Reading people is a survival skill which all children need to learn

I got a handwritten note from a friend last week. She had to drop something off for me, so she included several paragraphs of updates about her family.

The note was newsy and seemingly happy, but my gut told me she wasn’t doing well. Some tiny whisper in my mind told me to pay attention to a few words that didn’t quite fit with the rest. And then I suddenly knew — without knowing why — that my friend was miserably unhappy. She was stressed and crumbling inside, despite all the happy talk.

I picked up the phone and called her. I told her that I could tell she’s not doing well and that she was hiding what stress was doing to her. I asked what I could do to help.

“How did you know?!” she asked in a tone of shock. “The people I work with think I’m fine. My family thinks I’m fine. You hardly ever talk to me, so how did you know this about me? You’re right, but how did you know?”

The answer to that is complicated. I don’t read minds. I’m not a psychic. But I do read subtle clues from other people, especially in person. Nobody purposely taught me this skill. In fact, the way I learned was very unhealthy. But it’s a skill that all children need to learn.

Reading people was a survival skill for me as a child. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I learned from experience that bad things happened to me if I couldn’t predict what was going on in the minds of people around me.

I learned that from bad experiences with my narcissistic father.

I’ve talked at length in the past about how his undiagnosed narcissism colored every part of my childhood, so I’m not going to spend much time on the specifics here. I’ve spent a good portion of the last 10 or 12 years learning about narcissistic personality disorder and reinterpreting much of my childhood in light of this new-found lens. My childhood never made sense until I found this way to look at it.

Although he mellowed over the years insofar as how he presented himself, my father could be a raging monster when I was young. The worst part is that he was a kind and loving man for most of the time. It was like living with Dr. Jekyll and never knowing when Mr. Hyde was going to emerge.

There were times when Mr. Hyde was bubbling up toward the surface, but it wasn’t showing yet. Somehow — without being taught anything specific — I learned how to read when that was happening. Any human would learn the same thing out of self-preservation, so there was nothing special about me.

It was imperative that I learn when he was in a dangerous mood that could turn ugly, because I could find excuses to get away from him before the monster emerged. The scariest times of my childhood were times when the monster emerged and I wasn’t prepared for it.

I never had any conscious intention of picking up on these subtle clues of impending danger. It was just a survival skill that I learned — and slowly applied to the rest of my life. I eventually realized that I had the ability to “read” people in ways that few others had never learned.

For a long time, I thought I was special or talented to have this ability, but I now know that it’s a skill anyone can learn. I just learned it for very unhealthy reasons.

If I walk in to a group of people, I typically have the ability to “read the room” more than most people do. It’s almost as though I can feel emotions from the various individuals. I experience it as some abstract energy that’s somehow similar to colors or heat — in ways that I can’t explain.

In so many respects, I simply know things about people. The more I’m connected to a person — for good or bad — the deeper my ability becomes to know things about them that I shouldn’t be able to know.

I recently learned that Korean culture has a word for something very similar to this skill I learned. Koreans teach their children what they call “nunchi.” It includes this skill that I learned, but the Korean meaning is a bit broader. Ever since I discovered this concept in Korean culture, I’ve been thinking about how children can be taught these skills — but in positive ways instead of in the unhealthy ways I learned.

There are hundreds of places to learn what nunchi is all about — and there’s even a popular book on the topic — but here’s how one site defines what it encompasses:

Nunchi is a broad concept that literally means “eye-measure.” It includes intuition, sense, perception, wit, reading the room, taking a hint and giving a hint. Most commonly, it’s a way to gauge people’s thoughts and feelings based on their behavior, tone, body language and situation.

I’ve often thought that I wanted my own children to learn this skill that I have, but I wondered if it was possible to learn it without going through the scary necessity that taught me.

I find that the more free most people felt as they were growing up — the less oppressive their parents had been — the worse their skills were in this area. The correlations I saw in this way made me fear that my scary experiences were the only way to learn, and that certainly wasn’t an acceptable thing to do to children.

The fact that an entire society has been teaching these skills to its children for many hundreds of years makes me realize that it can be taught.

Most adults seem pretty clueless by my standards when it comes to understanding other people and being aware of subtle clues about what other people need and what others are feeling. So it’s no wonder they don’t teach their children this skill. They don’t even realize it exists. And their children grow up just as oblivious as they are about what’s going on around them.

I wish I had understood this when I was a child. I wish I’d known what I was doing. But now that I do know — and I understand that Korean culture teaches it in a very specific way — it’s going to change some of how I approach raising children.

I only hope I get the chance to apply this new knowledge — now that I’ve finally learned it can be taught in a positive way. I think it’s a vital life skill that every child deserves to learn.