What If You Could Look at Your Problem from Somewhere Else?
Imagine that you are having an argument with someone in your family. You know exactly what happened. They started it. They misunderstood you. They weren’t listening. Perhaps they accused you of something you didn’t do, told you what you were thinking without asking, or gave you advice when what you really wanted was for them to understand what you were saying. By the time the argument is over, you may have gone through the whole thing twenty times in your head, and each time you become a little more certain that you understand the problem.
Now imagine doing something completely different. Instead of trying to prove who was right, suppose you could temporarily step outside your usual way of looking at the situation and experience it from somewhere else. You might look at it from the perspective of the other person, but you could go much further than that. You might look at it from the perspective of your dog lying under the table while you argued, the kitchen table itself, your anger, the closed door you slammed afterward, or even some completely imaginary character that somehow reminds you of the situation.
That probably sounds strange. Why would anyone care what a kitchen table thinks? Tables don’t have brains. Your anger isn’t a person. A dragon from a dream doesn’t actually sit down and give interviews.
Integral Deep Listening, or IDL, doesn’t require you to believe that any of these things can really talk. Instead, it asks a more interesting question: What happens if you pretend for a while that they can?
An Experiment in Perspective
IDL interviewing is a way of conducting that experiment. Instead of simply thinking about a problem from your normal point of view, you temporarily imagine becoming something else and answer questions as if you were it. The purpose is not to discover whether the thing you become secretly exists somewhere inside you. The purpose is to find out whether changing perspectives allows you to notice something that you could not notice before.
You already know how to do something like this. When you read a good novel, watch a movie, or play a game, you can imagine what the world looks like to someone who is not you. You can understand why a character is frightened even though you are sitting safely on your couch. You can become angry when someone in a story is treated unfairly. You can sometimes understand two characters who are fighting even though each thinks the other is wrong. Your mind is remarkably good at temporarily experiencing the world from different points of view.
IDL uses that ability deliberately.
The experiment begins with something that actually matters to you. Perhaps you are worried about a test. Maybe someone is bullying you. Perhaps your parents are fighting, you are angry with a friend, you hate going to school, or you don’t know whether you should continue doing an activity that you used to enjoy. The issue doesn’t have to be terrible or dramatic. It only has to be something you genuinely care about.
Before beginning an IDL interview, you might choose three such issues. This matters because the interview is supposed to connect with your actual life rather than become an interesting game that has nothing to do with what happens after the interview is over.
Beginning with Not Knowing
There is one unusual rule at the beginning of an IDL interview: for a while, you don’t have to know what anything means.
That can be surprisingly difficult.
Suppose you dreamed about a huge black dog chasing you. You might immediately decide that the dog represents fear. Someone else might tell you that it represents anger. A dream book might say that dogs represent loyalty. Your parent might have another explanation, and a psychologist might have yet another.
IDL begins differently. It says, in effect, “Maybe. But we don’t know yet.”
For a few minutes, you put your explanations on a shelf. They don’t have to be thrown away. You can come back to them later. You are simply creating enough room to discover whether something unexpected happens when you stop telling the experience what it means.
IDL calls this epoché, but the word is less important than the skill. It means temporarily setting aside what you think you know so that what you already believe does not decide the answer before you have conducted the experiment.
This can be useful with waking problems as well as dreams. If you are furious with a teacher, for example, you already have a story about what is happening. Perhaps your story is completely accurate. IDL does not ask you to decide that it is wrong. It asks whether you are willing to temporarily put the story aside long enough to see whether another perspective adds information to it.
Becoming Something You Are Not
Suppose we use the dream about the black dog. Instead of asking, “What does the dog symbolize?” an IDL interviewer might ask you to imagine that you are the dog.
At first you might say, “That’s stupid. I’m obviously not a dog.” Correct. You aren’t.
But for the experiment, you imagine what it would be like if you were.
You might notice that as the dog you feel enormous, fast, and powerful. The interviewer could ask what you like about being the dog and what you dislike about it. You might be asked what you are doing in the dream and why you are doing it. What do you think about the person you are chasing? What do you want? What are you afraid of? What would you change about yourself if you could change anything?
Perhaps you discover that the dog isn’t trying to attack you at all. Maybe, from the dog’s perspective, it is trying desperately to catch you because you keep running away from something important. Or perhaps the dog really does want to bite you.
That is allowed too.
IDL isn’t designed to produce nice answers.
The important thing is that for a few minutes you have moved from “me looking at the dog” to “the dog looking at me.” That change can generate information that was unavailable from your original position.
You Don’t Have to Believe What Happens
This is one of the most important parts of IDL.
Suppose the dog says, “You need to stand up to your friend instead of pretending everything is okay.” That might sound wise. It might even feel completely true, but IDL does not say, “The dream has spoken. You must obey.”
Dream characters can give terrible advice. Imagined perspectives can be confused. Something that sounds brilliant during an interview can turn out to be useless the next morning.
IDL treats these perspectives neither as meaningless fantasies nor as secret authorities. It leaves the question open.
Perhaps the dog is part of your mind. Perhaps it is a product of imagination. Perhaps it represents some psychological process. Perhaps thinking about what it “really is” isn’t very useful at all.
What matters more is whether the perspective produces information that can be tested.
This protects you from an important mistake. When adults tell children to listen to themselves, they sometimes make it sound as though everything that comes from inside is wise. It isn’t. Your mind can produce wonderful ideas and terrible ones. So can your parents. So can teachers. So can friends. So can books, religions, scientists, therapists, social media, artificial intelligence, and IDL interview characters.
The source of an idea does not automatically make the idea true.
What If There Is No Dream?
You don’t need a dream to do an IDL interview. You can begin with an ordinary problem.
Suppose you are terrified about giving a presentation at school. The interviewer might ask you where you feel that fear in your body. Perhaps you say that it feels like a hard knot in your stomach. You might be asked what the knot would look like if you could see it. Perhaps you imagine a tight red ball.
Then comes the strange part.
“What would happen if you became the red ball?”
After laughing at the question, you give it a try.
As the ball, you might say, “My job is to keep everything tight so nothing embarrassing happens.”
The interviewer could ask what you think about the twelve-year-old whose stomach you live in. Perhaps you answer, “He thinks I’m the problem, but I’m trying to protect him.”
Now something has changed. A few minutes ago, the fear was simply an unpleasant feeling you wanted to get rid of. From this other perspective, you have generated a possibility: perhaps the fear is attempting to perform a useful job but is doing it in a way that causes problems. That possibility might be wrong.
Again, the point is not to believe it. The point is that you now have something new to investigate.
Listening in More Than One Direction
Most of us become very good at listening in one direction: from ourselves toward everything else. We look at our parents, friends, teachers, bodies, emotions, dreams, problems, and the world and decide what they mean to us. IDL adds another direction.
What happens when you imagine the problem looking back at you?
This can be especially interesting as you grow older because you are beginning to discover that your parents’ picture of you isn’t exactly the same as your picture of yourself. Your teachers have another picture. Your friends have another. You may act like a different person at school than you do at home, and perhaps like another person entirely when you are alone.
Which one is the real you?
IDL does not require you to choose.
It begins with the possibility that you are capable of experiencing life from many perspectives without any single one having to become the ruler of all the others.
That does not mean that every perspective is equally useful or equally accurate. It means that you can listen before deciding.
Four Things to Listen For
IDL pays particular attention to four abilities that can help when different perspectives disagree. They are called autonomy, reciprocity, confirmation, and reliability, or ARCR.
Autonomy means that you are allowed to be different. Becoming the black dog for ten minutes doesn’t mean you stop being yourself. Listening to your parents doesn’t require becoming the person they want you to be. Understanding a friend’s position doesn’t require agreeing with it. Healthy relationships require enough room for different centers to remain different.
Reciprocity means that those different centers affect one another. Your freedom matters, but so does the effect of your choices on other people. Their needs matter, but that doesn’t give them unlimited authority over you. Reciprocity asks whether a relationship works in both directions rather than only for whoever has the most power.
Confirmation means checking whether you have actually understood. During an IDL interview, the interviewer does not simply announce what your dream or image means. They ask questions and listen to your answers. In ordinary life, confirmation might mean saying to a friend, “So you thought I was ignoring you when I walked past you yesterday. Is that what you’re saying?” Understanding someone’s position accurately is different from agreeing with it.
Reliability means finding out what continues to work over time. A wonderful idea that disappears the moment an interview ends has accomplished very little. If a perspective recommends something useful, IDL is interested in whether you can actually try it and what happens when you do.
Together, these abilities help turn an interesting conversation into an experiment.
Advice Has to Meet Reality
Imagine that the black dog recommends that the next time your friend makes fun of you, instead of laughing along while feeling terrible inside, you calmly say, “I don’t like that. Please stop.”
That is specific enough to test.
Perhaps you try it and your friend stops. Perhaps your friend becomes angry. Perhaps you discover that saying it calmly is much harder than you expected. Perhaps you realize that the real problem isn’t your friend at all but your fear that the group will reject you if you object.
Whatever happens, you have learned something.
IDL therefore does not end when the interview ends. In some ways, that is when the important part begins. A recommendation can be turned into a small experiment. You decide what you will try, when you will try it, how you will know whether you actually did it, and how you will evaluate what happened afterward.
If it works, you have evidence that the recommendation may be useful.
If it doesn’t work, you have learned something too.
Failure does not mean that you performed IDL incorrectly. It may mean that the recommendation was wrong, that the experiment needs changing, or that something important was overlooked.
The purpose is learning, not proving that the interview was wise.
You Can Interview Your Heroes—and Your Monsters
One of the interesting things about IDL is that the perspective does not have to be pleasant.
Suppose you dream about a monster. Normally you would want to escape from it, destroy it, or wake up. In an IDL interview you might try becoming it.
What is it like to be enormous and frightening? Why are you chasing the child in the dream? What do you want? What do you think about humans? What would you change about yourself? What would you change about the dreamer? The answers may surprise you.
You can also interview something you admire. You could become an eagle, a superhero, a tree, your favorite fictional character, the ocean, or a mountain. But IDL will not assume that beautiful characters are wise and ugly characters are foolish. Sometimes the monster may have more useful information than the hero.
That is part of the experiment too. Appearances do not decide usefulness.
What Happens to “Me”?
There is another interesting discovery you may make after doing several interviews.
Normally, “me” feels extremely solid. You know what you like, what frightens you, what annoys you, and what you believe about yourself.
Then you become the wolf, the red ball, the tree, the monster, or another character from a dream, and for a few minutes you may experience completely different priorities. Something that frightens you might not frighten that perspective at all. Something enormously important to you may seem unimportant from there. A problem that looked impossible from your normal position may look quite different from another one. When the interview ends, you come back to being yourself.
IDL is not trying to get rid of that self.
Instead, you may begin discovering that being yourself does not require being trapped inside one way of seeing. You can have a center without believing that your center is the entire world.
That ability becomes increasingly important as you grow up. You are going to hear many people telling you who you are, what you should believe, what success means, what you should want, whom you should admire, what you should fear, and what kind of person you ought to become. Some of what they tell you will be useful. Some will not. IDL does not provide a list telling you which is which.
It teaches you a way to investigate.
- You can listen without automatically obeying.
- You can disagree without automatically rejecting.
- You can temporarily become another perspective without losing your own.
- You can generate possibilities without assuming that every possibility deserves to become reality.
- You can test recommendations and allow experience to correct them.
- And you can learn that changing your mind is not necessarily evidence that you were foolish before.
Sometimes changing your mind means that you learned.
An Interview Is Only the Beginning
An IDL interview may be interesting, funny, uncomfortable, surprising, boring, or occasionally extraordinary. None of those reactions tells you whether it was useful.
The more important question is what happens afterward.
Did you notice something you had not noticed before? Did you understand someone differently? Did you discover an assumption you had been treating as a fact? Did you receive a recommendation that you could actually test? Did trying it change anything? Did it fail? If it failed, what did the failure teach you?
Those questions turn IDL from an exercise in imagination into a method of learning.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand IDL is to think of your normal point of view as one place from which you can look at the world. It is an extremely important place. You need it. Growing up includes strengthening it so that you can become increasingly capable of thinking and choosing for yourself, but it does not have to be the only place from which you can look.
IDL interviewing gives you a simple way to visit other perspectives and then come home again.
You bring back whatever you discover. You examine it. You decide what deserves testing. You try some things in your actual life. You pay attention to what happens. You keep what proves useful and remain willing to change it when it stops being useful.
You don’t even have to believe that IDL works.
Try an interview.
See what happens.
Then decide.
Test Your Understanding
What If You Could Look at Your Problem from Somewhere Else?
Choose the best answer for each question.
1. What is the main purpose of changing perspectives during an IDL interview?
A. To discover the hidden symbolic meaning of everything
B. To determine which perspective is the real one
C. To notice possibilities or information you might miss from your usual point of view
D. To prove that imaginary characters really exist
2. What does epoché mean in an IDL interview?
A. Temporarily setting aside what you think you already know
B. Trying to interpret a dream as quickly as possible
C. Accepting whatever an interviewed character says
D. Forgetting your own point of view permanently
3. Suppose an interviewed dream character gives you advice that sounds extremely wise. What should you do according to IDL?
A. Follow it because dream characters know more than you do
B. Ignore it because imaginary characters cannot provide useful information
C. Ask an adult whether the character is correct
D. Treat it as a possibility that can be examined and tested
4. What does autonomy mean in ARCR?
A. Always doing whatever you want
B. Allowing different perspectives or people enough room to remain different
C. Agreeing with other perspectives so that conflict disappears
D. Deciding which perspective should control the others
5. What does reciprocity emphasize?
A. Relationships and choices affect more than one participant
B. Everyone should have the same opinion
C. The strongest person should make the final decision
D. You should put other people’s needs ahead of your own
6. Your friend says, “You ignored me yesterday,” and you respond, “You thought I was ignoring you when I walked past. Is that what you mean?” Which ARCR ability are you practicing?
A. Reliability
B. Autonomy
C. Confirmation
D. Reciprocity
7. Which example best demonstrates reliability?
A. Having an exciting insight during an interview
B. Discovering what continues to work when you try it over time
C. Believing a recommendation because it feels true
D. Choosing the perspective that gives the nicest advice
8. Why does IDL turn recommendations into real-life experiments?
A. To prove that IDL characters are always correct
B. To make interviews more entertaining
C. To eliminate the possibility of failure
D. To discover through experience whether a recommendation is actually useful
9. What does IDL suggest if a recommendation fails when you try it?
A. The failure may provide useful information about what needs to change or what was overlooked
B. You should repeat exactly the same experiment until it succeeds
C. You performed the interview incorrectly
D. You should stop interviewing that perspective
10. Which statement best summarizes the overall approach that is described?
A. Your normal point of view is unreliable and should be replaced
B. Every perspective contains an important truth that should be followed
C. You can temporarily explore other perspectives, return to your own, and test what you discover
D. Dreams and imagination provide better answers than ordinary thinking
Answer Key
1. C
2. A
3. D
4. B
5. A
6. C
7. B
8. D
9. A
10. C