Bob Hurst, The Listeners
Headquarters Counseling Center, in Lawrence, Kansas, exists to provide help for those who have nowhere else to turn. It has no Freudian couch, no billing department, no aged white men dispensing sage guidance. It’s staffed entirely by volunteers, mostly undergraduates, who make themselves available at difficult and inconvenient hours, the hours when desperate people are most likely to descend into self-destruction. And it provides something people walking in darkness often need: someone to simply listen.
Documentary filmmaker Bob Hurst took his camera into a training course for counseling volunteers, to discover what makes a good suicide prevention specialist. If I admire anything about his technique, it’s probably his willingness to avoid coming to pat conclusions. These young volunteers don’t have neatly prepared answers for life’s contentious questions; the course simply provides them skills necessary to listen impartially. Which, despite what you might expect, proves to be a highly contentious skill.
First, the counselors must practice the task of keeping silent during somebody else’s trials. Counselors in movies and novels often dispense gnomic wisdom exactly when characters, enduring the Dark Night of the Soul, need it most. Not these counselors. We watch as experienced trainers, some with the highest degrees available in their fields, teach their wide-eyed young students how to say as little as possible, add nothing to the conversation, letting the callers just speak.
(After writing this essay, a Headquarters volunteer contacted me, asking for clarification. When I say they “add nothing to the conversation,” this is inaccurate. Rather, they add as little as possible, always remaining careful to ensure callers tell their own stories without interference.)
Many of the world’s great religions, including Christianity and Buddhism, teach the importance of refraining from judging others: we don’t understand another person’s plights, and cannot be truly fair. How many of us, though, are able to actually do that? Our unthinking response to difficult or morally fraught situations is usually to sort people into worthy and deprived categories, which often reflect “similarity to me.” These students struggle learning how to reserve and avoid judging.
Officially, Headquarters is part of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (NSPL), a network of local and regional call-in centers where ordinary people many quite poor, phone in when facing the desire to abandon life. This gives Headquarters a potentially nationwide reach. However, the NSPL’s member centers maintain focus on their regions, starting from the assumption that local people understand local needs. This means that Headquarters’ callers mainly live within a short drive of their building.
Much counseling, especially crisis counseling like Headquarters does, starts with the assumption that callers want to live. They wouldn’t call a suicide prevention hotline unless they believed life still had some meaning, however tenuous. Therefore the counseling process mainly involves letting callers tell their own stories, tease out the hidden aspects of their own lives, and rediscover why life retains some substance. The process is often counterintuitive, and often requires the counselors not giving advice.
Popular nonfiction filmmakers like Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock might’ve felt compelled to creatively edit this story, creating central characters and a through-line. Not Bob Hurst. Though he sometimes interviews experienced counselors, who talk almost into the camera, and lets several trainees introduce themselves, there’s no linking narration or other storytelling quality. (He does have to insert a title card at one point.) Hurst prefers to let us witness events unfold, forcing us to listen.
In practice, this means something isn’t constantly “happening.” For instance, we witness trainees grappling with the official Headquarters script, which often defies common sense; the trainees desperately want to insert advice or correct mistaken ideas. Conventional storytelling technique says one of two things should happen: either a senior trainer should concisely explain the trainees’ mistakes, or the trainees should have a lightbulb moment. Neither simple solution occurs. The trainees just struggle until they understand it.
Pointedly, this struggle corresponds with the battles callers go through. (For confidentiality reasons, we don’t get to witness an active client call.) The callers, trainees, and audience want compact aphorisms which resolve moments of slow conflict. Reality doesn’t make such a good narrative, unfortunately. Instead, as the counselors listen to callers, and callers listen to the truths which linger, unacknowledged, inside themselves, we viewers listen to our own struggles, realizing we bear our own answers.
We, like Headquarters’ volunteers and callers, need to listen. We learn how to reserve judgement, exist in the present, and avoid the temptations of concise answers. This documentary doesn’t provide a happy ending or “useful” moral. Instead, running slightly over one hour, it encourages us to participate in a movement from one place to another. That movement isn’t always easy or engaging. But it takes us where we need to go, which is outside ourselves.
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