What a Snake Taught Me About Curiosity

Viktor Frankl once received a phone call in the middle of the night from a woman who intended to end her life. He spoke with her for a long time and eventually she promised not to go through with it.

When they later met in person, he asked which of his arguments had helped her most.

"None of them," she replied.

What changed her mind was something much simpler. A stranger had answered the phone at that hour, listened without judgment, and genuinely cared. If someone was willing to do that for her, she thought, then perhaps her life had worth after all.

I return to that story often. For me, it captures something that no technique can substitute for: presence.

Before any method or approach, before any therapeutic tool is reached for, there is a relationship. Trust, openness, and the kind of attention that communicates to another person that they matter. Without that foundation, meaningful work becomes elusive. With it, sometimes surprisingly little else is required.

Within that relational foundation, three qualities have become especially important to me: listening, curiosity, and humour.

Listening sounds simple and is anything but. What interests me is not the performance of attentiveness—nodding at the right moments or reflecting back the last phrase—but genuine receptivity. The kind of listening that creates enough space for a person to surprise themselves.

Speaking, much like writing, is often a process of discovery. Meaning does not always exist fully formed before expression; often it emerges through it. A good question, asked without judgment or agenda, can open a door that neither person knew was there.

This is the spirit of the Socratic method—not leading someone to a predetermined conclusion, but accompanying them towards one of their own.

Curiosity deepens this process. It keeps the dialogue alive and moving, willing to follow a thread wherever it leads rather than rushing towards resolution.

In my experience, the most important insights rarely arrive where you expect them. They often emerge sideways: through an apparently minor detail, an offhand remark, or a moment of unexpected emotion. Curiosity keeps us available to those moments rather than rushing past them in search of our own explanations.

Humour is the third element, and perhaps the most underestimated.

Frankl wrote that humour allows a person to detach from themselves and thereby attain the fullest possible self-mastery. This is not incidental to logotherapy; it is woven into it. Paradoxical intention, self-distancing, dereflection—all require some capacity to hold oneself lightly, to step back from one's reactions with something closer to amusement than dread.

A conversation that can laugh, even briefly, has more room in it. Heavy things become a little easier to carry when there is some air around them.

The most vivid personal example I have of these principles at work involves, somewhat unexpectedly, snakes.

I have always loved animals. Every animal, in fact, except one.

For as long as I can remember, snakes produced a visceral fear in me: a racing pulse, chills, and an immediate urge to look away. Intellectually I knew the fear was disproportionate. Emotionally, that knowledge made no difference whatsoever.

A few years ago, I joined a social media group dedicated to snakes encountered in the wild. Members posted photographs, identified species, shared behavioural observations, and offered advice on how to safely observe or move them. What struck me was the tone. These were people who genuinely found snakes beautiful and fascinating—and who were also, quite often, openly amused by the fear they provoked in others. Someone would post a photograph of a perfectly harmless grass snake that had sent a family fleeing, and the comments would fill up with gentle incredulity: here was a creature that spent its days quietly keeping the local rodent population in check, being treated as though it had crawled out of a nightmare. The laughter wasn't cruel.

I began looking at the posts regularly.

Not because I had decided to overcome my fear. At first it was simply curiosity. I wondered whether repeated exposure might change something.

Gradually, it did.

The visceral recoil softened into tolerance. Tolerance became interest. Interest became something surprisingly close to affection.

Eventually I found myself actively hoping to encounter a snake in the wild.

On the second walk I took with that intention, I came across a viper resting calmly in the grass.

To my genuine astonishment, what I felt was curiosity.

I recognised its markings, took a photograph, and posted it in the group. The fear that had accompanied me for most of my life had given way to fascination.

In a sense, this reflects one of the central insights behind paradoxical intention. Rather than avoiding the feared object, you move towards it—first imaginatively and then in practice—until anxiety gradually loosens its grip and something more interesting takes its place.

What began as dread ended as wonder.

I now encounter snakes with much the same attentiveness I bring to any other creature.

More broadly, I think it illustrates what curiosity can do when it is given enough room.

Fear contracts.

Curiosity expands.

And in the space that expansion creates, things that once seemed fixed sometimes begin to change.