The good listener knows that we’d ideally move—via conversation with another person—from a confused, agitated state of mind to one that was more focused and (hopefully) more serene. Together with them, we’d work out what was really at stake. But in reality this tends not to happen, because there isn’t enough of an awareness of the desire and need for clarification within conversation. There aren’t enough good listeners. So people tend to assert rather than analyze. They restate in many different ways the fact that they are worried, excited, sad, or hopeful, and their interlocutor listens but
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