Over the years I’ve spent about two hundred hours scuba diving. One of the many fascinating parts of the scuba experience is the
increasing quiet you encounter as you go further below the ocean’s surface. I used to love to swim down to one hundred feet and simply float, holding my breath a moment to eliminate the loud noise of my breathing and enjoying the enormous silence of the depths.
For me, one of the most remarkable things about encounters in the chaplaincy was how deep they could go in a matter of moments, even with complete strangers. Time seemed to be unrelated to the institutional clock on the wall.
Silences were flooded with unspoken communication. The profundity of these encounters often felt like soul-to-soul exchanges.
Several factors influenced these encounters. One was the medications the patient was receiving, some of which can sharply reduce the usual self-protective barriers people erect between themselves and strangers. Another was the particular experience the patient was having. Giving birth, suddenly learning you have a serious family problem, and, especially, being told
you have only a short time to live, jolts most people out of their usual protective shell.
Another cause of these profound encounters relates particularly to chaplains and mental health professionals. One of the skills we are taught is called reflective listening. It is a special way of being with someone. You listen intently and single mindedly to what they are saying and reflect their words back to them in a way that shows them how closely you have heard them. This reflection often
enables them to become aware of what’s going on inside them. Only when we are aware of how we feel about something can we go to the next step, which can range from simply experiencing the emotion in the presence of a sympathetic other person to taking some sort of action...
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