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.
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What caring does mean, however, is doing your best to help your report be successful and fulfilled in her work. It means taking the time to learn what she cares about. It means understanding that we are not separate people at work and at homeāsometimes the personal blends into the professional, and thatās okay.
Another nuance of respect is that it must be unconditional because itās about the person as a whole rather than what she does for you. Iāve never encountered a manager who wasnāt a bastion of support for individuals they considered top performers. Itās easy to like and have a great relationship with someone who is kicking ass. The harder test is, what happens when she struggles?
But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of oneās pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things
beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.
But you donāt always need to be cared for. You donāt have to justify your existence by caring for others. Instead of making mutual care an absolute principle, you could understand that need, absence, and ignorance allow wonder and new life.
Mentalizing also helps us simultaneously sympathize with a person while also detaching to make judgments about them.
Too often, the people we ask for feedback are kind but not nice. Kind people will tell you things a nice person will not. A kind person will tell you that you have spinach on your teeth. A nice person wont because itās uncomfortable. A kind person will tell us what holds us back even when itās uncomfortable. A nice person avoids giving us critical feedback because theyāre worried about hurting our feelings. No wonder we end up thinking people will be interested in our excuses.