The Red Thread
What a therapist learns about listening, and why it matters to everyone
Most of us think we are good listeners. I found out otherwise in a small room with a one-way mirror.
Years ago, when I was in graduate school training to become a clinical psychologist, one of my teachers told us that in every patient’s story there is a red thread. People wander, he said. They move from topic to topic within a session and from one session to the next. But hidden among everything they bring into the room is a red thread that connects it all. The first thing they mention when they walk in, the story they tell, the little jokes and asides, the dreams they report, even the last thing they say on the way out the door: all of it is a clue, and all of it is holding the red thread.
I didn’t believe him. It sounded too neat, like something meant to make the process poetic. And even if it were true, it sounded like an overwhelming job. How was anyone supposed to hold all of that in mind at once and find the one strand of consistency that mattered?
But what the heck, I said to myself, I’ll try to find that red thread in my next practice session. You see, the way I was trained 50 years ago, we practiced by offering therapy to people who could not afford what was then 25 dollars an hour. Sadly, the clients were getting a beginner, and I was the beginner. My supervisor sat behind a one-way mirror and recorded the session with one microphone plugged into my session and the other in his hand. Afterward I could replay everything on a stereo tape recorder, hearing myself with the patient on one track and, on the other, the supervisor’s helpful and more often than not not-so-helpful commentary: “You’re not listening to what she said, dammit! What do you think that hesitation was about? When he called you Mr. Bassard, do you think maybe he was mad at you, duh!?” Good times, right?
I started to pay attention to clues for where the red thread was. It could be in that hesitation, in the mispronunciation of my name, in the struggle to find the right word, in the similarities between her interaction with her son and the story she told about a neighbor’s interaction with the grocer.
It took me a while, but I learned my supervisor was right, and for a reason so simple I was almost embarrassed not to have seen it. Everything a patient brought in had one thing in common. It was all produced by the same human being. The stories, the jokes, the dreams, the complaints were not separate things. They were one fabric, woven by one consciousness trying to make a single life story out of the complexity of living.
That fabric turns out to be layered. Sometimes the red thread lies right on the surface where anyone could see it. Sometimes it dives down and runs three layers below, showing itself only in a passing remark or a dream that seems to be about something else entirely.
What I finally understood was this: to follow the red thread, you follow the person, not the thought. Thoughts go everywhere. The person is the one place they all come from.
Two things make this hard. The first is the therapist’s own fabric. New therapists in particular must learn their own threads well enough to set them aside, because a client’s remark can snag on an old worry or private hope, and before long the therapist is following himself. The second is the client’s defenses. Clients want help, but getting help means facing their vulnerabilities, and no one likes that. Sessions fill with distractions: interesting stories, humor, feigned anger, tears. The therapist must resist getting caught up in them but notice when they occur, because it is often when the therapy is getting close to the red thread.
Recognizing the red thread is basically recognizing the consistent patterns of behavior in a person’s life. It’s not that they get angry, for example, but what makes them angry, under what circumstances, and why the alternative to anger is not available to them. Following the red thread does not mean understanding the feeling. It means helping the person understand where, when and why their patterns were established. Doing that follows the thread down a level into the less conscious past.
What I learned was to pay attention with a dual lens. The first question is what strikes me as real or meaningful. That one is felt; I can hear that some of a client’s words are about the person while others come from the person. The second question is what ties the other threads together. That one is thought through. If a client’s anger keeps flaring when she feels overlooked, I step back and ask whether being overlooked runs through the rest of her life, in her marriage, her work, her childhood. One test is immersive and the other is reflective, and the thread worth following is the one that passes through both.
I’ve come to think this isn’t only for therapists. We all spend our lives listening to people we love, and most of us do exactly what that distracted therapist does. A spouse, a friend, a grandchild tells us something, and we hear the part that touches our own concerns and follow that. The conversation quietly becomes about us. Listening for the red thread means listening for the person underneath the topic: the thing they keep coming back to, in different words and different costumes, because it matters to them.
The same is true when we look at ourselves. We have our own favorite threads, usually the story we most like telling about who we are. The red thread tends to run underneath that story, in the complaint that keeps returning in new clothes, the joke we always make, the judgments we make about our friends, neighbors and family that often reveal more about us than them.
The red thread is the signature of the human being telling their story. It is the story about being human and dealing with the complexity of this world. When the story is told it is not smooth and perfect. It has hesitations where fear, anger, and doubt creep in. It is told in sentences that begin and suddenly end in the middle as the person thinks of something and reorganizes the telling. It is told not only in words but in silence, in pauses, in sighs and shudders. It is told awkwardly, with reluctance and insecurity. It is told like an imperfect human being...which is exactly where the red thread begins.
