TWO: How Not to See a Person

“If you want to understand humanity, you have to focus on the thoughts and emotions of individuals, not just data about groups.

Then you try to reidentify the mutual purpose of the conversation. That’s done by enlarging the purpose so that both people are encompassed by it.

Finally, you can take advantage of the fact that a rupture is sometimes an opportunity to forge a deeper bond.

A person who is good at mirroring is quick to experience the emotions of the person in front of them, is quick to reenact in his own body the emotions the other person is holding in hers. A person who is good at mirroring smiles at smiles, yawns at yawns, and frowns at frowns. He unconsciously attunes his breathing patterns, heart rate, speaking speed,

posture, and gestures and even his vocabulary levels.” (Brooks, “How to Know a Person”,

p.146)

“People who are good at mirroring, by contrast, have high emotional granularity and experience the world in rich, supple ways. They can distinguish between similar emotions, such as anger, frustration, pressure, stress, anxiety, angst, and irritation. These people have educated their emotions by reading literature, listening to music, reflecting on their relationships. They are attuned to their body and have become expert at reading it, and so they have a wide emotional repertoire to draw on as life happens.

If mentalizing is me projecting my experiences onto you, caring involves getting out of my experiences and understanding that what you need may be very different from what I would need in that situation. This is hard. The world is full of people who are nice; there are many fewer who are effectively kind.