What a near-death experience taught me about listening

I tell the whole story elsewhere, so I will be brief here. In 2011, at twenty, I was in a car accident that killed my father. For a few minutes, it killed me too. I experienced something I will not try to explain — a closing in, a door, a choice — and then I was back, gasping, alive.

What I want to write about is what came after. Because the thing people find most remarkable about my work is the thing I find hardest to talk about, and I want to try.

What changed

In the months after the accident, I noticed that I was hearing people differently.

Not voices. Nothing mystical. More like this: someone would be telling me about their exam stress, and I would find myself aware — clearly, physically — that the real weight was something else. A father who did not call. A relationship that was quietly ending. A loneliness they had not admitted to anyone.

I did not know what to do with this. Often I said nothing. Sometimes I said something small — “how are things at home?” — and watched the person’s face change, as though I had opened a door they thought was locked.

I have spent the years since trying to understand what this is. I have a Master’s in Machine Learning; I am not inclined to accept things without examining them. Here is where I have landed.

Most listening is waiting

Watch two people in conversation. What you will mostly see is one person talking while the other prepares to talk. The “listener” is scanning for their cue — the pause, the keyword, the moment they can connect it to their own story or offer their advice.

This is not listening. It is queuing.

Real listening — the kind that makes people feel heard — requires putting down your own next sentence entirely. You are not preparing a response. You are receiving. The other person’s words are landing in you, and you are noticing what they do when they land.

I think what changed for me after the accident is simply that I lost the ability to queue. Something about coming that close to the end of everything made my own next sentence feel very unimportant. I could just… receive. And when you receive fully, you hear the tune under the words.

The tune under the words

Every conversation has a surface — the content, the topic, the words — and a tune underneath. The tune is the emotion the person is actually carrying. It shows up in pace, in pauses, in which details they linger on and which they hurry past, in what they say twice.

Most of us hear the surface and respond to it. Someone says “work is stressful”, we discuss work. But the tune might be I am afraid I am failing, or nobody at home asks how I am, or I have been pretending to be fine for so long I am not sure what fine is.

When you respond to the tune instead of the surface, something happens. The person feels met. Not analysed, not fixed — met. And people who feel met will tell you things they have never said out loud. Not because you pressed. Because, for the first time in a long while, it felt safe.

This is what clients mean when they say they told me things they never planned to. I did not extract them. I just listened to the tune, and they heard themselves.

Why the insight lands later

The other thing people tell me is that what I say in a session often makes sense only days afterwards. “I did not get it on Tuesday. On Friday it hit me.”

I used to find this frustrating. Now I understand it.

When you respond to the tune, you are saying something the person’s surface has not yet caught up to. Their conscious mind hears it and files it under “interesting, not sure”. But their deeper self recognises it immediately — and works on it quietly, until the surface is ready.

This is why I never push for a reaction in the room. The reaction is not the point. The recognition is, and recognition has its own schedule.

Why I do this work

I could have done many things with an unusual ear and an engineering degree. I chose this because of the second thing that happened to me: years after the accident, with all my supposed perceptiveness, I found myself inside a narcissistic relationship and could not see it.

That taught me something no amount of listening to others could have. The pattern is invisible from inside. And the way out is not more intelligence or more vigilance. It is being heard — properly, by someone who can hear the tune under your “I’m fine”.

That is what I try to be for people. Not a therapist; I am careful to say so. Not a guru; I have no system. Just someone who came back from the edge without the ability to wait for his turn to speak, and decided to be useful with it.

If you want to be listened to like that, I am here.