Nonlistening: Defensive listening

When I think of communication, first thing that comes to my mind is the speaking part; like the words you are using to create your message. However, taking a look closer to chapter 6 made me realize that the listening part is as much as important in the communication process, or even more!

One of the most interesting part of the chapter discusses the forms of nonlistening. It can’t take many forms, just like pseudolistening, monopolizing, selective listening, defensive listening, ambushing and literal listening. For the purpose of this blog, I will only concentrate on defensive listening (p.158).

Julia T. Wood’s definition of defensive listening is: ‘perceiving personal attacks, criticism, or hostility in communication that is not critical or mean-spirited’ (p.158). Responding defensively happens when you have a bad perception of the person’s message; you perceived the person doesn’t like/respect/trust you and expresses it in their communication.

But the defensive listening may be caused by other factors, for example, if you had a pretty hard day at work, you may tend to perceive attacking message where there’s none. This also happens about certain topics you feel ashamed of, or you don’t feel comfortable talking of. As an example, you may respond rudely to someone’s speaking of his particular other if you just broke up with yours, because you may doubt you are lovable.

I used to be very good friend with Annie, who was very frequently using defensive listening. Now, after all of our misunderstandings and little fights because of that communication issue, our friendship isn’t the same, it actually decreased. For example, I would say: ‘I wish I didn’t wake you up this morning. I was up early and I tried to be careful not to make noise, but I accidentally dropped a glass on the floor!’ and she would answer something like: ‘Well, I should have get up earlier but I had so much work last night that I felt I deserved to stay in bed this morning…’. In this situation, I was just trying to be polite and apologize for the noise, but she would take it like an attack. She would think I was saying she was a lazy person for not waking up as early as I did! This was the kind of responds I got from her… Sometimes, I would tell her that her perception wasn’t good and explain what I really meant. In this context, metacommunication is essential for the communication to be effective between both people.

You know this humorist, Jeff Dunham? Well, one of his character, ‘Peanut’, is so hilarious! There’s actually a scene where Peanut is arguing with Jeff on basically everything. When watching it, at some point, you can feel Peanut is very aggressive and sarcastic and uses defensive listening whenever Jeff would talk. Enjoy! :)