How My Therapist Taught Me to Be Interested in Other People
By: David Powell
Tags: Therapy, Self Improvement, Self-awareness, Mental Health

Photo by Des Récits on Unsplash

I’m not naturally interested in other people.

I am naturally self-centered, self-involved, and self-important.

It takes a focused effort for me to listen and care.

When I do listen, it takes more effort to not make a conversation about myself.

I once shook a professor in college by blatantly stating this in a paper. It was a scriptwriting class, and it happened to be the only class I ever took with my then girlfriend. The prof had assigned us an essay responding to an article about creating art as a means of positive social change.

What did we think about art as protest, art as justice, art as the catalyst for change?

I read the altruistic article, and as I wrote my response I realized that I just didn’t care much about people who weren’t me.

I listed this realization in the paper. I concluded that it was probably something I should work on.

When he handed the graded paper back to me, the professor stopped, looked at my girlfriend, and said, “You know he only cares about himself.”

“I know,” she said.

It should have alarmed me more than it did. It was my first inkling of my toxic narcissism. I wish I could say writing that paper was my wake up call to what a privileged person I was.

I learned more slowly, though.

A few years later, I had built up quite a repertoire of toxic habits, and I started my journey with therapy — a journey I’m still on.

In the second or third month of work with my sliding scale therapist, I admitted that I wasn’t interested in other people. I found it difficult to not dominate a conversation. I could barely ask someone about their day without turning the interaction into a monologue about myself.

My therapist — We’ll call him “Doc” — nodded. He thought for a moment, and then said, “Would you be alright with some homework for this week?” I said yes.

One week of homework turned into three, and this was our process.

Week One: The Reporter

Our homework consisted of different roles Doc assigned to me. For example, in the first week he told me I was a reporter.

“Whenever you’re talking with someone this week, I want you to think of yourself as a journalist for the news. Focus of the Who, What, When, Where, and How of whatever someone else is talking about. Keep digging like it’s your job.”

So I tried. I asked questions that kept other people talking. This naturally limited how much I could make a conversation about myself.

I still wasn’t interested in other people, but I was acting more like someone who was.

Week Two: The Monk

Doc’s next prescription changed my week more drastically.

“This week, you’ve taken a vow of silence. Don’t talk unless you have to. Let it be awkward.”

It was awkward. Well, it was awkward for me. I can’t remember anyone else reacting in a noticeable way.

This project gave me two insights:

I really was doing most of the talking in my social interactions.

People didn’t care when I stopped.

My friends, coworkers, and acquaintances were as disinterested in what I had to say as I was with what they did.

Perhaps I hadn’t mastered interest in others, but at least I wasn’t talking at them this week.

Week Three: The Listener

Our third week attempted to balance the reporter, the monk, and the social narcissist I had been.

“This week, you can talk in conversations. You’re only going to say what you have to say to keep the conversation going, though.”

That week, my vocabulary consisted of

Yes.

Oh, really?

Tell me more.

What was that like?

And that was all.

Honestly, that week was beautiful.

Now I had learned how to ask questions from being the Reporter, and I realized that what I had to say wasn’t that important from being the Monk. All that existed was what the other person in a conversation had experienced, thought about, or felt at that time.

And I was interested.