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Led by Eileen Dunn, a seasoned clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, The Art of Listening explores the transformative power within the space between speaker and listener. Join us and our guests on this collective journey of self-discovery, as we navigate the depths of human connection and the power of listening.
Knowledge always kind of goes towards grasping something specific while being has more to
do with an opening of something, a surrendering to something, a way of being able to hold
and be with difficult feelings, emotions, experiences, and not necessarily moving towards
grasping for something.
And then there can be knowledge that gets derived from that experience, which I think is
different.
I'm Eileen Dunn, and this is The Art of Listening, a podcast that delves into the
incomparable power of human connection and the magic of good depth talk therapy.
In each episode, professional listeners, seasoned clinicians share stories about their
personal journeys, their professional experience, and how they bridge the gap between
receiver and giver, patient and therapist.
We discuss the challenge, the wisdom, and the transformative power of listening within
ourselves and with each other.
Today's guest is Dhwani Shah.
Professional listeners are people.
When listeners come to an encounter with someone for the first time, for the last time
and everywhere in between, they bring their own feelings, experiences, pensions and
judgments. We are who we are.
These idiosyncratic human truths of ourselves can't be put aside.
But this is not a weakness.
Embracing our whole selves as listeners is a source of strength.
It allows us to show up honestly and authentically.
Dhwani Shah spent much of his early career trying to replace the truth of himself in the
listening space with academia.
Like many, if not most of us committed to the profession due in the very beginning.
But as you'll hear Dhwani discuss it, this was a flawed or self-protective goal.
In order for him to create an honest space with patients, he first has to be honest with
himself. In this episode, Dhwani discusses his journey of discovering the power of
genuine listening, being fully present with patients, and the consequences of slipping
away from this approach.
A powerful reminder that embracing our authentic selves as listeners paves the way for
more profound and transformative connecting as people.
While you're listening, I challenge you to think about these questions.
What and how much do you assume if people regularly without even noticing?
What holds you back from being your true self in the relationships that matter most?
What are the limitations of those relationships when you don't bring and explore your
full true self?
I'll share my thoughts at the end of the interview.
Now to Dhwani.
Let me begin at the beginning.
You were born in India, but you came to the US at the age of two.
Tell me about growing up as an immigrant in this country.
How did it shape your view of people and connecting with people?
Yeah, so I left India when I was young and.
Because of that. A lot of the experiences that I carried about India, especially the
younger experiences I carried more in the recesses of my mind as fantasies, desires,
wishes to be there, feelings of a motherland that I never quite fully had that I wish
that I had. So growing up in America was always this sense of being and belonging as an
American, but only partially in the sense of also there being always something else there
in my life that was sort of in the background that was mysterious to me, that informed
who I was, but never really felt fully available to me.
I'm thinking, too, about how, you know, in terms of those primary people of yours, your
mom was an artist, your dad was a scientist.
You relocated from your original country to this culture.
How did that teach you about communication, social relationships?
Well, I grew up in this kind of mysterious household that was very different than other
Indian immigrant families, where on the one hand, we had my father, who was a very
unorthodox man, but in many ways very traditional.
He was an internist, a physician, loved science.
The books that he had were all about astronomy, physics, medicine, biology, those kinds
of things. And then we had my mother, who was incredibly innovative artist, who did a lot
of installation work, bronzes in there and paintings and there the whole house was filled
with her canvases of Indian women and also just lots of mysterious kind of enigmatic
things that were both violent and sexual.
Also, like, for example, she has a whole series of woodcuts and sculptures where there
are guns and women and children are sticking their heads in guns.
Women in saris are sticking their heads in guns.
And it's all about aggression and violence and the plight of women.
So there was a lot of that there in the household, too.
And she would build these huge sculptures that were about ten feet, 12ft tall, made of
wood and all kinds of intricate Rajasthani miniature engravings of Indian artwork.
And then she would break them and burn them and collapse them and create all kinds of
Western images that were graffitied on top of them.
So here I was growing up in this environment of all of these like incredibly rich and a
little bit disturbing images, and then also having this kind of father who was a very
kind of paternal physician type, who had a very basic job as a physician.
How does your background, how with all of its facets, influenced your work?
Yeah, I think that the way in which I think about it is, is there a way to to be objective
about subjectivity or is there a way for us to understand human experience in a way
that's not just impressionistic or just based on opinions, but really based on some
wisdom, you know, of understanding and being with aspects of human existence that can
deepen our understanding of it.
And for us to have some real purchase on it, for lack of a better word.
And I feel like.
My whole life has been this way of wanting to understand things that are mysterious,
enigmatic, difficult to understand why people do the things they do when they're not
rational. Why are there myths?
Why do we love these stories?
Why do people get into these difficult situations that really don't have any basis in
kind of rational thinking and quote unquote, scientific, rational mindsets?
And for me, the most interesting aspects of all of that is, is there a way to understand
all of those things in a in a way that is not just about the rational, but can we be
objective and curious and interested and learn things from our subjective experiences and
these kinds of enigmatic mysteries?
Listen, that's a life mission statement, if you've ever heard one.
I know.
You know, it makes me wonder, like as a psychoanalyst, you are a practicing the depth work
that allows, as you put it, possibilities to emerge.
The crucial element of surprise, being able to show up every moment, every hour with each
patient and with yourself.
Yeah. A brand new moment.
And to really listen is no small thing.
And no, as we've discussed.
But I wonder specifically, how did you get to psychoanalytic training and a
psychoanalytic way of being?
I feel like in some ways the way in which I thought about psychoanalysis when I was
younger and my fantasies and wanting to be a psychoanalyst when I was younger, even in my
training and I would say even now sometimes is based on some flawed thinking about
knowledge. To say it briefly, though, is that I feel like this idea of wanting to be
objective about subjectivity and wanting to understand and know in some ways this kind of
wanting to know and wanting to understand, I think it took me away from what you just
said, which is that patient listening and being with patients and really allowing
surprise and aspects of what I wasn't sure about and what I didn't know and what the
patient doesn't know and wasn't sure about to emerge.
And this kind of way in which things can emerge and they need to emerge as surprises and
as ways in which we're mysterious to ourselves and others and keeping that mystery and
holding it and being able to be with it.
That was a lifelong lesson for me and still continues to be.
And I, I struggle with that.
But the way I got into psychoanalysis was through actually, interestingly enough, I think
my father introducing me to Joseph Campbell and the power of myth.
When I was little, I loved Star Wars.
I loved Greek myths, I loved the Mahabharata and Indian myths.
And I loved I just loved to read all of that stuff.
And then I watched this show where this guy was basically breaking it all down and
talking about all of these aspects of the myth and what happened in the myth and the myth
of the hero and and all the connections between all the different myths and what they say
about human beings and human nature.
So I was mesmerized by that.
I started to love reading Carl Jung and then Freud and then reading Existentialism, Greek
tragedy, all of that stuff I loved.
And then when I went to college, I was really fortunate to be at Rutgers, where George
Atwood was there, and he was a just this amazing, really generous, like, down to earth
guy. And he taught my intro to psych class and he's like, We're not going to do any of
this CBT stuff.
We're just going to learn about these aspects of like how the mind works and we're going
to really talk about what it's like to be a clinician and to be with people and how a
person really is in therapy.
And I was like, Wow, okay, let's do it.
And it all had to do for me.
It was I was always interested in the irrational, you know, and how to make sense of what
doesn't make sense and what isn't so easy to figure out.
And that's where cognitive behavioral therapy never really appealed to me.
I mean, it appeals to me more now, actually, especially the elements of exposure and
about being able to be with difficult feelings and affects and experiences, which I think
is essential. But that whole kind of let's rationally think about this in a way that
makes sense.
I was drawn to that thinking in some ways, but in other ways I, I rebelled against it.
For me, knowledge is about grasping.
It's about knowing. It's about trying to figure something out.
It's about, in some ways a false.
It can be false. But I think even when it's true, it can be false.
And that's the difficulty in what you see in psychoanalysis, which I love about
psychoanalysis, that even if you're right and you tell the patient something that's
absolutely right, it only captures one piece of something that is maybe right, but it's a
selected fact. That's right.
And you're missing so much more.
Dhwani's early struggles so strongly revolved around searching for knowledge as a way to
overcome being a human in the space, something he initially believed to be a barrier in
his work. Overcoming this view, and in turn embracing our own humanity, is a lesson that
he now teaches others through his book, The Analyst's Torment.
Unbearable Mental States and Countertransference.
The book delves into how our personal histories, backgrounds, traumas and overall being
influence us as listeners.
It emphasizes leveraging the givens of who we are to enhance our listening abilities.
I had Dhwani share how his journey led him to write that book.
What I needed to learn.
And it took me a long time to learn this and I'm still not fully learning this and
forgetting it and needing to relearn it.
And by relearning, I mean re-experience it and be with it and make sure that I'm
emotionally honest and authentic about it is how I get in the way.
You know, what is it that I do that gets in the way of me being able to really be with my
patients? Because what I've learned over the years is that it's less about what we know
often and it's more about what we can stand and how we can actually stand being with our
own feelings and our patients feelings.
You know, it's like sometimes I think I forget this and I want to always remember this,
which is what we do is a listening science.
It's not a talking science.
It's not even a conceptual science in many ways.
Like, I feel like it can be those things and it should be those things on some levels.
But it has to be, at its heart, a listening science about how we can bear to hear what
the other person has to say That is sometimes almost impossible to hear or bear.
And where else does that happen in our world where somebody can walk in and really say
whatever is on their mind?
If it's a racist thought, if it's a violent thought, if it's an unbearable trauma that
they never were able to talk to about anybody before, that they can finally share.
Where can a person actually bear and be with those unbearable things and then help that
person instead of suffer from it?
They can suffer with it.
They can be with it as opposed to feeling like it's tormenting them and hurting them.
And I mean, to me, that's like at the essence of what we do.
It's simple to say being alone and not being alone.
Yeah, period.
It's just powerful the way you put it.
It's about what we can stand.
And when someone can't stand something going on in themselves, but they're alone with it
and it's a non-option because it's where the action is inside.
To be able to put words to what we try to do, that just trying to bear ourselves bearing
being with someone else is the kind of thing that people look back and say, that's going
to help me. You know, is that what we're here to do?
You know, don't you need to get busy?
Don't you need to give me homework?
What sense does that make?
I mean, it's a real it's a real twist, but.
But it's a real truth, isn't it?
Yeah. That the business of learning, to be honest with yourself in an ongoing way, in the
face of what feels not possible or desirable or even purposeful, that seems so stupid.
And yet. Yeah.
And yet you're saying that that's the most powerful thing.
Yeah. And it's the most difficult thing.
And if you think about it, like all the depictions of therapy in popular culture, you'll
never see some therapist in in a movie or in a show, give out a handbook or even give out
a paperwork about analyzing your feelings, actions, and you'll have a person actually
being there, hearing an emotional truth that that person hasn't been able to fully
articulate yet.
And then that moment where they're actually able to speak the truth about some pain or
about something in their life that they've never been able to say.
And that's the poignant moment.
And of course, it could be romanticized and idealized and it often is and those kinds of
situations. But that is really, to me, the essence of why people come into therapy.
They're in pain, they're suffering, and they don't know how any other way to feel about
dealing with their suffering than to do what we do in our popular culture, which is to
try to figure it out and problem solve it, and have some technical approach to fixing it.
But I do think at its deeper core, they're looking for a place for someone to hold their
suffering and to be with it.
Not always, but I think often that's what they're really wanting.
I mean, there's a million answers to this, but and it's very personal, right?
I mean, I think there's universal reasons, but then it's endlessly idiosyncratic for each
one of us because we have an internal world and no two are the same.
But, you know, how can you answer for the sake of our listeners what makes and keeps that
so hard to be honest with the truth of.
Your experience, You know, in the face of something that feels unbearable, not possible
when it's not yours, it's someone else's.
I'll just speak about it personally.
I think that what makes it difficult for me is when my patients talk about things that
resonate with me in a painful way or in a way in which I haven't fully come to terms with
or understood and faced my own demons and issues about what I'm suffering from and what's
painful for me.
I think a lot of our anxiety about being with aspects of other people's emotions,
including our own, is that it's it's painful, It's difficult.
And it's. It's really scary, honestly, to to face certain aspects of ourself that are
violent, that are sexual, that are dangerous, that don't conform to the laws of society
or good being a quote unquote, good person, like the racist parts of ourselves, the angry
parts of ourselves, the parts of us that want to transgress.
You know, Freud said it most succinctly when he said it's all about those fantasies of
killing or having sex, that in transgressive ways that can be so unbearable for us.
But I would want to broaden it to to something more.
And this is where I think Freud got it a little bit not wrong, but maybe he missed a
little bit about what it means to suffer from trauma, what it means to feel emotional
pain, what it means to go through something that is so unspeakably difficult that you
can't even face it yourself.
How difficult it was.
Also, what's so shameful that feels so alien to who we want to be and how we want to be
seen as.
And also what feels so guilty to and what provokes so much guilt in us about so many
feelings and fantasies that we have that provoke this kind of fear about being punished
and about other people finding out those kinds of things, I think.
And it's not just inside.
It's a consequence of the interaction with the world outside.
I you know, I don't forget the story you told about being in the car with your kids on
the, what, New Jersey Turnpike and.
Oh, yeah. So I was I was in New Jersey driving and somebody just was tailing me.
So I just let them pass. And when they did, they just shouted out a bunch of racial
comments at me.
Just basically like, go back to your own fucking country kind of thing.
And then just all of the feelings that came from that that were unbearable to me.
And in the book I talk about how that came up for me when a patient inadvertently made a
racist comment towards me about being a dirty Indian and how for her it had so many
meanings and so many resonant feelings about her past, about who she was and about her
whole life experience, and about what it meant for her to be in treatment with somebody
who's Indian. She was white, but for me, in that moment, it just felt like an attack.
And it felt like this moment where I couldn't bear the feeling of being attacked again
and now in this kind of intimate setting.
So in this chapter, I talk about how difficult that was for me to try to manage all of
that and then still be able to listen to her and be with her and help her with what she
was feeling.
I mean, not to overvalue any more than to undervalue, but losing the connection and then
getting it back or losing that footing within ourselves in terms of self knowledge, you
know, that is the balanced truth in terms of connecting with someone.
You know, there's no such thing as as living even as a depth clinician in a position of
perfect attunement.
I appreciated very much.
I know the name Bolognini, but I haven't read him as much and I appreciated your
educating me about his notion of what is it called empathy ism versus true empathy.
Could you say more about what you know about his thought that way?
Sure. So, you know, from my understanding about that, I think what he was speaking to
about this was empathy ism.
At least that's the way I this is the way in which I'm thinking about it is a kind of
forced empathic attitude.
It's a often a position of sentimentality and a way of almost feeling like you have to
force yourself into an empathic frame of mind to be with a patient.
And by doing so, you often avoid a lot of your own feelings, thoughts, experiences with
the patient that you almost have to put away because they're too unbearable for you to
feel with the patient.
And you put on a kind of posture with them.
Like for me, like empathy is an incredibly difficult, very messy experience of us trying
to sit with and be with our patients and never fully being able to do it.
But being in the kind of as much as possible, the fullness of our experiences and
feelings with them and being and allowing for a more.
Open space of even feelings that maybe feel uncomfortable to us with our patients, like
hate, anger, jealousy, all those other feelings that we've talked about, that in some
ways a part of empathy is actually being with those feelings and then allowing the space
for your patients to be with those feelings too.
I love how you said that.
It's jarring and confusing to be true with someone this way where they are.
That's true.
Talk about objectivity and subjectivity.
Again, trusting that that combustion, that encounter is going to is purposeful.
It's going to take you somewhere.
Yeah. You know, I was thinking what you just said reminded me of something, actually about
this struggle that we also have in that term and that I think often gets neglected is
this struggle between empathically linking and identifying with our patients and then
also recognizing and being appreciative of their separateness.
You know, we have to feel like we're connected with our patients, but we also have to
deeply respect their separateness and the fact that they are not us and we don't fully
understand what they're going through.
And that balance, it's not even a balance.
It's actually a very messy dialectic.
I think, that gets created that is so important to hold.
That feeling of connection with our patients is so critical as listeners.
Every day. Good listening challenges us to reflect within ourselves, to look into our own
souls, and to answer honestly what's really happening for me.
The point is not to simply share with our patients.
The biggest purpose is to bear those feelings in the space with and for the work with our
patients. We try to feel everything running through us truthfully, to let it flow, to
allow it to inform us, not to hold it in a negative way, but to be able to feel and know
and to think with it.
Bearing thoughts and feelings in order to be present to be with our patients in the
absolute present moment may be the hardest, most powerful thing we do as clinicians.
This is the truth. So delicately pondered in his book.
So I asked him the question, How do you know?
How do you know when you're really doing it successfully?
I actually don't. And I keep that an open question in my mind as much as possible.
I think where I go with that is I am beginning to understand better when I don't.
I'm beginning to understand better when I'm not doing that.
And just to give you an example of that, like I think one of the things that I've learned
is how I play this blame game in my mind.
And this actually is one way in which I'm not fully listening.
And just to kind of explain that, like when I'm in a state of mind where I'm not being
fully what you just said, I tend to start to do this blame game where sometimes it'll go
to the patient. I'm blaming them, I'm upset with them.
I have some feelings of negativity towards them, or then it may go to their spouse or
their significant others.
Oh, they're the problem. Yeah, they're annoying, they're causing the problem.
Or then it will go to their past.
Their mother was the problem.
Their father was the problem.
And then when none of that works, then it goes to me, I'm the problem.
I'm not the good therapist.
And when I start to find myself in that kind of hot potato of who's to blame, I know that
I'm not in the receptive place of understanding the nuances and subtleties of all of the
complexity there about the affect of range of experience of what's happening.
So what do you do, right?
So then you've got to do the thing of and it's not easy and it doesn't always work, right?
But you've got to do the thing of saying, Wait a minute, what's going on with me?
Like, No, really, what's going on with me?
No excuses, no rationalizations.
Like, what am I feeling right now?
Or what's happening inside my body that is just I can't tolerate being with this person
this way where I have to actually resort to these kinds of simplistic, one dimensional
tropes. And then you find something usually.
I mean, sometimes it's shame, sometimes it's a deep, like hopelessness that this isn't
going anywhere like this.
Therapy is is a waste.
Sometimes it's a feeling of some kind of real anger or a feeling helpless, like totally
helpless or feeling scared, you know, feeling frightened by something that they're
saying. It's almost like you have to use your body as a supervisor.
Like, you know, we have our supervisors.
Yeah. Our body speaks to some truths emotionally that's going we have to cultivate a
relationship with our body where we listen to our body like we listen to our supervisors.
I think that's brilliant.
I think that's brilliant. Is am I being greedy?
If I ask you to give an example of a time when you felt yourself even recently playing
the blame game?
Yeah. So one example I could give is from the book actually about my patient in the
dissociation chapter who was talking a lot about her day, talking about things that
really didn't have any impact on me.
And I was sort of going through the motions of being this kind of empathetic, kind of
false empathy, like just saying, Oh yeah, there must be really difficult for you.
Oh, tell me more about that, or That must have been painful.
But I wasn't checking in with my body and she was picking up on that and she called me
out on it and said, You know, you sound like I guess now would be the equivalent of a
chat therapist who's basically just saying back more what is mechanical than really
feeling like a human being in the room.
And and when she said that at first I became defensive and I wanted to just sort of say
back to her, well, you're the problem here.
Maybe you should talk about something interesting.
But I didn't say that.
And then when I when I felt that anger in that moment, I finally felt my body because my
body was angry.
And then I realized how much I was checked out from what she was saying, that I really
wasn't paying attention to my body.
And what I was feeling was actually what it came down to.
But this took a while.
Was her unbearable trauma of her sexual abuse and what she went through, that it was so
painful and difficult for her, she couldn't put it into words.
I didn't want to go there with her.
We were both circling around it.
And I the first ways in which I felt it, I think, and realized something was going on was
when I realized I wasn't feeling it and then feeling the anger.
She helped you with her.
Our patients, really, they're our first supervisors, our patients.
There are our best supervisors.
I really do love how you said the body is, but the body is a level of honesty and truth to
that they don't have access to.
They can see from the outside looking in or feel from the outside looking in.
But then you use that, you honored it and then you said, wait a minute, what's going on?
Right. And I like what you said, by the way.
Our patients often don't know and they can't always help us.
Our bodies sometimes don't know.
So you're right to say that, like we use all of this as we try our best, but we're not
always going to get it right.
Right? As long as we know that that's what we're doing and what we're enacting and the
limitations about doing that to the human soul.
I mean, sometimes we have to.
Exactly. Yeah. It's just we have to take on many roles.
Sometimes we just have to be aware of those roles we take on and, and hold them in a
lighter way.
So listen, let me let me ask you.
As clinicians, we're living learning from our experience to quote beyond all the time.
So what are you thinking these days and where is your journey taking you?
I've been thinking a lot recently about anxiety and about how it's such an important
topic, and it's sometimes either goes in the direction of manualized treatments for
anxiety, which can be helpful, but then they kind of become a little bit dry or one
dimensional, or it becomes about these like philosophical, highfalutin existential ideas
from Heidegger and all of this where it goes in that direction.
But as clinicians, what do we do with anxiety?
How do we treat anxiety in our ordinary daily practices?
How do we treat guilt, anxiety, Suffocation.
Anxiety. Abandonment.
Anxiety? Ontological anxiety and anxiety of death and of being in the world and traumatic
anxiety. So that's kind of where my mind is going, how to formulate those questions more
in a deeper way for clinicians, but not in a way that's too abstract.
And I also feel like sometimes people yeah, and I've noticed that when we talk about
anxiety, we often collapse it into one thing where people have one idea about what
anxiety is. And there's just such a broad range of different kinds of anxieties and way
in which it gets expressed that I feel like is worthwhile for us to know as clinicians.
And I'm excited to explore that more.
Dhwani Shah is a model of the use of self as fine tuning instrument in the art and science
of listening. Humility.
Yes. He shows and shares himself through his journey of professional development
generously, as with the writing of his recent publication The Analyst's Torment.
But it's not about trying to be virtuous.
The uprooted little kid who relocated with his family to live in a whole new culture long
before he could think abstractly, learn to use the feeling of not belonging, of being
different, to develop a real hunger for demystifying the mysterious, flirting with the
romantic feel good surface of being in his teens couldn't do it for him.
His mom's artistic way of creating and then destroying, and then recreating depictions of
sex and violence, Indian culture and American culture made him more than wonder.
It made him know that the meaning we humans have to negotiate hurls us into realms well
beyond the rational, well beyond the feeling of freedom to choose realms within ourselves
that we must find a way to love, to embrace in the compassionate human way.
Being honest with ourselves is like coming back to middle C on a keyboard with many
octaves. Our capacity for empathy is the bridge of our shared humanity.
Unbearable comes from feeling left abandoned, left alone with an experience as a person
in a world of other persons.
Bearing and believing comes from the unfailing experience of being and being with the
enduring knowledge within ourselves that we are never alone.
At the top of this episode, I challenged you to notice just how much you live on,
assuming others to think about what holds you back from sharing more of your true self
with those closest to you, and to think about the effects your withholding imposes in the
space between you and those who are your world?
So let me close again with a few of my thoughts inspired by this conversation with
Dhwani. As I listened to him, I felt disarmed, relieved by the company I felt with his
sharing of his challenge as a colleague and a fellow human.
I found myself appreciating the opportunity clinical work makes possible for the
professional use of true feelings and what that does for me.
Secondly, we all have different levels and angles of hunger for contact with others.
How could we not be negotiating the space between us all the time, explicitly and
implicitly, to create the space together?
But the answer is fear.
When we boil it down, fear of our impact on others, fear of their expectations or needs
of us. And lastly, the quality of our connections rises and falls with the capacity we
have or have yet to further develop, to do both, to be our true selves and to be with the
truth of each other.
As Dhwani said it so well, where there is knowledge that comes with being, there is a
chance to surrender.
Please join us for our next episode as we continue to dive into the space between speaker
and listener. You can follow us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts,
and if you enjoyed the experience, please tell your friends, Give us a five star rating
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