How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

by David Brooks

The psychologist Laura Carstensen finds that as people get older, emotion often takes the place of rational thinking. People feel free to cry more, are more adept at pulling differentiated emotions into consciousness. The awareness of death tends to make life’s trivialities seem…trivial.

“Cancer cures psychoneuroses,” one of Irvin Yalom’s therapy patients told him. “What a pity I had to wait till now, till my body was riddled with cancer, to learn how to live.”

The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.”

So why don’t people talk more? Epley continued his research and came up with an answer to the mystery: We don’t start conversations because we’re bad at predicting how much we’ll enjoy them. We underestimate how much others want to talk; we underestimate how much we will learn; we underestimate how quickly other people will want to go deep and get personal.

The psychologist Jerome Bruner distinguished between two different modes of thinking, which he called the paradigmatic mode and the narrative mode.

Paradigmatic thinking is great for understanding data, making the case for a proposition, and analyzing trends across populations. It is not great for seeing an individual person.

Stories capture how a thousand little influences come together to shape a life, how people struggle and strive, how their lives are knocked about by lucky and unlucky breaks.

So when I’m in a conversation with someone now, I’m trying to push against that and get us into narrative mode. I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do. Similarly, I don’t ask people to tell me about their values; I say, “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.” That prompts a story.

The ability to craft an accurate and coherent life story is yet another vital skill we don’t teach people in school. But coming up with a personal story is centrally important to leading a meaningful life. You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell your story. You can’t have a stable identity unless you take the inchoate events of your life and give your life meaning by turning the events into a coherent story. You can know what to do next only if you know what story you are a part of. And you can endure present pains only if you can see them as part of a story that will yield future benefits. “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story,” as the Danish writer Isak Dinesen said.

The Polish researcher Małgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl asked people to describe the characters they heard in their head. She found that people commonly named four types of inner voices: the Faithful Friend (who tells you about your personal strengths), the Ambivalent Parent (who offers caring criticism), the Proud Rival (who badgers you to be more successful), and the Helpless Child (who has a lot of self-pity).

In Composing a Life, the cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson argued that we often shoehorn our lives into neat, linear stories of decision and then commitment: I decided to become a doctor and pursued my dream. She argues that many lives are not like that. They are nonlinear. They have breaks, discontinuities, and false starts. Young people, she wrote, need to hear that the first job they take at twenty-two is not necessarily going to lead in a linear way to what they are going to be doing at forty. I’m always intrigued by people who see their lives as a surfing story: I caught a wave and rode it, then I caught another wave. Then another. That’s a relaxed acceptance of life few of us can muster.

I find that most of us construct more accurate and compelling stories as we age. We learn to spot our strengths and weaknesses, the recurring patterns of our behavior, the core desire line that will always propel our life forward. We go back and reinterpret the past, becoming more forgiving and more appreciative. “Calm is a function of retrospective clarification,” the Swarthmore literature professor Philip Weinstein writes, “a selective ordering after the fact.”

Toni Morrison put it this way: “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and skin remember as well as how it appeared.”

But Hurston, through her example, shows us what the true task of opening your eyes to others involves: How do I see a person as part of their group? And how, at the same time, do I see them as a never-to-be-repeated unique individual, bringing their own unique mind and viewpoint?

A woman told me about the time when she was thirteen and she went to her first party and had her first alcohol. She was dropped off at home so drunk that all she could do was lie on the front porch, barely able to move. Her father—a big, strict disciplinarian—came out and she thought he was going to scream at her the very thoughts she was thinking about herself: “I’m bad. I’m bad.” Instead, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her inside and placed her on the living room couch and said, “There’ll be no punishment here. You’ve had an experience.” He knew what she was thinking; she felt seen.

Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they help you process your own thoughts and emotions. They enter with you into your process of meaning-making and then help you expand it, push it along.

“Maybe we should just go back,” Kidder said to Deo from the backseat of the car as they approached the hospital. Deo replied, “You may not see the ocean but right now we are in the middle of the ocean and we have to keep swimming.”

“Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody,” the theologian Henri Nouwen wrote. “Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody.”

Critiquing with care works best when someone names something we ourselves almost but did not quite know. Critiquing with care works best when that naming happens within a context of unconditional regard, that just and loving attention that conveys unshakable respect for another person’s struggles.