Listening to Someone Process an Experience

❓ Do we need to talk about an experience to process it?
This question struck us as we were reading Listen by Kathryn Mannix for the WISE book club recently. Do you think it’s true? Is external story telling needed to make sense of our experiences?

Here’s how Mannix puts it in the book:

“Someone who has experienced an emotionally intense event will go over their story until they have made sense of it. This processing is an important part of coping…. Once a person with a distressing story finds someone who is willing to listen, expect to hear their story repeatedly, sounding the same (often with new details) and eliciting the same distress, until gradually it softens into the memory of ‘a bad thing that happened to me in the past’ instead of being an active and current distress” (p 69).

“As we tell our story to someone else, we hear that familiar story in a perception-changing way. Taking it out of our minds and framing it into words changes the way it feels, sometimes even the way that we understand it” (p 75).

When we are coaching (or when we are being coached), we recognise that sometimes it makes very little difference what questions are asked. Our presence and attentive listening to the person’s thoughts and feelings is all that is needed. Listening is a gift to the person speaking.

🔸 Have you experienced the gift of listening?
🔸 Do you think talking to a listener is needed to understand our experiences?

A massive thank you from Sarah to the WISE book club for the excellent book pick. The leaders also facilitated a great online discussion about it; thanks to Kathryn Hemming, Samantha Caras, and Gina Davies. The next book is What Do You Need? How Women of Color can Take Ownership of Their Careers to Accelerate Their Path to Success by Lauren Wesley Wilson.

📅 Date: September 17, 2025
⏰ Time: 7:00 p.m. (Manila – GMT+8)
📍 Location: Virtual (Zoom)
🔗 Registration