Fortunately, Susan knew a brainstorming technique called "think and listen." Months later when I was explaining to Mary Daly how "think and listen" worked, she told me that Nelle Morton had described the same process in her 1972 essay, "The Rising Woman Consciousness in a Male Language Structure," only calling it instead, "hearing into speech," or "hearing into being." Finding "hearing into being" a much more felicitous description of what happens in this process, I immediately adopted that name for it.
The process itself is very simple—feminists will recognize it as having some of the best characteristics of consciousness raising (CR) as it was done early in the movement: no interruption or evaluation is allowed. With time and use I came to appreciate the very complex genius of this process. As a brainstorming measure, it has no peer, and it is the perfect mode for addressing questions such as those I posed to the women who were to meet in San Jose.
It works best in a group of three that has an hour and a half at its disposal. Everyone in the group has equal time to talk—in this case, a half hour each—uninterrupted and with out evaluation. This is a revolutionary experience for some women. Being seriously and completely listened to, being genuinely heard, hardly ever happens to women in ordinary everyday life. Many women cry the first time they try this process. Their being so avidly heard in the present causes them to realize how deeply they have been wounded by being ignored and disregarded, shut up, talked over, and found inconsequential or amusing during most of their past lives.
It is also often the first time women have ever listened to somebody else for a half hour or so without responding, without murmuring, "Oh yeah?," "I see," "Um hum," "I know how you feel," at appropriate intervals. Or laughing, or making sympathetic noises. It is often the first time they have ever listened to somebody else without allowing their facial expressions to communicate understanding, puzzlement, disagreement, or a host of other reactions. It is not easy for women to learn not to respond. We are thoroughly conditioned to respond. We always respond. That is one of our roles in patriarchy—to be the responders, the chorus. Men talk, and we nod and say breathlessly, "Then what happened?" or "Oh, yes, I'd love to hear about your childhood rock collection!" Our children have legitimate needs for our attention. They need to have us laugh when they're witty or cluck with dismay when they tell us their woes. Our faces are infinitely plastic: we are required to register admiration, servility, sympathy, concern, sorrow, and understanding all day long every day. We almost cannot not respond by this time in our lives. We almost cannot allow somebody to set forth upon this quest for their own ideas in our presence without our solicitous questions and reassurances, our reactions stamped clearly on our visages, our oohings and aahings—we are such active listeners. When we first try to listen passively to others, some of us feel like traitors; we feel as if we're doing something illegal, as if we might be arrested for it any moment.
-Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation
