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

When you meet someone with cancer, it feels empathetic to tell the person how sorry you are, but my friend Kate Bowler, who actually has cancer, says that the people who show empathy best are those “who hug you and give you impressive compliments that don’t feel like a eulogy. People who give you non-cancer-thematic gifts. People who just want to d

Over the next months, severe depression was revealed to me as an unimagined abyss. I learned that those of us lucky enough never to have experienced serious depression cannot understand what it is like just by extrapolating from our own periods of sadness. As the philosophers Cecily Whiteley and Jonathan Birch have written, it is not just sorrow, i

“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,

Rich people walk into Neiman Marcus and see a different store than poor people do, because rich people actually have the capacity to buy things in that store.

When, in adulthood, you get to know someone really well, you often develop a sense for how they were raised. You see in some people’s current insecurities how as children they must have been diminished and criticized. You see, in their terror over being abandoned, how they must have felt left behind when young. On the other hand, when you meet peop

Your mind hides most of your thinking so you can get on with life. Furthermore, you’re too close to yourself. You can’t see the models you use to perceive the world because you’re seeing with them.

AVOIDANCE. Avoidance is usually about fear. Emotions and relationships have hurt me, so I will minimize emotions and relationships. People who are avoidant feel most comfortable when the conversation stays superficial. They often overintellectualize life. They retreat to work. They try to be self-sufficient and pretend they don’t have needs. Often,

If a baby goes unseen by their caretakers for long periods of time it can leave lasting emotional and spiritual damage. “The development of the soul in the child,” the philosopher Martin Buber wrote, “is inextricably bound up with that of the longing for the Thou, with the satisfaction and disappointment of this longing.”

Storr says you can get a sense for somebody’s models, especially the defensive ones, by asking them to complete sentences like “The most important thing in life is…” or “I’m only safe when…”