The people who know us best are also the people we're most likely to stop actually seeing. Psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan spent his career studying what he called 'parataxic distortion' — the way we unconsciously replace real people with mental composites built from years of accumulated impressions. The longer the relationship, the more elaborate the composite. With family especially, we're often not responding to the person in front of us at 6pm on a Monday; we're responding to a kind of historical average of every version of them we've ever known. The 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza made a related observation from a different angle: he argued that our emotions lock onto objects not as they are, but as we've categorized them — and that this is particularly durable with those closest to us, because repetition deepens the groove. Together, these two thinkers suggest the same practical intervention: before a conversation with someone you love, take a deliberate beat to register that you don't yet know who this specific person is *right now*. Not their history. Not their pattern. The person standing in your kitchen this evening.

Think of a family member you spoke with recently. What did you assume before they finished their first sentence — and what might you have missed because of it?

Drawing from Interpersonal Psychiatry combined with Spinozan Philosophy of Emotion — Harry Stack Sullivan (The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, 1953) and Baruch Spinoza (Ethics, 1677)