Some Things You Don’t Say to Strangers (Until You Do)
On reading people fast, and the risk of telling them what I see
TL;DR: There’s a kind of intimacy that doesn’t take time. You meet someone, and something in you reads them clearly within minutes. The gift is real. So is the risk of saying it wrong. Most of what I’ve learned about this came from doing it badly, and one of the few times I think I got it right happened on a massage table this week.
When I met Andrea in the waiting area, before either of us had said much beyond our names, I could feel her reading me. Charlotte does this all the time, and I’ve only recently learned to identify it. For most of my life I was oblivious to the relational scan that happens in the first ninety seconds of a new encounter, the part where the other person is gathering signal about who you are and whether you are safe. Andrea was doing that. New male client, about to be alone with her in a closed room, about to take his clothes off. This time I noticed. And I practiced responding in a way that communicated safety: open posture, eye contact without intensity, a low-frequency presence that lets a body in a different body know it can stand down.
The massage was ninety minutes. By the time I was getting up off the table, I had a clear read on who she was at a level deeper than biography. She had asked about pressure preference at the start. I gave her my standard line: “Grunts are good, screams are bad, crying is perfect.” She paused, considered, asked whether that depended on happy or sad tears, then decided “Good either way, I suppose” before getting started. The way her hands moved through tissue told me she understood physiology better than most therapists I’ve worked with. The way she held the room told me she lived comfortably in liminal space, the place between waking and not, where the body sometimes says things the mind hasn’t agreed to yet.
I have language for liminal space because of Charlotte, who is a master at it. Watching her hold people and rooms over the years taught me the shape of the thing before I had the word.
I didn’t say any of that to Andrea during the session. There’s a rule I follow without having articulated it before, which is that you don’t tell someone what you see in them while they’re working on you, lying down, naked under a drape, with their hands inside your back. I waited.
At the desk while paying, I told her. Brief, specific, about her depth with the body and her ease in liminal space. She nodded and went back to her room. A minute later she came back out, found me before I’d left, and asked if I would say it again. She had heard me the first time. She wanted to hear it twice. To store it. I repeated it. She said it made her feel very seen, and I drove home thinking about all the times I have not gotten this right.
What I haven’t told you yet is that speaking those words at the desk was itself somewhat new for me. I’ve been seeing things in people for years. I haven’t always said them, even when the moment was right and the words were ready. The current shift is probably connected to neurofeedback. I’m three weeks into a T3-F3 protocol that targets the left frontal cortex, the area where approach motivation lives, the part of you that decides to make a bid instead of staying quiet. The minute that therapist spent at the desk asking me to repeat what I said may have started, in part, with an electrode placement on my forehead yesterday at a different office.
What I Mean by Seeing
I’m describing a particular cognitive event. You meet someone, and within minutes a kind of resolution forms. The reading comes from pattern matching, somatic intuition, and the speed at which an autistic-flavored brain absorbs micro-signals other people don’t notice they’re emitting.
It isn’t psychoanalysis. I’m not pretending to know their childhood or their pathology. The closer comparison is what musicians do when they hear another musician play four bars and know what kind of player they are. Or what a good craftsperson does when they pick up someone else’s tool and know how it’s been held. The information was always there. Some of us are wired to read it fast.
I’m not special for having this. Plenty of people have it, often arriving from very different places. Twice-exceptional people, autistic people, deeply attuned introverts, somatic therapists, the best teachers I’ve ever had. Survivors of complex trauma have their own version, where hypervigilance reads rooms from the doorway and pays a cost I won’t pretend to understand. Talk therapists also do this professionally, adapting language and insight to whoever’s on the couch and calibrating in real time. It’s a real thing. And like every real thing, it can be used well or badly.
The Names Other Cultures Gave It
Humans have known this happens for a very long time, and the names they’ve given it carry a kind of wisdom I keep returning to.
In Kenya, where I’ve spent time in the Turkana region around Lodwar, greetings are not perfunctory. They are an act of slow, mutual acknowledgment that can take minutes. You ask about a person’s health, their family, their cattle, their journey. The greeting is the relationship, briefly enacted in full. Swahili has Karibu, which translates as “welcome” but carries the sense of being brought close, into nearness. The transactional “hi, how are you” that Western culture treats as basic civility would read in many East African contexts as something closer to dismissal. My own clumsy Western version is an acronym I default to in small talk: FORD, for family, occupation, recreation, dreams. It’s a structured nudge to ask actual questions about the actual person in front of me. The Kenyan version doesn’t need an acronym. The full greeting is the recognition. The slow pace is the practice.
Japanese has ishin-denshin, “what the mind thinks, the heart transmits,” for the silent recognition that passes between people. It also has ichigo ichie, “one time, one meeting,” a tea ceremony principle that holds each encounter as unique and unrepeatable. The discipline is to be fully present because there will not be another meeting exactly like it. Twice-exceptional readers will recognize this from their best one-on-one conversations, the ones where the neurodivergent branching gets to flow and you stop performing a tidied-down version of yourself. Those conversations can’t be repeated, partly because nobody could reproduce the path. As far as I can tell, the tea masters who codified ichigo ichie did not factor in audio recording or working memory fragility. The rest of us have to record the unrepeatable to keep it. I’m aware this is exactly the move ichigo ichie is asking me not to make. The old monks would not approve of my workflow.
Mandarin has zhīyīn, “one who knows the sound,” from the legend of Bo Ya, a master musician, and Zhong Ziqi, a woodcutter who could hear what Bo Ya was feeling in his playing without being told. When Ziqi died, Bo Ya broke his lute and never played again. He said no one would understand his music now. The legend is two thousand years old and still does what it does.
Koreans have nunchi, “eye-measure,” which is the art of reading a room and the people in it. The thing I love about nunchi is that the master often doesn’t speak what they see. Restraint is part of the skill. Knowing without saying is its own competence, and the saying is a separate decision that comes later, with care.
Paul wrote that we currently see “through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.” The verse sits inside his chapter on love, and the placement matters. He’s saying love is the practice of partial seeing, of doing the best we can with the glimpses we get, until something more complete becomes possible. Christian theology also has Imago Dei, the image of God in every person, which makes recognition itself a kind of theological act. The Quakers have a phrase for this: “that of God in everyone.” In the meantime we get glimpses, and the glimpses are precious, and we are supposed to handle them with care.
Different cultures, same recognition. The seeing is real. The intimacy is real. The question of when and how to speak it is its own discipline.
Where I Worry About Using It: Across Sex
Let me name the thing I’m most often unsure about. When the person I’m reading is a woman I don’t know well, I get cautious. What I see is the same. How I might say it changes.
Neurodivergent flirting calibration is, by general consensus among people like me, a known weakness. I don’t always know when I’m flirting, when I’m inadvertently flirting, or when I’m leading someone on without meaning to. I miss the signals coming back at me, too. On top of that, I’m confident and good-looking, which makes the inadvertent-flirting question a live one. I have years of evidence that my read on these signals is unreliable.
There’s a layer underneath the calibration problem worth naming. The cultural script for masculinity assumes a man already knows how to read women, what the rules of cross-sex engagement are, and when he’s being inappropriate. I haven’t. I’ve spent most of my life convinced that I should have, and that’s its own brand of masculine shame. Shame distorts decisions. Sometimes it pushes me toward over-disclosure to prove I’m safe. More often it pushes me toward withdrawal that wears the costume of respect while running on fear.
So when I see something true and intimate about a woman I’ve just met, I have to weigh whether what I want to say will land, and also whether it could be misread as something I didn’t mean and don’t want it to be.
The risk of overstepping with intimacy across sex isn’t theoretical. Even when nothing romantic is intended, the act of saying I see you, here is what I see can commit the other person to an asymmetric intimacy they didn’t ask for. They now have to decide what to do with it. They didn’t apply for the position.
So I default to extra restraint. I’m aware that the restraint is itself a kind of asymmetry. Men I read get the gift more easily. Women I read get my caution. That isn’t perfectly fair. I haven’t solved it. Most days I’d rather err on the side of not creating a complication for someone who didn’t sign up for one.
Where I Worry About Using It: Substack Comments
This one is different in mechanism, and I’m working it out in real time.
Substack Notes and article comments are a public square. When you comment, other people see. When you reply to someone with something personal, you’ve drawn them into a conversation that exists in front of an audience.
Earlier today I commented on a Note from Lee Hopkins, a psychologist whose work I follow. The Note was about SEO growth on his site. My comment asked him about his inner needs underneath the analytics.
He’s male. I think I asked partly because he’s male. The question I keep turning over is whether I would have asked the same thing if Lee were a woman. Probably not. Even if my read had been identical. Even if the question would have served her work the same way.
I’m not sure that’s the right calibration. It might be over-correction, or wisdom, or both at once. What I do know is that public comments are a different vehicle than private DMs, that what you say in someone’s comment section becomes part of their professional surface, and that recognition addressed to the wrong audience can feel like exposure even when it’s accurate.
The honest version of the question I’m sitting with is whether I’m extending the gift unevenly because the risks are uneven, or because my own caution about being misread is doing the work. I don’t have a clean answer. The question feels worth asking out loud, which is part of why I’m asking it here.
What I’ve Figured Out So Far
A few practices have started to crystallize.
Wait. The massage therapist case worked because I waited. I didn’t speak while she was working and I was on the table. I waited until we were both standing, both back in our normal roles, both at the transactional moment when the container of the session had closed. That’s nunchi. That’s the restraint that lets the speaking land.
Speak at the edge of awareness. Carl Rogers called this advanced accurate empathy. You name what they almost know about themselves, the thing on the verge of articulation. The aim is something they would recognize as true the moment they heard it. This is different from psychoanalytic excavation or unrequested third-eye reading.
Be specific. Vague flattery feels worse than no comment at all. Once you’ve decided to speak, the specificity is what makes the speaking honest. “You have a deep relationship with physiology and you’re at home in liminal space” lands. “You’re a great masseuse” doesn’t.
Notice your standing. Who is the observer to the observed? Stranger, colleague, friend, paying client, anonymous internet commenter. These are not the same channel. The recognition might be identical. The right way to deliver it varies.
The request to repeat is the ratification. When the therapist came back and asked me to say it again, that wasn’t politeness. That was her nervous system asking for the words a second time so she could keep them. If you’ve ever spoken something true to someone and watched them go quiet and ask you to say it again, you’ve seen this. It’s the closest thing to a green light I know.
The Third Factor and the Dopamine I’m Not Pretending Isn’t There
Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration names something he called the third factor, the autonomous developmental drive that begins to operate once you’ve outgrown both biological instinct and cultural conditioning. It is the part of you that pulls you toward who you actually are, sometimes in opposition to what your nervous system wants and what your culture expects.
For me, helping other people see themselves is how the third factor moves. It isn’t a hobby. It’s a pull. Naming this is useful because it gives me both permission and responsibility. Permission to honor the drive instead of suppressing it. Responsibility to not abuse it.
There’s an honest piece I want to put on the table. I get a clear catecholamine response when I generate personal insight, whether the insight is about me, about someone I’m working with, or about a stranger I’ve just read. My nervous system is wired for it, partly because of how the dopaminergic system got built in this brain. The reward is real. The reward is also mine.
This doesn’t make the seeing bad. It does mean that any time I’m sharing what I see, there’s a real chance I’m partly doing it for the buzz. Restraint is the practice that keeps the gift clean. The third factor pulls me to share. The chemistry rewards me for sharing. That is a lot of momentum to manage, and the management is the work.
Closing
The cultures that named this all knew the same thing. Seeing is one act. Saying is another. The gap between them is where wisdom lives.
The therapist asked me to repeat what I said because it landed. That is the bar. Not every reading should be spoken. Not every speaking should be public. Not every audience is the right audience. The thing I’m trying to learn is when the saying serves the seeing, and when the saying is just my system enjoying its own resolution.
I’m not done figuring it out. Next time, I’ll keep doing what worked with the therapist: waiting until the container of the moment opens for it, paying attention to the channel, asking whether what I want to say is something they would recognize as true if they heard it, and asking whether the speaking serves them or just the small reward circuit in my own brain.
Sometimes the gift is in what you decide not to say. Sometimes the gift is in saying it twice, slowly, at the desk, while they hold the receipt and ask you to repeat it.
Human. Deeply seen.