The Others – Listening and Touching

Listening:
When in a conversation, how well do you listen to the other person? What type of conversation do you have? Why do you conversate with others/ what is your goal? Do you try to understand what they are saying or just try to get your point across? Usually when we conversate with others, we don’t think about these questions. But if you think back to all of you previous conversations, you could probably be able to answer all of them.
In order to listen to others, the first thing you must do is to listen to yourself. “What is your basic orientation toward other people?” For most of us, we talk with other people to interact, but what we don’t realize is that there are different levels of interaction.
Through this lesson we learned that most of the time people have a motive or goal when they have a conversation. There are many types of conversations people can have, such as: story telling, where one person would say something and then the other person would say something that had happened to him/her or “that reminds me of the time”. Then there are the consoling conversations where you try to make the person feel better or vise versa. Other conversations could be for entertainment or information or could even be a debate where the both of you are trying to get your points across. When debating, do you just try to get your point across or listen to the other person? One thing we saw was that people usually tried to get their point across and didn’t listen to the other person. In my opinion you should listen to everything the person is saying even if you don’t agree. The more I began to pay attention to the types of conversation people had, I realized that they were very similar to those that we discussed in class. The different types of conversations and people’s motives are endless, but acknowledging them is important. That way it will help you get a better understanding of yourself and understand others better as well.


Touching:
In this unit we analyzed the question, why do people touch? Similar to listening, there are different levels and categories of touching. There is casual, compassionate, violent, therapeutic and erotic touching. There are different motives as well: pleasurable/sensual and erotic. In my opinion people touch for different reasons. Sometimes it’s to give the other person pleasure in a therapeutic way, to help them relieve tension. A compassionate touch could be saying hello to a friend by giving them a kiss on the check. That could also be a casual touch, just like a handshake. A massage could fall under most categories. A couple, or two friends could give each other massages, so it could also be pleasurable and/ or erotic.
There also is a difference in the type of person you are. You could be a very touchy person, moderate touch, accidental touch or no touch at all. I categorized myself as a moderate touch type of person. At home with family and with some of my friends I don’t mind if they touch me, but I a person I knew but wasn’t my friend touched my I might feel awkward. When I asked others how they would rate me some said that I’m accidental touch whereas others said I’m very touchy. I guess it depends on the other person as well and their comfort level. Sometimes body gestures and facial expressions could help you figure out how a person feels when you touch them or when they are touched by others.