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by
David Brooks
Read between
February 22 - April 22, 2024
True friendship offers deep satisfactions, but it also imposes vulnerabilities and obligations, and to pretend it doesn’t is to devalue friendship.”
When, in adulthood, you get to know someone really well, you often develop a sense for how they were raised.
The famous Grant Study followed 268 Harvard men from their days as college students in the 1940s until their deaths many decades later, in an attempt to discover the patterns of human development and achievement.
If you hope to know someone well, you have to know something about the struggles and blessings of their childhoods and the defensive architecture they carry through life.
AVOIDANCE.
Avoidance is usually about fear. Emotions and relationships have hurt me, so I will minimize emotions and relationships.
DEPRIVATION.
OVERREACTIVITY.
Passive aggression
Introspection isn’t the best way to repair your models; communication is. People
They need people who will practice empathy. That’s where you and I come in.
Empathy is involved in every stage of the process of getting to know a person.
Empathy consists of at least three related skills.
mirroring.
A person who is good at mirroring is quick to experience the emotions of the person in front of them, is quick to reenact in his own body the emotions the other person is holding in hers.
mentalizing.
caring.
my friend Kate Bowler,
People vary widely in their ability to project empathy.
seven categories on it,
borderline personality disorder.
Here are some practices that can help you develop your empathy skills:
CONTACT THEORY.
DRAW IT WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED.
LITERATURE.
EMOTION SPOTTING.
SUFFERING.
Throughout this chapter I’ve been trying to emphasize how physical emotions are, that becoming more empathetic is not some intellectual enterprise; it is training your body to respond in open and interactive ways.
The people who practice effective empathy have suffered in ways that give them understanding and credibility.
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.”
C. S. Lewis once observed that grief is not a state but a process. It’s a river that runs through a long valley, and at every turn a new landscape is revealed, and yet somehow it repeats and repeats.
permanently damaged by trauma
assimilate
People wh...
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The journey of reconsideration and re-formation often involves taking what Stephen Cope, learning from Carl Jung, calls “the night sea journey,” heading off into the parts of yourself that are “split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out.”
If a subtext of this book is that experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you, then one of the subsequent lessons is that to know someone who has grieved, you have to know how they have processed their loss—did they emerge wiser, kinder, and stronger, or broken, stuck, and scared?
Buechner
realization: “The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.”
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 Buechner pattern is a familiar one.
friends can ask each other the kinds of questions that help people see more deeply into their own childhoods.
“This Is Your Life.”
“Filling in the Calendar.”
story sampling.
The fifth exercise is my favorite.
just have serious conversations with friends.
The essential moral act in this model of character formation is self-mastery.
character. This book has been built around the Illuminator ideal.
morality is mostly about the small, daily acts of building connection—the gaze that says “I respect you,” the question that says “I’m curious about you,” the conversation that says, “We’re in this together.”
