The first obstacle to listening is not the other — it is the posture you inhabit without knowing it. Three false postures lie in wait for every sincere listener.
FREN· Understand · knowing yourself
He evaluates before he has heard; his first word is a verdict. Eli saw Hannah praying in silence and thought her drunk (1 Samuel 1:13-14): he did not judge out of malice, but too soon. The risk: turning the church into a courtroom and driving away the wounded who no longer dare confide. “Judge not” (Matthew 7:1); judgment belongs to Christ, “at the time God has set” (1 Corinthians 4:5). You are a witness and a companion, not a magistrate.
He draws his solutions before he has heard the depth of the problem: a verse, a method, a book. Job's friends were at first perfect — seven days seated in silence with him. Then they spoke, and everything was spoiled. “Oh that you would keep silent, and it would be your wisdom!” (Job 13:5). “Quick to hear, slow to speak” (James 1:19): listening comes first, the word after.
He turns pain at once into a spiritual sign: to the one who weeps, “God is speaking to you there”; to the one who doubts, “it is a trial.” It is the most widespread profile in devout circles — and the most subtle, for it avoids the pain by over-interpreting it. “Jesus wept” (John 11:35): he knew he was about to raise Lazarus within minutes, but first he wept. Pain has its time; interpretation has its own; they do not always coincide.
Beneath these postures, three automatisms: “that's just like me!” (you bring everything back to your own experience and the other disappears); thinking in the other's place (you guess, you decide for him); over-involvement (you drown in his distress and are no longer a point of support for him). To name them in yourself is already to begin freeing yourself from them.