Thought provoking

ANXIETY. The number two reason people don’t see others is that they have so much noise in their own heads, they can’t hear what’s going on in other heads. How am I coming across? I don’t think this person really likes me. What am I going to say next to appear clever? Fear is the enemy of open communication.

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.”

Therapists are essentially story editors. People come to therapy because their stories are not working, often because they get causation wrong.

Politics seems to offer an arena of moral action. To be moral in this world, you don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow. You just have to be liberal or conservative, you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible.

A good conversation is not a group of people making a series of statements at each other. (In fact, that’s a bad conversation.) A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers her own perspective based on her own memories, and floats it back

the saying goes, they are not going to solve their problem at the same level of consciousness at which they created it.

I’m no longer content to ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, I ask, “How did you come to believe X?”