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

by David Brooks

By high school I had taken up long-term residency inside my own head. I felt most alive when I was engaged in the solitary business of writing.

Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.

Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills.

The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

And all these different skills rest on one foundational skill: the ability to understand what another person is going through. There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” To do that is to say: You don’t matter. You don’t exist.

Seeing someone well is a powerfully creative act. No one can fully appreciate their own beauty and strengths unless those things are mirrored back to them in the mind of another. There is something in being seen that brings forth growth. If you beam the light of your attention on me, I blossom. If you see great potential in me, I will probably come to see great potential in myself.

“The roots of resilience,” the psychologist Diana Fosha writes, “are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.” In how you see me, I will learn to see myself.

Many of our big national problems arise from the fraying of our social fabric. If we want to begin repairing the big national ruptures, we have to learn to do the small things well.

“To be able to understand people and be present for them in their experience—that’s the most important thing in the world.”

“In refusing to recover from my father’s death she had discovered that her life was endowed with a seriousness her years in the kitchen had denied her….Mourning Papa became her profession, her identity, her persona.”

You can be loved by a person yet not be known by them.

“Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.” The quality of your life depends quite a bit on the quality of attention you project out onto the world.

“Every epistemology becomes an ethic,” the educator Parker J. Palmer once observed. “The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.” Palmer is saying that the way we attend to others determines the kind of person we become.

Human beings, she finds, are self-centered beings, anxiety-ridden and resentful. We are constantly representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, in ways that gratify our egos and serve our ends. We stereotype and condescend, ignore and dehumanize. And because we don’t see people accurately, we treat them wrongly. Evil happens when people are unseeing, when they don’t recognize the personhood in other human beings.

Most of the time, morality is about the skill of being considerate toward others in the complex situations of life.

An education in human variety prepares you to welcome new people into your life.

“While families are imperfect institutions, they are also our greatest source of meaning, connection, and joy,”

Isn’t it time you forgave yourself for that? When you and your parents are close again, what will you want them to understand about this time in your life?

Nothing can be heard in the mind until the situation feels safe and familiar to the body.

Before a person is going to be willing to share personal stuff, they have to know that you respect their personal stuff. They have to know that you see their reserve as a form of dignity, their withholding as a sign that they respect themselves.

trust is built when individual differences are appreciated, when mistakes are tolerated,

“Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.”

“What I will remember forever is that no one said a word. I am still amazed at the profoundness that can echo in silence. Each person, including newer boyfriends who I knew less well, gave me a reaffirming hug in turn and headed back to their seats. No one lingered or awkwardly tried to validate my grief. They were there for me, just for a moment, and it was exactly what I needed.”

the ultimate touchstone of friendship “is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

“Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world.

People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.

In other words, seeing is not a passive process of receiving data; it’s an active process of prediction and correction.

“The human need to self-present is powerful,” notes the psychologist Ethan Kross.

Sadness, lack of recognition, and loneliness turn into bitterness. When people believe that their identity is unrecognized, it feels like injustice—because it is.

As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect.

You can’t get to know another person while pretending not to see ideology, class, race, faith, identity, or any of the other fraught social categories.

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” the nameless narrator declares. “It is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”

As soon as somebody starts talking about times when they felt excluded, betrayed, or wronged, stop and listen. When somebody is talking to you about pain in their life, even in those cases when you may think their pain is performative or exaggerated, it’s best not to try to yank the conversations back to your frame.

Remember that the person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do.

that as we enter a scene, we’re looking for opportunities for action. How do I fit into this situation? What can I do here? What possibilities does this situation afford? In Gibson’s language, we see “affordances.” A hunter with a gun will see a much bigger field than a hunter with a spear because he has a much wider range of action. A police officer who is holding a gun is more likely to “see” other people holding guns than he would if he were holding a shoe, which is partly why 25 percent of police shootings involve unarmed suspects. Proffitt and Baer hammer home the point: “We perceive the world, not as it is but as it is for us.”

I did not realize that it was energy and desire he lacked, not ideas about things to do. It was only later that I read that when you give a depressed person advice on how they can get better, there’s a good chance all you are doing is telling the person that you just don’t get it.

I learned, very gradually, that a friend’s job in these circumstances is not to cheer the person up. It’s to acknowledge the reality of the situation; it’s to hear, respect, and love them; it’s to show them you haven’t given up on them, you haven’t walked away.

I will always hold close the moments when my friends refused to leave my side even as I pushed them away. Even those that I eventually lost to the world, they were there calling me out from the edges of the abyss I had fallen in. They saved me. And taught me how to be me but more importantly how to be a friend.

The cloud would not lift. I am told that one of the brutalities of the illness is the impossibility of articulating exactly what the pain consists of. Pete would give me the general truth: “Depression sucks.” But he tried not to burden me with the full horrors of what he was going through.

He’d been a presence for practically my whole life, and suddenly the steady friendship I took for granted was gone. It’s as if I went back to Montana and suddenly the mountains had disappeared.

“They loved me the way they loved each other,” Moore wrote, “the only way they knew how: inconsistently and conditionally. From them, I learned that love was something you had to scramble to keep. It could be revoked at any minute for reasons that you couldn’t understand, that you couldn’t control. The kind of love I grew up with was scary to need, and painful to feel. If I didn’t have that uneasy ache, that prickly anxiety around someone, how would I know it was love?”

quality of your relationships determines the quality of your life. But relationships in childhood had a special power.

The world is full of people who are nice; there are many fewer who are effectively kind.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create….By some strange unknown inward urgency, he is not really alive unless he is creating.

To recover from painful traumas, people need to live through experiences that contradict what happened to them earlier in their lives.

“Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.”

It’s by sharing our griefs with others, and thinking together about what they mean, that we learn to overcome fear and know each other at the deepest level.

The goal is to try to create mental flexibility, the ability to have multiple perspectives on a single event. To find other ways to see what happened. To put the tragedy in the context of a larger 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.