When a baby cries, it’s because it wants something. Crying is the only real “lever” that a baby has to control its environment, so it uses it. If it’s hungry, tired, uncomfortable, or scared – it cries. If you figure out what thing the baby needs and fix that problem, the baby generally goes back to cooing pleasantly.
Frequently, adults will whine and complain about something, and if you try to fix it or help in any way, that adult will tell you they don’t want a fix, they just want to be heard.
When do we learn that?
At some point between being a baby and being an adult, we must learn this behavior. Because a baby doesn’t just cry for the sake of crying; it doesn’t just “want you to listen to it cry.” It wants something about its situation to change!
So my theory is this: we’re interpreting “I just want to be heard” incorrectly. That’s not what the adult wants. The adult wants to feel loved, in exactly the same way that the baby sometimes cries just because it wants the touch of a parent. But adults feel weird about just asking to be loved or held or comforted, so instead we proxy in something else. “Just listen to me” is really just a substitute for “please make me feel like somebody cares about me enough to listen.”
So… do that. The next time someone asks you to “just listen,” so a little bit more than that. Make sure they feel safe, secure, and appreciated. We’re all just babies crying, sometimes.
