Effective & Ineffective Attending Behavior: How to be there for someone in distress

A Quick Guide

Attending behavior uses visuals (eye contact), body language, vocal tone, and verbal tracking to show support to people in distress. If you want to evaluate, whether you are attending to someone effectively or ineffectively or how to utilize intentional non-attention and silence in your attending behavior, read on to find out.

Ineffective Attending behavior

To understand ineffective attending behavior, try to remember a poor listening experience with a friend, parent, partner, or teacher. These can involve incidents where you felt misunderstood, blamed or not heard correctly. Your actions may have been misinterpreted, or you just didn’t get the response you were looking for. Keeping that in mind, list down what went wrong, how you felt, how did the other person behave, and what were their qualities.

A few examples of this may include someone who laughed inappropriately while you were saying something serious. A person yawned while you were talking. Or keep looking at their phone and so on. Such behaviors indicate their boredom, non-attention, insensitivity, and a stance of disrespect. Due to this, the already distressed person feels disappointed, upset, empty, angry, frustrated, and vows not to open up to such a person ever again. Try to avoid repeating these aspects in your own interactions to prevent other people from feeling this in your presence.

Effective Attending behavior  

Effective attending behavior is essential for developing a relationship of trust and connecting with someone on a deeper level. For this purpose, listening, talking and non-verbal cues are utilized. Listening is especially important as it facilitates the other person to continue to talk and explore what they are feeling. To check whether you are attending to someone effectively, look out for the following signs in them:

• The person will talk more openly and give you a complete story.
• There will be few breaks in eye contact.
• Their vocal tone will be consistent.
• The person’s body language will be comfortable.

In order to make your attending behavior more effective, you may utilize intentional non-attention and silence as additional strategies.

Intentional non-attending behavior

Sometimes, intentional non-attention can be used to discourage someone with a habit of talking only about negative things. You can use shifts in tone, body language, and eye contact and change the topic to something positive, to communicate this message. However, try to use this strategy with care and only when nothing else seems to work.

The Power of Silence

Silence is an important factor in attending behavior. We usually have a tendency to fill the silence because we feel uncomfortable or scared when things get too quiet. However, silence can be useful for the following:

1. Processing emotions.

Silence gives the other person time to process in emotionally overloaded situations. Even we can use silence to think over our thoughts before responding to the distressed person before us.

2. Sitting and facing difficult feelings, thoughts and problems.

Try to notice the difficulty of ‘sitting with your feelings’, ’sitting with uncomfortable topics’, and ‘sitting with your thoughts’ in the other person and yourself. People who use humor, rationalize statements, or change the problematic topic usually have this difficulty. They do this to avoid feeling their emotions, facing their thoughts, or talking about a hard topic. Be silent and patient in such situations to overcome these difficulties. Initially, it may seem tough but with practice, it will get easier.

3. Supporting an emotionally overwhelmed person.

Silence can be useful to support someone overwhelmed with emotions. For example, if someone is crying, instead of offering comforting statements, try to be silent and let them pour out their emotions. Let them really feel the feelings inside out, before moving to the talking phase of comforting them.

4. Helping a person open up.

Finally, silence can be used as a strategy for people who don’t open up easily. If someone is already of a quiet and shy nature, and you talk over them, they will further withdraw into their shell. Try being silent and on the listening end. Chances are you will eventually start to notice their discomfort with silence and attempts to fill up the space by opening up.

The above are a few strategies you can utilize to enrich your attending skills. Remember, it takes time and practice to develop them so try being patient with yourself. Check out the previous articles to learn more about attending skills and how to be there for someone in distress.