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

Being a therapist, she argues, is less about providing solutions and more “a way of paying attention, which is the purest form of love.”

Other easy introductory questions are things like “That’s a lovely name. How did your parents choose it?”

University of Chicago psychologist Nicholas Epley points out that in day-to-day life we have access to the many thoughts that run through our own minds. But we don’t have access to all the thoughts that are running through other people’s minds. We just have access to the tiny portion they speak out loud. This leads to the perception that I am much

“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them,” Weil wrote. The person who is good at accompaniment is decelerating the pace of social life.

A writer could blast out her opinions, but writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think.

RECEPTIVITY. Being receptive means overcoming insecurities and self-preoccupation and opening yourself up to the experience of another. It means you resist the urge to project your own viewpoint; you do not ask, “How would I feel if I were in your shoes?” Instead, you are patiently ready for what the other person is offering. As the theologian Rowa

“We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we often end up by disguising ourselves from ourselves.”

A person with an overreactive defense architecture is thinking, My critics or opponents are not just wrong, they are evil.

I’m trying to emphasize the presence of the past, how the dead live in us. Research by Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn found that people who are descended from those who practiced plow-heavy agriculture tend to live in cultures that have strongly defined gender roles, because it was mostly men who drove the plow. On the other hand,

To really know someone, you have to know how they know you.