost before it has opened. The question needs the silence that comes after it. Sometimes the real discovery happens not through the question, but in the pause in which it goes on sounding.
Perhaps this is the simplest way to put it: a poor question looks for an answer. A good question leaves a person larger than any answer could. It fills no gap. It opens a door – and then steps back, so that the other can walk through it when they are ready.
Why Silence Sometimes Holds
On the stillness between sentences – and what happens within it.
Almost everyone knows the moment when a conversation falls quiet and the silence is at once uncomfortable. As soon as it comes, the urge arises to fill it – with a question, a remark, anything at all. As though the silence were a hole that must be closed. We have learnt that speaking makes connection and silence endangers it. Often the opposite is true.
For not every silence is the same. There is a silence that is empty – the mere absence of speech, a breaking-off, a falling quiet out of awkwardness. And there is a silence that is full. Within it, something is happening. Someone is listening inwardly, searching for something that has no words yet, arriving at themselves. From the outside the two look alike. From the inside they are the opposite of each other.
The full silence is not a nothing. It is a space. Whoever stays quiet without withdrawing holds this space open – and signals, without a word: you don’t have to say anything now. You may search. I am not going away. This kind of stillness is not an emptiness between two sentences. It is itself a form of presence.
This is why bearing the silence is so much harder than it looks. Whoever fills it rarely does so for the other. They mostly do it for themselves – because their own restlessness is growing, because not-knowing feels uncomfortable, because they want to do something when they do not know what to do. Filling the silence is often an escape from one’s own helplessness. And it interrupts at the very moment when the other had just begun to look deeper.
For in that full silence something can surface that was hidden beneath the talking. As long as words continue – explaining, asking, consoling – the surface stays in motion. Only when that motion rests for a moment can what lies beneath show itself. Often it is precisely the sentences after a long pause that matter – the quiet, almost passing ones that were not possible before. They do not come because someone asked for them. They come because a space had opened.
So that no misunderstanding arises: silence is not a value in itself. There are moments when it would be wrong – when someone is in danger and needs clear questions, when someone is looking for orientation, when shame fills the room and a word could dissolve it. Silence at any price is not accompaniment but another form of absence. It is not about saying as little as possible. It is about sensing when the silence holds and when it leaves someone alone.
Perhaps this is the heart of it: silence and listening are not the same. Silence is the absence of speech. Listening is presence. The one can be empty; the other is always full. Whoever truly listens while staying quiet lets no hole appear that would have to be filled. They hold a space – and sometimes this held, listening space is the only thing that carries a person when words have long since left them.
What We Hear
What happens on the telephone when we hear the person rather than the problem.
There are conversations in which I notice, after a while, that all I am hearing is the problem. Then the fear is only fear. The loneliness only loneliness. The person disappears behind whatever is weighing on them just now – and often I only notice when the conversation grows heavy and will not move on.
On the telephone, almost everything we usually rely on falls away. No face, no room, no gesture. A voice remains. And with this voice I never hear the whole person – I only ever hear something. I lift something out. The one word that makes me sit up. The tone that unsettles me. The story I believe I already know.
And what I hear becomes, for a moment, the whole truth. If what I hear above all is the distress, I am speaking with a person in distress. If I also hear what has carried them this far – that they called at all, that they are still speaking, that they are searching for words – then I am speaking with a person in whom something other than their distress is still alive. Both are there. But it makes a difference what I hear. For what I hear begins to shape the conversation – for me and, a few sentences later, for the person at the other end as well.
That is why listening is never neutral. It looks like receiving, but it is also an act of choosing. I decide – usually without noticing – in which world I meet the other person. And the greatest temptation here is not to hear too little. It is to know too quickly. To classify. To recognise the situation, to understand the case, to be opening a drawer inside already. The moment I classify a person, I stop hearing them.
Those who are judged cannot show themselves. That holds on the telephone as it does everywhere. And the reverse is true as well: sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, a person begins to speak differently about themselves – not because I said anything clever, but because they sense that I have not already finished hearing them. That in my listening there is still room for what they themselves do not yet know.
Perhaps that is the heart of it: not merely to hear what a person says, but to listen in a way that allows a person to hear themselves again. Not to pick out the problem, but the person – and, within them, what is still possible.
While reading an essay by Elisabeth Ferrari on Martin Buber, I became aware of where this movement comes from. Ferrari describes how we do not simply depict the world but always already lift something out of it – and how our world arises from precisely that. What stands most in the way of meeting, she writes with Buber, is to take a person apart, to sort them into categories, to meet them with preconceptions. If, instead, we see them in their possibilities, as they could be, we help them so that their world – and ours – can grow.
Ferrari speaks of perceiving. On the telephone, this becomes something simpler still and harder still: hearing. Perhaps accompaniment begins exactly there – with the quiet decision of what we choose to hear.
Prompted by: Elisabeth Ferrari, ‘Das dialogische Wesen des Menschen’, in: SyStemischer 13/2018, pp. 54–64.