Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen > Status Update

“We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning. For what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie.” -Carl Jung
“All growth is costly, it involves leaving behind an old way of being in the world.” -Keegan
It’s a process of disembedding from one mindset, and reembedding in another.

Hard conversations are hard because people in different life circumstances construct very different realities. It’s not only that they have different opinions about the same world, they literally see different worlds. We project our individual mental experiences into the world, & thereby mistake our mental experience to BE the physical world, oblivious to the shaping of our perception by our personal histories etc.

Every conversation takes place on 2 levels: the official conversation (what gets said w/words), & the actual conversation, which occurs in the ebb & flow of underlying emotions & messages transmitted as we talk. With every comment, the subtext has us feel either a little more safe or a little more threatened. It is the volley of these underlying emotions that will determine the success or failure of the conversation.

Healthy societies create the politics of distribution (how should the resources of society become allocated?)
Unhappy societies create the politics of recognition: political movements fueled largely by resentment. Those practicing the politics of recognition are not trying to form domestic policies or solve a social ill, but to affirm their identity, gain status & visibility, to find a way to admire the self.

Loneliness & politics:
Lonely people are 7 times more likely to be active in politics than non-lonely ppl. For those who feel disrespected & unseen, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. Politics seems to offer a comprehensible moral landscape (who’s ‘In’ & ‘Out’). Politics seems to offer a sense of belonging, as well as an arena of moral action. Many aspects of everyday life are now politicized.

Tips to be a good conversationalist:
Give your full attention. Use the SLANT method: sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod head, track the speaker.
Be a responsive (“loud”) listener (min. qualifiers), but don’t fear silence.
Favor familiarity- ask them about what they already know/experience
Ask follow-up details about their story, including thoughts&feelings. Then ask them how they experience the event NOW.

Constructionism: we as humans don’t take in objective reality, we actively construct our own perception of reality.
“People don’t see the world with their eyes they see it with their entire life”
As we try and know others, we need to ask ourselves how they are perceiving this moment, how they are constructing their reality.

Accompanying is the first gentle step to getting to know a person, without over-intensity of diving in too deep. We can’t be in a rushed “efficiency” mindset that prioritizes our own mindset & will.
Elements of Accompaniment include patience & playfulness & presence. We can’t force it- “let others voluntarily evolve”.
The ultimate touchstone of friendship is WITNESS- the privilege of seeing & being seen.

Philosopher Iris Murdock on morality: Not about abstract universal principles.
Morality is about how we pay attention to others; moral behavior happens continuously throughout the day. The essential immoral act is the inability to see other people correctly. When we don’t see people accurately, we treat them wrongly. Evil happens when people are unseen- when the personhood in other human beings is unrecognized.

“Every epistemology becomes an ethic. The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living. The relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.”
(Parker Palmer)
The way we attend to others determines the type of person we become. If we see people generously then we will become generous. If we see people coldly then we become cold.