Active Listening
Clinical Practice
A structured listening approach: giving full attention, reflecting back what was heard (paraphrasing, not parroting), noticing emotion beneath the words…
A structured listening approach: giving full attention, reflecting back what was heard (paraphrasing, not parroting), noticing emotion beneath the words, and avoiding the urge to immediately problem-solve or defend. The goal is for the speaker to feel genuinely heard before any response is offered. Couples who practice this during conflict have meaningfully better outcomes.
Evidence
Clinical Practice
Active listening, the reflect-back-what-you-heard technique, earns Clinical Practice. It is a legitimate, widely taught communication skill, but the popular claim that it is the key to a successful marriage does not hold: Gottman and colleagues (1998) found that active-listening exchanges did not characterize stable couples and that empathy-based listening tasks were hard for couples to sustain and did not predict good outcomes. The rating reflects a real technique with genuine uses whose strong couples-fix-it claim is unsupported.
Origin
Carl Rogers / client-centered therapy