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

by David Brooks

Ambivalent Parent

the Proud...

Helpless...

life. In real life I’d prefer to be around my friend Kate Bowler’s voice.

She has a voice that pulls you into friendship and inspires humor; in her voice, laughter is never very far away.

It was my way of reminding you of who the hell I was.”

in the imago of the Fighter:

four levels of identity creation.

“identity achievement.”

“foreclosure.”

“identity diffusion.”

is “moratorium.”

In The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker describes the relatively few plotlines that show up in our culture again and again,

“Overcoming the Monster,”

“Rags to Riches,”

“Quest,”

is: How reliable is this narrator?

I’m looking for narrative flexibility.

Therapists are essentially story editors.

stories; I’m helping them create their stories.

that brings forth growth.

In every life there is a pattern, a story line running through it all. We find that story when somebody gives an opportunity to tell it.

Zora Neale Hurston

There’s a certain spot on this earth that is somehow sacred, the place where you come from, the place you never quite leave.

We live our childhoods at least twice.

Toni Morrison put it this way: “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

It is emotional memory—what the nerves and skin remember as well as how it appeared.”

That failure to heed her mother’s final wishes tortured Hurston for the rest of her life.

Hurston determined that she would bring these old stories of Black culture to the wider world.

ancestors.” Each person’s consciousness is formed by all the choices of her ancestors, going back centuries:

Hurston defied the lazy way people today classify others according to their group.

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?

The challenge in seeing a person, therefore, is to adopt the kind of double vision I mentioned in the chapter on hard conversations.

One of the great fallacies of life is to think culture is everything; another great fallacy is to think culture is nothing.

What is culture?

It’s a shared symbolic landscape that we use to construct our reality.

The United States, she shows, is a classic loose culture.

In his brilliant book Albion’s Seed, the historian David Hackett Fischer shows us the long continuities that mark the different streams of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in the United States.

They carried their cultures with them—a way of speaking, a way of building a home, a way of raising children, playing sports, cooking food, as well as attitudes about time, attitudes about social order, power, and freedom.

The seeds of this behavior were planted over three centuries ago, and many of the people who live them out today are not even aware of where they come from.

Reik. My faith journey has taken me in unexpected directions. I don’t go to synagogue anymore; I go to church. I don’t speak Hebrew, and I no longer keep kosher.

You’re always, to some small degree, a stranger in a strange land, with an affinity for all the other strangers.

So when I see you, I want to see back into the deep sources of your self. That means asking certain key questions: Where’s home? What’s the place you spiritually never leave? How do the dead show up in your life? How do I see you embracing or rejecting your culture? How do I see you creating and contributing to your culture? How do I see you transmitting your culture? How do I see you rebelling against your culture? How do I see you caught between cultures?

He knew what she was thinking; she felt seen.

Wisdom isn’t knowing about physics or geography. Wisdom is knowing about people.

That’s the great gift Illuminators share with those around them.

My view of what a wise person looks like has been transformed over the past couple of years, as I have been researching this book.

I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story.

about. Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they help you process your own thoughts and emotions.

Their essential gift is receptivity, the capacity to receive what you are sending. This is not a passive skill.