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A review by rbruehlman
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks
5.0
I have a confession: I love psychology, but I can't stand self-help or pop psychology books. Invariably, they fall into one of two traps: "no, duh," or "that makes a lot of sense ... in theory ... but I have no freaking clue how to put that into practice." While the premise of such books is usually interesting, in practice, I usually end up bored.
How to Know a Person is a rare psychology/self-help-esque book that falls into neither of these categories. It is both a reminder of what it means to be human, as well as highly practical in how to be better and connect more fully with others. Some parts of the book inspire deeper thought; others give concrete takeaways that you can try to put into practice right away, without feeling preachy or inauthentic.
Brooks mentions himself that the book is probably more appropriately subtitled, "The Art of Hearing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Heard" (presumably, the publisher nixed this!). That is really what the book is about. It's about listening to others. We cannot see people for who they are if we do not listen. Most people hunger to be understood and long for deep connections ... and, on the flip side, just as many people are not that great at understanding and appreciating others deeply or behaving in a manner that would forge the kind of connections they crave. Deep connections come from understanding, and understanding comes from authentically and deeply listening to others. As it turns out, part of being a good listener is asking good questions.
Some thoughts / takeaways from the book ... (I guess this isn't so much of a "review" as it is a long laundry list of reflections / musings as a result of reading the book...)
Most people really suck at asking questions!
This was a revelation for me when I started dating. I've battled with social anxiety my entire life, and a recurrent fear for a long time was that I was a boring conversationalist. Then I started dating, and I realized: I may not be Barack Obama, but I'm not as bad as I think! Many people don't ask any questions. Most were perfectly nice people, too, with interesting answers! But they asked vanishingly few (sometimes zero) questions. I never enjoyed those conversations. The other person usually did, blithely unaware they had told me tons about themselves and learned nothing about me. To them, it was a great conversation.
Being a good conversationalist isn't about having the wittiest story or knowing tons of facts. That's called being a good entertainer. People feel like they've had a good conversation when the other person has invited them to contribute and is genuinely interested in what they have to say.
The best questions aren't what, but how and why.
But not all questions are created equal. You can fill a conversation with what questions, sure. It's not hard. But it probably won't be the most satisfying exchange. It's likely two things will happen: 1) you will know a lot of facts about a person, like where they live or what they do for work, yet nothing about them, and 2) you will keep having to resuscitate the conversation with a change of topics or additional questions. When you get at how and why someone thinks or does a certain thing, you express interest in them (vs. meaningless small talk), and you learn so much more about them. Which do you think would be a more interesting conversation: "Where do you live?" or "Why do you live where you do?" I live in Hell's Kitchen. I live in Hell's Kitchen because it's close to Central Park; in addition to loving to run, I found out through living in the grey, stony Financial District that I really love having trees around. They make me happy. One answer tells you a lot more about me than the other.
I am going to make more of a conscious effort to ask how / why going forward to elicit people's life stories. Less what questions!
Resist the temptation to relate things back to you.
Ooh, I'm guilty of this one. I want to make people feel heard, so if I know what their experience is like, I will try to prove I know how they feel by talking about how I've been there too. This is a dangerous trap, because it shifts the attention away from the speaker and over to you. It also blinds you in a sense to what the person is saying; maybe you have been through that situation too, but when you start talking about yourself, it's hard not to extrapolate how you felt onto the other person. Maybe that's true and they feel the exact same way, but they may very well not! You deprive them of the space to explain for themselves, might inadvertently tell them how you think they're feeling, and make the conversation about you.
I think I talk about myself in such situations because I want someone else to not feel alone and that I get it. But when I think about it--when I was depressed, was it actually helpful knowing somebody else was depressed too? Not really. It just felt like we were two people in the same shitty sinking boat together, and now I felt bad that they felt like shit too. There are times when knowing someone is or has been in the same boat as you is helpful ... but it's rarely at the exact moment you're trying to tell your story.
It's probably not necessary to self-disclose at all to make someone feel heard. If you know how it feels, for instance, to lose a family member, you can support the other person with the thoughtful probing questions you ask, ones that are indirectly informed by your own experience. Your prior experience can help you figure out the right questions to ask or the things to say. I've been thinking about this in relation to someone I knew with social anxiety, in fact. Initially, I tried to relate (boy, do I know social anxiety!), but then I realized, that is not what that person needs; they probably don't care that I, too, have social anxiety. I will not cure them by countering their cognitive distortions with logic, or by telling them what helped me. I will only help them by providing real evidence they are not dislikable by being there for them and offering friendship.
The way to support someone through depression or other hard life events isn't to fix, but to be there and care unconditionally.
This is related to the above bullet. Brooks compassionately describes his friend's slide into deep depression and his eventual suicide. Brooks initially wanted to fix his friend. He told him about the things he could do to feel better; he countered his friend's negative thoughts, assuring him life wasn't really that way. It didn't help, and Brooks felt helpless. Eventually, however, Brooks realized: he was doing it all wrong. His friend wasn't a dummy; he wasn't doing the things that Brooks thought would make him better, because he had tried it, and it didn't help. If it was that easy, his friend would have done it. All Brooks had done was make his friend feel like he just didn't get it. Brooks was not going to be able to fix his friend. All he needed to do was simply be there for him.
This is so utterly true, speaking from experience. "You will feel less depressed if you just get out / move around / do blah blah blah." Argh!! What people don't understand is that, yes, when you are just down in the regular dumps, getting out of the house can make you feel better. When you are clinically depressed, however, you cannot feel pleasure. You can leave the house and show up to an event, and you will not enjoy it. You will feel just as horrible at home as you did out and about. Actually, you might even feel even worse socializing, because not only do you still feel horrible, you can't even put on a happy face, and other people can tell. Then you start beating yourself up for being a drag on the event or other people. When people tell you, "You just need to X," they are proving, yes, they don't get it. They don't understand it doesn't actually help ... and their advice also just implies you're just not trying hard enough. Not doing the right things. No one depressed wants to feel unhappy. That is already a thought going through their head--they're a burden on everyone else, and they're just not trying hard enough to be better.
No one can cure depression with a pep talk. It just doesn't work that way. Depressed people already believe no one wants to be around them and that they are a drain on others; telling someone it's not true is just words. If you want to support someone with depression, simply be there for them, nonjudgmentally. Actions speak so much louder than words.
People react to the same event differently.
This was beautifully illustrated by two French families' experience in the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. A couple's young daughter was swept away, and in the aftermath, the French vacationers reacted very differently to the same catastrophic event. Emmanuel Carrère felt frozen, useless, unable to help; his girlfriend sprung into action, coordinating and helping as she could; the girl's mother was destroyed; the girl's father strove to keep levity and support his crumbling wife. The same event, the same circumstance, will shape different people dramatically. Don't ever assume how you react or perceive an event is the same as someone else.
David Brooks isn't some kind of master People Person.
They say the best sports coaches usually weren't star athletes in their prime. In fact, the best athletes are often not very good at teaching their sport at all! When you are naturally good at something, it can be a struggle to effectively teach others, because, well, you didn't think about how you did a given technique ... you just did it. It was easy, because you're a natural. In order to learn a complicated or advanced thing, people who aren't naturally gifted have to study and break down the technique into smaller steps ... ones naturals never even think about.
David Brooks is no different. He freely admits, repeatedly, in the book that he is not some kind of natural wunderkind at forging deeper connections. He poignantly illustrates this by recounting how in his early twenties, he couldn't understand why a crush chose another man over him--after all, Brooks thought, he was the better writer! He was totally oblivious to the idea that that wasn't an impressive thing at all, especially not in the context of a fulfilling relationship. Listening deeply is a skill Brooks has developed over time, and he still swings and misses all the time. I relate to that; I am not a natural either, but I certainly think I can (and have become) better over time practicing listening to people. "Just ask questions! People love to talk about themselves!" is advice I've been given many times in my life, but no one ever really explained what that meant.
Big Five personality tests.
This section did not make me think. This is actually a criticism of the book. Unlike MBTI, the Big Five is very well researched and widely accepted in the psychology field. However, Brooks' explanation of the traits was horrible! One of the things that makes the Big Five so valid as a personality measurement is that each of the dimensions are wholly independent of one another. You could be an extraverted neurotic, or an open-minded but disagreeable person... or the reverse, or any combination thereof. However, Brooks presented the traits as if they were the opposite of one another. Extraverts, he claims, feel more positive emotions; neurotics are more likely to feel negative ones. A layman might think with that explanation, ah, extraversion is negatively correlated with neuroticism. No, they're actually completely independent of one another. Neuroticism is a tendency towards worry and anxiety, and a degree of emotional lability. Extraversion is about sensation seeking and deriving enjoyment from socialization and the world around you, as opposed to focusing inward with less stimulation. An extravert can be highly neurotic and prone to worry, and an introvert may be mellow. Or not!
Anyone who reads this book and was not familiar with the Big Five already should look up the Big Five separately online, because Brooks simply did not do the explanation justice.
Wisdom isn't being able to tell someone what to do; it's helping someone figure out what they should do.
I loooooove giving advice. If someone mentions they're struggling with a thing, my reflexive response is to think about how I would solve the situation, or what I think they should do.
This is not good, and it's something I am actively trying to stop myself from doing.
Firstly, most of the time, people are not looking for advice. If they are, they will say so. If they don't say so, then they probably just want space to talk and to be heard. Jumping in with solutions short-circuits that entirely.
Secondly, as Brook notes, tactical advice isn't actually as helpful or useful as asking questions that help clarify what the person should do, and, critically, why. It allows the person to come to the right decision with confidence. Being told you should do X, without the personal understanding of why X is the right answer, just lands differently than deciding to do X because someone asked you, "What draws you to X? What would you gain if you did Y instead? What's really important to you?" and you realizing, you know what, X is the right choice because of blah blah blah. You end up feeling good about your choice, that it was informed. And it's a gift that keeps giving! You learn about yourself being asked open-ended questions, and, maybe, the next time you are faced with a similar dilemma, you know enough about yourself to know what to do, or at least what things to consider.
Give a man a fish and he'll be fed for a day; teach a man to fish, and he'll be fed for life.
I also love the idea of wisdom being asking questions vs. advice because the former feels so much more open-ended. If I give you advice, I have an opinion on what you should do. Maybe I have a bit of an agenda. It's me implying I know you better than you know yourself. If I ask you an open-ended question of what's important to you, I allow you to come to your own conclusion, without me encouraging you to do one thing or another. It feels more altruistic and person-centered.
A personal anecdote of wisdom != advice: I was very unhappy on a team at work several years ago. Another team offered me a role doing something else. I was split; I hated the work I was currently doing and desperately wanted out, but I wasn't sold on the new team, either. I hemmed and hawed, unsure what to do. Finally, someone told me, "I'm not going to tell you what you should do one way or the other. The one thing I want you to consider is as you weigh the job offer is: are you running away from something, or running towards something? If you're running towards something, go for it; if you are running away, you should find something to run towards." I thought about that. I was not running towards the job offer. I wasn't excited about it. I was only entertaining the job offer because I was so unhappy on my current team. I was running away. I didn't accept the job offer.
When I asked that person for advice, I wanted them to tell me what I should do. But, realistically, I wouldn't have actually been satisfied with a simple "you should do X", because I wouldn't have resolved the doubt in my mind. Only by posing that wise question did I realize what I should do. I have thought about that question for years since. Am I weighing this option because I'm running away from something else, or am I running towards it? It was probably one of the wisest things someone has ever said to me.
While the events in our lives don't change, our perception of them and the roles they play in our self-story change over time. Our self-stories are constantly changing.
You will never really know yourself fully, and people close to you in life will always learn more things about you, no matter how long you have known each other. This is one of the things that makes people so fascinating!
Although stuff I wrote in high school and college and onward can sometimes make me cringe, I also treasure it. I sometimes forget, oh, yeah, this thing used to be really important to me, and this was a huge part of who I was. Or I realize, that event that I didn't think had that big of an impact on me back then, was in fact actually seminal in my current self-conception.
Our life events don't change, but our interpretation of them can vary so drastically, we can have many different versions of ourselves over the years. For many years, I rarely thought about high school, a thing I wished to simply forget; in the past year, an unrelated event triggered an outpouring of memory, and the realization of how profoundly one year of high school had impacted me hit me like a ton of bricks. It is now featured much more prominently in my self-story than it would have a year prior. My story is different, despite the past remaining static.
I think it would be an interesting thought exercise to take various events in your life and consider what you thought of them as they happened, a year later, five years later, decades later. How did their roles in your self-story change? What triggered that change? Why?
Telling people your story helps you create it; rarely do you have that story fully formed in your head.
Brooks notes most people have a narrative about themselves already, but, yet, it's often when people have to tell that story to someone else that they start to piece together additional details. It's not necessarily that they have all those pieces and insights prebaked and are just spitting out something canned. As people explain the narrative to someone else, they continue rewriting the story.
I think this is one of the things that makes therapy so helpful. You know your own head and life story deeply. You rarely have to explain a situation to yourself, or why you acted a certain way; you just know. When you have to explain that same thing to someone else, however, you have to give them additional context. In doing so, that exercise can force you to realize--oh, huh, you know what? As I'm saying this, I'm realizing that situation was pretty messed up, or that person didn't really mean to hurt me. Moreover, people can ask questions that challenge your narrative or put it into a different perspective.
Therapy isn't necessarily about getting advice or tools to manage distress. Sometimes it's simply articulating and narrating your experience to someone else in a novel way outside your own head, and having that narrative challenged.
How to Know a Person is a rare psychology/self-help-esque book that falls into neither of these categories. It is both a reminder of what it means to be human, as well as highly practical in how to be better and connect more fully with others. Some parts of the book inspire deeper thought; others give concrete takeaways that you can try to put into practice right away, without feeling preachy or inauthentic.
Brooks mentions himself that the book is probably more appropriately subtitled, "The Art of Hearing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Heard" (presumably, the publisher nixed this!). That is really what the book is about. It's about listening to others. We cannot see people for who they are if we do not listen. Most people hunger to be understood and long for deep connections ... and, on the flip side, just as many people are not that great at understanding and appreciating others deeply or behaving in a manner that would forge the kind of connections they crave. Deep connections come from understanding, and understanding comes from authentically and deeply listening to others. As it turns out, part of being a good listener is asking good questions.
Some thoughts / takeaways from the book ... (I guess this isn't so much of a "review" as it is a long laundry list of reflections / musings as a result of reading the book...)
Most people really suck at asking questions!
This was a revelation for me when I started dating. I've battled with social anxiety my entire life, and a recurrent fear for a long time was that I was a boring conversationalist. Then I started dating, and I realized: I may not be Barack Obama, but I'm not as bad as I think! Many people don't ask any questions. Most were perfectly nice people, too, with interesting answers! But they asked vanishingly few (sometimes zero) questions. I never enjoyed those conversations. The other person usually did, blithely unaware they had told me tons about themselves and learned nothing about me. To them, it was a great conversation.
Being a good conversationalist isn't about having the wittiest story or knowing tons of facts. That's called being a good entertainer. People feel like they've had a good conversation when the other person has invited them to contribute and is genuinely interested in what they have to say.
The best questions aren't what, but how and why.
But not all questions are created equal. You can fill a conversation with what questions, sure. It's not hard. But it probably won't be the most satisfying exchange. It's likely two things will happen: 1) you will know a lot of facts about a person, like where they live or what they do for work, yet nothing about them, and 2) you will keep having to resuscitate the conversation with a change of topics or additional questions. When you get at how and why someone thinks or does a certain thing, you express interest in them (vs. meaningless small talk), and you learn so much more about them. Which do you think would be a more interesting conversation: "Where do you live?" or "Why do you live where you do?" I live in Hell's Kitchen. I live in Hell's Kitchen because it's close to Central Park; in addition to loving to run, I found out through living in the grey, stony Financial District that I really love having trees around. They make me happy. One answer tells you a lot more about me than the other.
I am going to make more of a conscious effort to ask how / why going forward to elicit people's life stories. Less what questions!
Resist the temptation to relate things back to you.
Ooh, I'm guilty of this one. I want to make people feel heard, so if I know what their experience is like, I will try to prove I know how they feel by talking about how I've been there too. This is a dangerous trap, because it shifts the attention away from the speaker and over to you. It also blinds you in a sense to what the person is saying; maybe you have been through that situation too, but when you start talking about yourself, it's hard not to extrapolate how you felt onto the other person. Maybe that's true and they feel the exact same way, but they may very well not! You deprive them of the space to explain for themselves, might inadvertently tell them how you think they're feeling, and make the conversation about you.
I think I talk about myself in such situations because I want someone else to not feel alone and that I get it. But when I think about it--when I was depressed, was it actually helpful knowing somebody else was depressed too? Not really. It just felt like we were two people in the same shitty sinking boat together, and now I felt bad that they felt like shit too. There are times when knowing someone is or has been in the same boat as you is helpful ... but it's rarely at the exact moment you're trying to tell your story.
It's probably not necessary to self-disclose at all to make someone feel heard. If you know how it feels, for instance, to lose a family member, you can support the other person with the thoughtful probing questions you ask, ones that are indirectly informed by your own experience. Your prior experience can help you figure out the right questions to ask or the things to say. I've been thinking about this in relation to someone I knew with social anxiety, in fact. Initially, I tried to relate (boy, do I know social anxiety!), but then I realized, that is not what that person needs; they probably don't care that I, too, have social anxiety. I will not cure them by countering their cognitive distortions with logic, or by telling them what helped me. I will only help them by providing real evidence they are not dislikable by being there for them and offering friendship.
The way to support someone through depression or other hard life events isn't to fix, but to be there and care unconditionally.
This is related to the above bullet. Brooks compassionately describes his friend's slide into deep depression and his eventual suicide. Brooks initially wanted to fix his friend. He told him about the things he could do to feel better; he countered his friend's negative thoughts, assuring him life wasn't really that way. It didn't help, and Brooks felt helpless. Eventually, however, Brooks realized: he was doing it all wrong. His friend wasn't a dummy; he wasn't doing the things that Brooks thought would make him better, because he had tried it, and it didn't help. If it was that easy, his friend would have done it. All Brooks had done was make his friend feel like he just didn't get it. Brooks was not going to be able to fix his friend. All he needed to do was simply be there for him.
This is so utterly true, speaking from experience. "You will feel less depressed if you just get out / move around / do blah blah blah." Argh!! What people don't understand is that, yes, when you are just down in the regular dumps, getting out of the house can make you feel better. When you are clinically depressed, however, you cannot feel pleasure. You can leave the house and show up to an event, and you will not enjoy it. You will feel just as horrible at home as you did out and about. Actually, you might even feel even worse socializing, because not only do you still feel horrible, you can't even put on a happy face, and other people can tell. Then you start beating yourself up for being a drag on the event or other people. When people tell you, "You just need to X," they are proving, yes, they don't get it. They don't understand it doesn't actually help ... and their advice also just implies you're just not trying hard enough. Not doing the right things. No one depressed wants to feel unhappy. That is already a thought going through their head--they're a burden on everyone else, and they're just not trying hard enough to be better.
No one can cure depression with a pep talk. It just doesn't work that way. Depressed people already believe no one wants to be around them and that they are a drain on others; telling someone it's not true is just words. If you want to support someone with depression, simply be there for them, nonjudgmentally. Actions speak so much louder than words.
People react to the same event differently.
This was beautifully illustrated by two French families' experience in the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. A couple's young daughter was swept away, and in the aftermath, the French vacationers reacted very differently to the same catastrophic event. Emmanuel Carrère felt frozen, useless, unable to help; his girlfriend sprung into action, coordinating and helping as she could; the girl's mother was destroyed; the girl's father strove to keep levity and support his crumbling wife. The same event, the same circumstance, will shape different people dramatically. Don't ever assume how you react or perceive an event is the same as someone else.
David Brooks isn't some kind of master People Person.
They say the best sports coaches usually weren't star athletes in their prime. In fact, the best athletes are often not very good at teaching their sport at all! When you are naturally good at something, it can be a struggle to effectively teach others, because, well, you didn't think about how you did a given technique ... you just did it. It was easy, because you're a natural. In order to learn a complicated or advanced thing, people who aren't naturally gifted have to study and break down the technique into smaller steps ... ones naturals never even think about.
David Brooks is no different. He freely admits, repeatedly, in the book that he is not some kind of natural wunderkind at forging deeper connections. He poignantly illustrates this by recounting how in his early twenties, he couldn't understand why a crush chose another man over him--after all, Brooks thought, he was the better writer! He was totally oblivious to the idea that that wasn't an impressive thing at all, especially not in the context of a fulfilling relationship. Listening deeply is a skill Brooks has developed over time, and he still swings and misses all the time. I relate to that; I am not a natural either, but I certainly think I can (and have become) better over time practicing listening to people. "Just ask questions! People love to talk about themselves!" is advice I've been given many times in my life, but no one ever really explained what that meant.
Big Five personality tests.
This section did not make me think. This is actually a criticism of the book. Unlike MBTI, the Big Five is very well researched and widely accepted in the psychology field. However, Brooks' explanation of the traits was horrible! One of the things that makes the Big Five so valid as a personality measurement is that each of the dimensions are wholly independent of one another. You could be an extraverted neurotic, or an open-minded but disagreeable person... or the reverse, or any combination thereof. However, Brooks presented the traits as if they were the opposite of one another. Extraverts, he claims, feel more positive emotions; neurotics are more likely to feel negative ones. A layman might think with that explanation, ah, extraversion is negatively correlated with neuroticism. No, they're actually completely independent of one another. Neuroticism is a tendency towards worry and anxiety, and a degree of emotional lability. Extraversion is about sensation seeking and deriving enjoyment from socialization and the world around you, as opposed to focusing inward with less stimulation. An extravert can be highly neurotic and prone to worry, and an introvert may be mellow. Or not!
Anyone who reads this book and was not familiar with the Big Five already should look up the Big Five separately online, because Brooks simply did not do the explanation justice.
Wisdom isn't being able to tell someone what to do; it's helping someone figure out what they should do.
I loooooove giving advice. If someone mentions they're struggling with a thing, my reflexive response is to think about how I would solve the situation, or what I think they should do.
This is not good, and it's something I am actively trying to stop myself from doing.
Firstly, most of the time, people are not looking for advice. If they are, they will say so. If they don't say so, then they probably just want space to talk and to be heard. Jumping in with solutions short-circuits that entirely.
Secondly, as Brook notes, tactical advice isn't actually as helpful or useful as asking questions that help clarify what the person should do, and, critically, why. It allows the person to come to the right decision with confidence. Being told you should do X, without the personal understanding of why X is the right answer, just lands differently than deciding to do X because someone asked you, "What draws you to X? What would you gain if you did Y instead? What's really important to you?" and you realizing, you know what, X is the right choice because of blah blah blah. You end up feeling good about your choice, that it was informed. And it's a gift that keeps giving! You learn about yourself being asked open-ended questions, and, maybe, the next time you are faced with a similar dilemma, you know enough about yourself to know what to do, or at least what things to consider.
Give a man a fish and he'll be fed for a day; teach a man to fish, and he'll be fed for life.
I also love the idea of wisdom being asking questions vs. advice because the former feels so much more open-ended. If I give you advice, I have an opinion on what you should do. Maybe I have a bit of an agenda. It's me implying I know you better than you know yourself. If I ask you an open-ended question of what's important to you, I allow you to come to your own conclusion, without me encouraging you to do one thing or another. It feels more altruistic and person-centered.
A personal anecdote of wisdom != advice: I was very unhappy on a team at work several years ago. Another team offered me a role doing something else. I was split; I hated the work I was currently doing and desperately wanted out, but I wasn't sold on the new team, either. I hemmed and hawed, unsure what to do. Finally, someone told me, "I'm not going to tell you what you should do one way or the other. The one thing I want you to consider is as you weigh the job offer is: are you running away from something, or running towards something? If you're running towards something, go for it; if you are running away, you should find something to run towards." I thought about that. I was not running towards the job offer. I wasn't excited about it. I was only entertaining the job offer because I was so unhappy on my current team. I was running away. I didn't accept the job offer.
When I asked that person for advice, I wanted them to tell me what I should do. But, realistically, I wouldn't have actually been satisfied with a simple "you should do X", because I wouldn't have resolved the doubt in my mind. Only by posing that wise question did I realize what I should do. I have thought about that question for years since. Am I weighing this option because I'm running away from something else, or am I running towards it? It was probably one of the wisest things someone has ever said to me.
While the events in our lives don't change, our perception of them and the roles they play in our self-story change over time. Our self-stories are constantly changing.
You will never really know yourself fully, and people close to you in life will always learn more things about you, no matter how long you have known each other. This is one of the things that makes people so fascinating!
Although stuff I wrote in high school and college and onward can sometimes make me cringe, I also treasure it. I sometimes forget, oh, yeah, this thing used to be really important to me, and this was a huge part of who I was. Or I realize, that event that I didn't think had that big of an impact on me back then, was in fact actually seminal in my current self-conception.
Our life events don't change, but our interpretation of them can vary so drastically, we can have many different versions of ourselves over the years. For many years, I rarely thought about high school, a thing I wished to simply forget; in the past year, an unrelated event triggered an outpouring of memory, and the realization of how profoundly one year of high school had impacted me hit me like a ton of bricks. It is now featured much more prominently in my self-story than it would have a year prior. My story is different, despite the past remaining static.
I think it would be an interesting thought exercise to take various events in your life and consider what you thought of them as they happened, a year later, five years later, decades later. How did their roles in your self-story change? What triggered that change? Why?
Telling people your story helps you create it; rarely do you have that story fully formed in your head.
Brooks notes most people have a narrative about themselves already, but, yet, it's often when people have to tell that story to someone else that they start to piece together additional details. It's not necessarily that they have all those pieces and insights prebaked and are just spitting out something canned. As people explain the narrative to someone else, they continue rewriting the story.
I think this is one of the things that makes therapy so helpful. You know your own head and life story deeply. You rarely have to explain a situation to yourself, or why you acted a certain way; you just know. When you have to explain that same thing to someone else, however, you have to give them additional context. In doing so, that exercise can force you to realize--oh, huh, you know what? As I'm saying this, I'm realizing that situation was pretty messed up, or that person didn't really mean to hurt me. Moreover, people can ask questions that challenge your narrative or put it into a different perspective.
Therapy isn't necessarily about getting advice or tools to manage distress. Sometimes it's simply articulating and narrating your experience to someone else in a novel way outside your own head, and having that narrative challenged.