Mike: 00:08

Welcome to Speak the Truth, a podcast devoted to giving biblical truth for educating, equipping, and encouraging the individual in Hello. Hello. I am back home in Keller, Texas. Unfortunately, I'm by myself, at least as far as our co hosts are concerned. However, I do have a special guest with me, and I'm really excited about this podcast because I've got Joseph Hasung on with us.

Mike: 00:34

Joe, how are doing?

Joseph: 00:35

Doing good, Mike. How are you?

Mike: 00:36

I'm doing good. Doing good. Guys, I wanted to bring Joseph on because he recently released, I think, as of March 23, he released his learning to listen book that was just a tremendous contribution to the biblical counseling world. And I would argue, and hopefully as Joe shares his purpose for writing the book and then how it's structured and everything that this this needs to be on the bookshelf of every Christian. And then, honestly, there's just a lot of things that can be employed in our day to day lives of just learning to listen just in general as human beings.

Mike: 01:05

So, Joe, could you share a little bit about yourself?

Joseph: 01:08

Yeah. Sure. I am the director of ministry partnerships and recruitment at Fieldstone Counseling. Been with Fieldstone for about three years now. I live in a little town in Southwest Kentucky.

Joseph: 01:18

It's Hopkinsville. We call it Hoptown. So if I say Hoptown, that's what talking about Hopkinsville.

Mike: 01:23

I like that.

Joseph: 01:24

Yeah. Marry Mary Dessera. We've been married for eighteen years. Got three kids, Sofia, Leora, Alastair, 14, 12, and eight. Yeah.

Joseph: 01:31

I've been doing biblical counseling for a long time as a pastor in different, yeah, different spots, mostly Kentucky, one time in Georgia, youth pastor, associate pastor, kind of almost a joke. Except for a senior pastor, I've been most jobs from janitor all the way up to associate pastor in in churches for fifteen years or so, and then had a vocational shift around COVID time and went more vocationally routed to biblical counseling, landed with Fieldstone. I was working on my D Man. I finished that. I'm actually weird to think about.

Joseph: 02:02

I'm almost two years now off of graduating from my D Man. So, yeah, that's a little bit about me. So, again, been with Fieldstone for three years, counseling with them, supervising, and now I'm directing recruitment and ministry partnerships.

Mike: 02:15

That's awesome. That's awesome. And so the book Learning to Listen that came out March just last month, late last month, Could you just share a little bit of, man, just what really prompted you or galvanized you to write the book?

Joseph: 02:30

Yeah. It's a little bit of a continuation from my work in the doctoral program at Southern. My my dissertation was on empathy and a biblical understanding of empathy. And as I did that, when I applied that in the last section of my dissertation, try to be viewed as very practical. How do we think about listening?

Joseph: 02:48

Because empathy, that's really where we connect is that that listening process and sharing hearts with someone. Yeah. So this book came out of that dissertation as well as just a recognition. I think there's just not a lot written in the biblical counseling world on skills or skill development in general. There are some, but no standalone books to my knowledge that are just about skill.

Joseph: 03:09

And then most of them are just chapters in larger works, like introductory works, thinking like gospel for disordered lives has a chapter. Even Adams had some stuff on skill early on. Wayne Mack has a great couple of chapters in the John MacArthur volume. But largely, it's just a pretty large hole in our literature. And so the listening book came from those two places, just realizing there's bit of a hole in our literature here as well as my dissertation.

Mike: 03:36

Yeah. No. That's good. It's a it's a great book. And I know for our certification training class here that we're gonna be having in the fall, we're gonna be implementing that as just part of just our at least training center requirements as far as implementing some of that resource wise from the book because it's just really helpful in the way that you've done that.

Mike: 03:55

And speaking of which Thanks. Learning to listen is structured in three parts. So it's the purpose of listening, the posture of listening, and the practice of listening. And so why did you choose that particular structure for the book?

Joseph: 04:06

Yeah. I think when I'm thinking about skill, I'm thinking about a bigger biblical category, which is wisdom. And wisdom and skill, there there's a lot of overlap here. But I think when we're thinking about skills and wisdom, we're thinking about why do we do something? We need to think about and reckon with that.

Joseph: 04:23

We need to think about the heart behind the thing that we're doing, the character that's there. Honestly, because if we disjoint skill from character, then it easily just becomes mechanistic or manipulative. So we don't want to just listen because we can be skillful for it. We want to have a heart that is right in listening. And then the last part really is just practical.

Joseph: 04:46

We need to not only know why. We don't just need to have a heart that's good before the lord. We also need to do it really well. I'm a sports guy, and so I'm always thinking in sports metaphors. I love basketball.

Joseph: 04:58

If you're thinking about setting a screen in basketball, you need to know why. Why am I setting a pick? Like, am I trying to get a shooter open? Am I rolling? What is it?

Joseph: 05:07

What purpose does it serve in the greater scheme of the play that I'm in? I need to know, like, the posture in which I'm setting a pick. If I don't have the right posture pick, I'm gonna get called for a foul. I might get hurt. I might hurt the person that I'm picking.

Joseph: 05:20

Lots of issues that could go in. And then also just I need to be able to really set a good screen. I need to know how to do it. I need to know what I'm doing after. Just so there's just this functional thing with those three aspects.

Joseph: 05:31

It's not just about listening. Literally, any skill we have in any part of life, you need these three things. But as a biblical counselor, we're wanting to think purpose in a grander scheme in God's plan, where what purpose does it serve? What heart before the Lord do we have, and then what practices can honor him as we do this really well.

Mike: 05:49

Yeah. That's really good. And so in the first part, like you mentioned, the purpose of listening, you established that listening is rooted in God's love and for us. And so because he loves, he also listens to us, and therefore, we too must love in order to listen. And so while God's perfect listening flows from his love, we are finite.

Mike: 06:09

We're limited beings, so we must rely on empathy to listen. Could you explain how you connected love and listening through empathy and how this approach helps us better listen really listening to others, particularly in counseling relationships?

Joseph: 06:22

Sure. In the book, I try and convey empathy as a disposition from which we listen. So it's this kind of place that we come from to listen. Empathy is really just a modern word that we use. And I think when we're using it and we're trying to think of it biblically, we're thinking of it as a word to use for all kind of the heart posture that sits in our listening.

Joseph: 06:42

So I just I would just say, in order to follow Jesus as a compassionate listener helper, he comes and he's engaging with people. He's doing so from this heart posture. And so compassion starts with that understanding, and then it works towards helping the sufferer. So it takes that initial connection point that our hearts can gather through listening and engaging with the person, and then it takes what their heart story is, and it moves towards actually helping them in their suffering. So my argument would be love compels us to empathize with the person so that we can help them.

Mike: 07:21

Yeah. That's really good. And what I appreciate about the way that you've written the first part of it, the why behind the how and the practical part of it is that it's rooted in God first and foremost. Like you you set that tone right out of the gate. So there's that theological groundwork there that I really appreciate.

Mike: 07:38

And also, I appreciate the vulnerability of realizing that there is that struggle like where we're made in God's image, but we're analogous to him. Right? Yeah. We don't know all things. And so the fact that there's this vulnerability that we literally have to listen in order to get to know the person and really in real time empathize that compassion.

Mike: 07:59

So there's just this very active approach that's obviously rooted in love. So I just I love the theological framework that you established right out of the gate. So I really appreciate that. And then and so also in the first part, you talk about the loss of listening. Can you share really the implications of this unfortunate reality and how it impacts us?

Joseph: 08:17

Yeah. There there's a lot. And this chapter, I think, is not meant to be exhaustive. Sin just distorts everything. And so there's gonna always be just almost infinite ways that it could manifest in our counseling and distract us.

Joseph: 08:32

But in listening and loving, I try and make those things tethered to one another. Yeah. We really can't love without listening. We shouldn't really be listening without loving. They're very much there.

Joseph: 08:43

So really the first way that sin cuts us off is it cuts us off from the source of love. So when we think about the garden and there's the first sin, when god shows up, there's a disconnect there. They run. They hide. And then Adam blames god for the sin.

Joseph: 09:00

He's like the woman that you gave me. So there's this just immediate disconnect. If god is love, then all of our love comes from god as the source of love. And so it's gonna be real hard for us to to love anyone if we've put a barrier up between us and the actual place where love comes from. The second way that it affects that sin affects our listening is it actually does affect the functional way that we listen to people.

Joseph: 09:30

It it can I I use Job's friends as an example of three things in particular that we sometimes we just speak too soon? We don't have all the information we need to actually speak wisely to the person. And so we speak too soon. We make a mess of things. It's very that's at least I do that, I think, quite often.

Joseph: 09:49

We can second thing we can do is we can minimize suffering. We can give really simplistic answers to really complex issues. And so and Joe's friends do this a lot. They just they minimize the suffering by just glossing it over with this simple thing. It must be this way because this is the only thing that makes sense to me.

Joseph: 10:08

And then the third thing is just pride. Eliphaz in particular, I think maybe one of our things with pride is it just tends to center our universe on us. And in counseling, that can sometimes get into this space where I don't think wisdom's gonna happen unless my mouth is open. And I think that's a mistake that a lot of us make. We just sin can make us think that we're the ones who carry wisdom in a session instead of the lord.

Joseph: 10:35

So, yeah, so I think there's lots of ways. Those are three ways I kinda identify in the book.

Mike: 10:39

No. That's really good. And I appreciate that because when you were going through sin in the book and just a different the different dynamics that are at play there, and I think one of those that I really appreciated that I unfortunately happens in the counseling room to your point as well as in literally in every relational context, and that is the reality of judgmentalism. We do believe to your point that we become functionally in that moment the source of wisdom, and that wisdom won't actually happen unless we open our mouths. And so there's just that active and passive sort of disposition of judgmentalism.

Mike: 11:11

So I really appreciated that that particular section in your books, man. Thank you. Thank you for that. And then moving from sort of the sections here, you had in the second part, you focus on posture. So it was Jesus' heart and our heart.

Mike: 11:24

How did you connect these two, and why is it so important?

Joseph: 11:27

Real simple, real quick answer here. Jesus and his earthly ministry, he was humble. He was gentle. He was patient with the people he's ministering to. We're made in Christ image.

Joseph: 11:37

We're being remade into Christ image. And because of that fact, Jesus is meant to be a pattern for us to emulate and especially in ministry. So when we look at him engaging in a certain way with a certain heart, that needs to be our heart too.

Mike: 11:52

Yeah. That's really good. Then the third part, preparing to listen, you employ an acronym, which good work on grace because it's all of grace. But in the third part, preparing to listen, you employ the acronym remember for while we're listening, which is can you just share with us what grace the acronym grace is?

Joseph: 12:10

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's gaze, relax, align, connect, engage. Those are the words attached to it. Gaze, we need to make appropriate eye contact.

Joseph: 12:20

We don't need to be too much. We might freak out our counselees if we are staring daggers into their soul. But, also, if we're not making eye contact, it can make us look like we're not paying attention, not actually care we we should try and hit a balance. And some of that's gonna be just wisdom in reading room. Like, you're in a room with a person.

Joseph: 12:37

How are they engaging you with eye contact? Are they is there are they locked in with you, or do they seem to be nervous? Just trying to basically make it as comfortable as you can with them with your eye contact. The second thing is relax. You don't need to be too stiff.

Joseph: 12:51

You also don't need to be maybe too relaxed either. Don't lean back in your chair. You shouldn't be like in a lazy boy with your feet kicked up. Serious conversations. Do have some sort of body posture that should be serious, but it also shouldn't be stiff and rigid.

Joseph: 13:07

Relax. Align. Yeah. Align your shoulders, man. Just if you're gonna have a conversation with someone, face them.

Joseph: 13:13

That's helpful. Yeah. Except I've just I've had lots of counselees as well as counselors that they some somehow think it's better to just misalign themselves and be to use a southern cattywampus to to the person in front of them. And, yeah, it's better to align and just it allows them to see that you're with them. Connect.

Joseph: 13:31

Try and lean forward just a little bit, especially if you're in, like, person in person setting. Just a little bit of a lean forward just says, oh, they're intent on listening to me. Better than leaning back in your chair. It just gives you a little bit of a connection point. And then engaging just open body posture.

Joseph: 13:50

Don't cross your arms. Don't cross your legs. Those things can look judgmental sometimes in certain cultural context. Now I would say with all of that, those are not rules to be followed, but suggestions as starting points. Culture dictates a lot of what is and is not appropriate here.

Joseph: 14:08

Eye contact is a cultural thing. Body posture is a cultural thing. Some cultures, eye contact is much more like it is stare daggers at each other. Don't avoid gaze. Don't do that.

Joseph: 14:19

Others, it's the opposite. There's some that respect means don't make a lot of eye contact. And so we're gonna try and do the best for the person in front of us to know what makes them most comfortable and makes it an environment where they're gonna be good to open up and talk about their story and you can share with them.

Mike: 14:37

Yeah. That's really good. And then you also have in the third part, in part three, you spend a considerable amount of time pressing into the gaps. What are some of the gaps that we need to consider when listening?

Joseph: 14:49

Yeah. The three that I identify, it's context, values, and perspectives. Perspectives. I think we all, as counselors or just as people living in God's world, we need to realize that the person in front of us, they're not us. There's always going to be a gap between my experience of life and the person in front of me.

Joseph: 15:09

And I'm just trying to identify big categories here. So context is one. Two smaller contexts would be culture. Again, like I said, body language, vocal tone, family structures, how we express emotions. A lot of that's cultural content.

Joseph: 15:24

A lot of people come by way of culture there. I just have my dad when he was pastoring a long time ago telling a story about a woman who was from South America who would come after service to have a conversation about the sermon, and she would, like, almost back him into a wall because her vision of body, like, space and bubble Yeah. Was not the same. Like, it was much her idea of that distance between a person needed to be much closer than what in America it is. And so just it's just a funny story.

Joseph: 15:54

We need to be aware of cultural context and upbringing, how that changes. Family. Family of origin can be another context that's very impactful for a person. So getting to know how their family's ordered, what emotional expression looked like as a kid, how conflict was dealt with when they were growing up, those things, they can give us a good sense of where a person's coming from. And so mining that gap of context is a helpful starting place to get to understand a person.

Joseph: 16:21

Values, man, values are the stuff of the heart. So getting to understand not only what they prioritize, but how they weight those priorities. Like, example would be, like, if you have a counsellee that values loyalty and friendships or someone who's more like self sufficient, the way they deal with friends and other people, knowing how they they weight those values even in how they deal with other people, that's helpful information to know. It may not be the way you do it, but it's helpful for you to know the person in front of you. Across generational lines, that's really important, especially if you're counseling someone from a generation younger or older, it's helpful to know generational differences, they do affect value waiting a lot of times.

Joseph: 17:06

I think of I don't know, Mike, but, like, baby boomers, which my parents' generation, there there's a lot of judgment sometimes that comes with millennials in reference to that. So it's baby boomers maybe value job responsibility jobs, responsibility, sacrifice, and baby boomers, that's theirs. But with millennials, it was like maybe life giving work was a little higher. Freedom felt a little bit more significant. And so you those are good and bad things on both counts.

Joseph: 17:35

Baby boomers may have some issues when they're retiring to not they might struggle the idea of not having as much responsibility attached to their job for the later part of life, whereas millennials have failure to launch. They have a hard time of finding the perfect job, or maybe they quit jobs too easily. But those value systems, although not bad in of themselves, it's helpful for us to know so we can help balance maybe the typical issues that may be going in there. Then the last thing is perspectives. Yeah.

Joseph: 18:03

We just need to be able to step into the world of the person. Just perspective is like a it's the filter for someone's life. And so just knowing what their perspective is like so that you can anticipate how they might react to a certain scenario. Something comes up. You have an intuition on how they might take the thing that's going on.

Joseph: 18:24

And as you start mining minding those gaps, it's just helpful to understand and know the person in front of you.

Mike: 18:32

Yeah. That's really good. And so you it was funny as you were talking about just the generational stuff. I guess I'm I'll be I'm 44. I'll be 45 a little bit later this year.

Mike: 18:41

So I fall into that Xennial category. I don't know if that's the case for you, but that was really funny that particular part, especially when I was reading through the book. Immediately put myself in some of those categories and just acknowledging some of my tendencies. But in in the last two chapters of the book, you focus on how we listen actively and then how we respond. Can you share some of those active listening skills and then how we should respond?

Joseph: 19:05

Sure. I feel like have been dealt with a lot. If there's anything that's been dealt with in the biblical counseling literature, questions. Man, gospel for disordered lives has a great section on questions, intensive versus extensive, open versus closed. I think a lot of people, if you're familiar with counseling at all, you're gonna know those things.

Joseph: 19:23

Reflections are a little bit more new to biblical counseling, I think. So just a couple things about reflections. Reflections are summary statements that reflect back information that you're hearing from the person in front of you. So they're not parroting. They say that it's not just the the caricature of restating the last four words the person just said.

Joseph: 19:43

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm really trying to help know that there it's a demonstration that we're listening to the person. So it's a type of rephrasing of the information. It might be really basic information like, oh, what happened, when it happened, just so you have timeline events in order. It might be more substantial to that.

Joseph: 20:03

It might have content like anxiety. That was anxious. That was disturbing. That was really hard. Using some of the language they're using.

Joseph: 20:10

It also might anticipate as you get to know someone, it it may go from they say something that was really hard and you're anticipating, oh, that must have been really anxious. You must have been very anxious for the whole weekend for that type of thing. And that's a statement reflecting back what you anticipate is true, and then they can clarify if that is true or not. But it also helps it helps continue the conversation. I might say this.

Joseph: 20:32

Most people don't get hung up on reflections. When I think biblical counselors hear this, and I've had a lot of people when I've talked to them about this, they think the idea of reflections feels super weird and awkward. Like, the person in front of me is not going to know what I'm doing if I state something back to them. I actually don't think that's true. Try it.

Joseph: 20:52

So I would just say try doing it. And maybe just the next time you have a long conversation with someone, not a serious one, just an informal conversation, see how often a conversation moves forward without questions, but just with statements, trying to understand what the other person's saying, but just restating it back for them with maybe a tag on the end. Is that right? Am I thinking about this right? Is that fair?

Joseph: 21:18

We do a lot more conversations this way than we give it credit for. So just say, riot before you. Just go away from reflections. I think they're actually more helpful than we think they are. It also helps us move the story forward.

Joseph: 21:31

Questions can funnel our scope. So especially initially in counseling, we have broad questions, and we start we we start with this really broad spectrum of what we're dealing with. Then our questions can progressively get more and more narrow, and it can get really awkward to try and pivot back up to the broad section of where we are. But what can happen is if you do reflection, sometimes it allows for a quick clarification or quick narrowing of the scope without actually stopping conversation at all. They can say yes, no.

Joseph: 22:03

Here's a pivot on that and then right back to where they were. It just it sometimes can be actually less awkward to do it this way. That's reflections. Responses, I just this is very basic, so I think there's more to be said about confrontation and affirmation. But confrontation, just an affirmation, the way I'm thinking about it is, what does this person need to see about their selves, life, world?

Joseph: 22:29

I take a there's a Paul Trick quote from instruments in the redeemer's hand. So what do they need to see about these categories of life, and then how do I help them see it? And so sometimes we're gonna confront, which means raise the issue of the problem. And sometimes that's gonna be in their suffering. It's gonna be, I've got a person in front of me who is equating suffering and sinning, and I need to help them see those aren't actually the same things.

Joseph: 22:50

Or they aren't comfortable with acknowledging the suffering, Not just that it's suffering, but, like, the mess of it and the complexity of it. And so I need to help them as sufferers to confront that aspect of what's going on. Sometimes we need to confront sinners. They're just yeah. They're doing something they shouldn't do.

Joseph: 23:06

They may not be aware of it or maybe they are, and they're just unwilling to put it off. Or they're they are aware of it, they're just really having a hard time putting it off. But we need to confront in that category too. And maybe some wise basic guidelines for that would be, let's be slow so we actually get enough information before we start confronting in this way. Our style of confrontation should match the need of the moment and the person, and then we should make it an opportunity to listen more.

Joseph: 23:35

Maybe with the caveat of there are going to be certain things that we hear in a counseling room that we don't need to listen more about. We need to actually stop and draw very direct attention to it. I'm thinking things like suicide or abuse, something like that where, yeah, this isn't gonna be a dialogue. The rest of the session, we need to stop. That's really important.

Joseph: 23:55

We need to stop there, and maybe it needs to be me instructing a little bit more than I normally would be. And then we just need to affirm people. I love kind of Mike Emlett's pattern of just trying to look where god's look where god is working. We need to see make sure that they are affirmed as valuable. They're in God's image.

Joseph: 24:14

They can be understood. They can be loved. They can be accepted. We need to affirm their story. There's gonna be aspects of their story that need to be confronted, But there's also when we're dealing with Palatin likes to use the term fine China.

Joseph: 24:26

When we're dealing with this really sensitive part of people's lives, we need to be looking at those categories, values, motives, perceptions, actions. We need to be thinking about ways in which they're already doing or being right. So are they loving the right things? Do they have the motives that we would want them to do? Are they perceiving?

Joseph: 24:45

Even though this is a really complicated and complex situation, are there aspects to their perception of what's going on that need to be affirmed? And are they doing even if their motives aren't quite what they need to be and their heart isn't quite in the right place, are they doing the thing they know would honor the Lord despite the other things? We just need to pick those things and really help them to see, oh, there are things about my experience that aren't it's not all bad. There may be some things that are really good.

Mike: 25:14

Yeah. That's really good. And I think one of the things I appreciate to to that part of the book is you provide and I think for those of you out there who are pursuing possibly even level one or level two, and you're just trying to really hone in on your skills a little bit and grow, Joe does a really good job of providing what a conversation would sound like if it if this was the tone or that was the tone and and then being able to see and what I appreciated as the reader reading that. So like what you're defending beforehand and then actually demonstrating, you can definitely see the logic. You can feel the logic of it and just the experience of it.

Mike: 25:51

So, Joe, I appreciate you sharing just the value of the book, the joy of writing the book. I think man, for those of you who aren't aware of it yet, please go out and get it. I'll obviously put it in the show notes as far as the link is concerned for Amazon. Joe, do you know of any places that might have good sales right now, good books, or any places that might have a good sale on the book?

Joseph: 26:15

As of this moment, whether whenever this comes out, new growth was doing discount based off of volume. So if you wanted to do it for if you have a counseling center or a ministry or church, you wanted to buy 10 or more, you get, like, 45% off, which is pretty significant. So it's less than $10 a book if you do it that way.

Mike: 26:33

That's huge. That's that's good. And I also I like to read in Logos, actually. So I was Yeah. I was I was it's not quite there yet.

Mike: 26:41

I think it's still gathering interest, the new growth, but I'm looking forward to it being in Logos as well. Joe, thank you. I appreciate you being with us, and thank you for just that needed contribution to the biblical counseling world on learning to listen. We appreciate you guys. And again, if you want to hear anything else topic wise, anything you'd like us to talk about or address, you can email us at topics@speakthetruth.org.

Mike: 27:03

Thank you for listening. We'll see you guys next time.