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

When Jimmy sees a person—any person—he is seeing a creature who was made in the image of God. As he looks into each face, he is looking, at least a bit, into the face of God.

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.

“There were many times when we felt blessed. It was as though certain death had granted us an extra life.”

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

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.”

If you adopt this detached, dispassionate, and objective stance, it’s hard to see the most important parts of that person, her unique subjectivity—her

Therefore, 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.”

Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. They know about life.

You’re not as good as you think you are.