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

This is what our friends do for us. They not only delight us and call forth our best; friends also hold up a mirror so we can see ourselves in ways that would not otherwise be accessible.

She later explained to me that “behavior is how we speak the unspeakable. John couldn’t speak something unspeakable, so he did it by being rude to others and by having this sense of himself as better than everybody else.”

I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle.

Therapists are essentially story editors. People come to therapy because their stories are not working, often because they get causation wrong. They blame themselves for things that are not their fault, or they blame others for things that are.

Narrative thinking, on the other hand, is necessary for understanding the unique individual in front of you. Stories capture the unique presence of a person’s character and how he or she changes over time.

paradigmatic mode is analytical. It’s making an argument. It’s a mental state that involves amassing data, collecting evidence, and offering hypotheses.

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

As I hope I’ve made clear by now, people are eager, often desperate, to be seen, heard, and understood. And yet we have built a culture, and a set of manners, in which that doesn’t happen. The way you fix that is simple, easy, and fun: Ask people to tell you their stories.

It’s a process of disembedding from one mindset and then re-embedding in another. An infant believes, I am my parents, but then around age two realizes: I am not my parents. I have parents. A teenager may be so embedded in the interpersonal consciousness that she believes, I am my friendships. But later she realizes: No, I am not my friendships. I