A somewhat handwavy thing I often say is that “we become ourselves in dialogue with others.” I realized I’ve never really unpacked what that means, and if it is true, so let me think aloud.

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I think the deepest reason we need dialogue to come in contact with ourselves is that it's very hard for us to confront and make sense of our own experience unless we have someone to mirror it—for a multitude of reasons.

Our feelings can be quite frightening, confusing, and hard to grasp when we're alone with them. But when we're able to share them with others (and I don't mean only emotions, but our perspective on the world, our experiences, what we see and think) much that was hard to make sense of on our own becomes clearer.

There are two major reasons for this. The first is that we often don't even have the words! We just have murky feeling. But when we start to talk to people, they can draw on their experience and put words to it—we can pool our words and our knowledge and get more tools and perspectives to work with as we’re trying to make sense of things. Collectively, we can work it through and start to develop the necessary language.

The second thing is that we're often frightened of certain thoughts and feelings inside ourselves. And if we are talking to someone who accepts us, it gets easier to look at that stuff.

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To understand ourselves and the world better, we want to see more clearly, take in more data. You could think of it as trying to make the information flow more freely through the system. The more information flows through, the more we can learn. The more you're able to take in and express, the more material you have to understand yourself, your tastes, the world, and other people. But because much of this information is confusing, frightening, and strange, it can be hard to let it flow.

In order to make that information flow, you need a sense of safety, you need to feel like the thoughts and feelings and the facts about the world are not going to hurt you, that it is ok, and that you can look at it—and for this, there needs to be an attitude of empathy, acceptance, a stance where you're not caught up in the feelings that are flowing but more “observe them.” And this is often easier to achieve when we’re looking at someone else, someone we care for. So when we talk together, we can, if we are dialogical, create space for each other to explore thoughts and feelings that we can’t confront on our won.

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A third point. This type of dialogical stance to others and ourselves is a non-obvious, non-natural way of behaving toward yourself and others. It is more natural to be defensive, status regulating, self-decieving, etc. Because the unnaturalness of a dialogical stance, it's hard to learn on our own. It’s like trying to learning how to play the piano without access to a teacher or videos or music to listen to. You wouldn’t get far. It is easier to learn these non-natural skills if you have someone to apprentice to. Which is also a reason why we become in dialogue with others: it is a space where we can apprentice ourselves to the attitude and stance that enables us to process things effectively. Being in dialogue makes us more dialogical.

I was reading Carl Rodgers discuss the common patterns of people who get exposed to a really good therapist who listens to them in a dialogical way. I’m not sure what he’s saying is true, but it fits my experience: When you encounter someone with a lot of empathy, acceptance, understanding, and a non-judgmental attitude, the person on the receiving end finds that information starts to flow more easily within them. They notice this other person can hold that information, accept it, and understand it. And this makes them start to learn this stance toward themselves, where they can be less frightened, better able to process information, more grounded. Over time, when they're exposed to someone like that, they start to learn how to do it themselves. They start to approach themselves in a way where everything that flows up—thoughts and feelings—is ok. They're less caught up in it. They're able to experience it, see what it means, use that information. This makes everything easier in all sorts of ways. It might be that we can basically only ever learn this stance through apprenticeship to others.

I'm not saying you necessarily need someone who's very, very skilled at this in order to learn it. But you need encounters with people where there's some room for this, some understanding, some level of safety—some kind of foothold. With me and my wife Johanna, who I have learned most from, neither of us was fully mature in this sense, and we still aren't. But we had enough space, enough capacity, that we could hold a little space for each other and get the information to start flowing a little better. We could accept a little bit more of ourselves and bring that into the conversation. That became a positive feedback loop. By bringing more in, we gradually expanded our understanding and capacity. Many good, healthy relationships work this way.

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A fourth reason why we can only come into a deep connection with ourselves through dialogue is that reality is very, very complex. As a thought experiment, imagine a person completely attuned to themselves, with a lot of empathy and understanding toward everything, including themselves, but without access to other people to talk to, without books or anything. That person wouldn't get very far.

Understanding reality in all its nuance and detail, and especially understanding the reality of our inner lives, is so complex that we need to work together to make progress.

Take, for example, cognitive biases—an important part of a sophisticated understanding of how you and other people work. Even though we’ve had cognitive biases for 100,000s or years, most like, the vocabulary and conceptual understanding necessary to talk about it and observe it with high resolution in ourselves wasn’t articulated and developed until the last fifty years! There are precursors in various philosophers and thinkers going back hundreds of years, but it took a large effort of many people for many years to refine this understanding and create this vocabulary. Even today, most people are not aware of the way confirmation bias shows up in their thinking. They don't have a vocabulary for it.

That's an example of something that clearly took us a very long time to grasp. I would argue that basically everything is like that—even things that feel more obvious to us, like anxiety, or flow, or happiness. All of these are concepts for thinking about ourselves that people had to develop. All words we use to make sense of ourselves are the result of endless thinking and conversation through millenia.

If we tried to re-derive it from the raw experience of our own lives, most of us wouldn't get anywhere. It's very rare for someone with undifferentiated, unarticulated, murky experience to turn that into sharp understanding. We develop our understanding of ourselves and the world by borrowing concepts and ideas developed by others. We learn them by talking, listning, and reading. Then we might tweak them a little bit, and add insights drawn from our own experiences—but this is a much slower process, and most of us aren’t very good at it, so we rely on the collective process of developing understanding for the most part.

This means our understanding of ourselves is to a large extent limited by what kinds of conversations we have access to. If we don’t have parents or peers who give us loving attention, and who can help us articulate our inner world, and if we never learn to turn to books with deep insights, we end up with a very limited understanding of ourselves, and with a very limited set of tools for orienting toward the world. Hence, we become ourselves in dialogue with others.

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As I said, I’m just thinking aloud here. I’m unsure about these things, and would love perspectives and pushbacks. I’m a bit unhappy about the argument here. I think one thing I dislike is that I made it sound like a therapy thing, but I think most useful dialogues aren’t about our feelings and our interiority, but about the world, about projects we’re working on, art works, other people, molecules we’re exploring in a laboratory, and so on.