Case Study 1 — Chapter 21: Empathy and Compassion — Seeing Through Other Eyes

Jordan: The Receiving Side

Background

Jordan has spent most of his adult professional life on the giving side of empathic exchange. He is good at reading his team's states. He notices when someone is struggling before they say so. He has a natural calibration for what people need — which is largely cognitive empathy: the capacity to model another person's situation and anticipate what they are experiencing.

He has been less aware of the other side of the equation: what happens when someone attempts to be genuinely present with him.

The answer, he has been learning, is that he tends to deflect.

The Pattern

He tracks it across a month, after the Dev incident.

It shows up in various forms:

When Dev expresses care about his anxiety: Jordan says "I'm working on it" and shifts the conversation to what he is working on specifically. The care is registered, filed, and moved past.

When his manager Sandra says "I notice you've been carrying a lot" after a difficult period: Jordan says "It's been a lot, but I'm handling it" and provides a status update on how he is handling it. The status update replaces the being-seen moment.

When Leon, during a Saturday run, asks "Are you okay?" after Jordan describes the initiative's latest complication: Jordan says "Yeah, it's fine, just — " and gives a problem description. The "are you okay" question never gets a direct answer.

He is, he realizes, extraordinarily efficient at redirecting care. Not defensively — not in a way that closes the door. More like: receiving the care briefly and immediately converting it into something more productive-looking.

Why? He thinks about it. Several answers:

Receiving care requires me to acknowledge that I need it. Needing care has, in his family of origin, been associated with weakness — with the kind of need that was met with "what are you going to do about it?" His father was not unkind; he simply did not have the vocabulary for non-instrumental care.

Acknowledging need means it's real. If he receives care without deflecting, the thing being cared about becomes more present. If he keeps managing the presentation of his state, the state remains manageable. If he allows Dev — or Leon, or Sandra — to actually see it, it becomes more real and therefore more uncomfortable.

There's a performance of capability at stake. Jordan has built his professional identity around competence and composure. Being genuinely seen by his team, by his colleagues, by people who depend on his judgment requires that the competence-and-composure version of Jordan remain the presented version.

The Moment

Late November. The initiative is in its second phase, and something unexpected has happened: it is going well. Not just "it's on track" well — it is producing results that are better than the proposal predicted, and Jordan is being asked, for the first time in his career, to present the findings to senior leadership.

He tells Dev this on a Thursday evening. He tells it the way he might tell it to his manager: matter-of-factly, with the key metrics noted, with the next phase outlined.

Dev is quiet for a moment.

"Jordan," Dev says. "This is a big deal."

"It's going well," Jordan agrees.

"No. This is — " Dev pauses. "You have been working on this for two years. This is what you spent 2 a.m. anxious about. This is what you built the implementation intentions to get started on. This is the thing you were afraid wouldn't change anything internally. And it is going well. That is a significant thing."

Jordan notices something in his chest. Not pride, exactly — something more complicated. Something that is in the neighborhood of being seen.

He does not redirect. He does not convert this into a status update or a next-steps outline.

He says: "I don't know how to fully let that land."

Dev says: "I know. But you're trying. That counts."

They sit with it for a moment. Jordan allows it. It is, he thinks, the most uncomfortably meaningful thirty seconds of the last several months.

The Therapy Session

Jordan brings the Dev conversation to his therapist, alongside the analysis of the deflection pattern.

His therapist asks: "What is the cost of receiving care — the internal cost?"

Jordan thinks. "It means I was actually struggling. And if I was struggling, then maybe I was less capable than I needed to be. And if I was less capable than I needed to be — " He pauses. "I don't know how to finish that sentence in a way that doesn't sound like catastrophizing."

"Try."

"If I was less capable than I needed to be, then maybe I'm not who I thought I was."

His therapist says: "What if being struggled with is just — being human? What if needing care doesn't subtract from your capability, it just makes it more accurately scaled?"

Jordan sits with this. The phrase accurately scaled does something. Not "capability diminished" but "capability seen in accurate proportion to what was actually being carried."

He writes in his notebook later: I have been performing competence as a substitute for receiving care. The performance is real — the work is real, the capability is real. But I've been using it to avoid being seen as something smaller than the performance. Which means no one has been seeing the full thing. Just the curated part.

The Team

In December, Jordan does something that surprises him. During a team retrospective at the end of the initiative's second phase, when the results are being reviewed and the good news is genuinely good, he says — unprepared and somewhat to his own surprise — "I want to say something."

The team looks at him.

"I couldn't have gotten this to here without the specific people in this room doing the specific things you did. And I want to name them." He names them. Not generically — specifically. What each person contributed, what it required of them, what it produced. He looks at each person while he says it.

One of his team members — a quiet, methodical analyst named Priya who has been on the team for three years and who has rarely received direct recognition in Jordan's presence — says "thank you" in a voice that is slightly unsteady.

Jordan recognizes the quality of what just happened. He gave specific, witnessed attention to people whose work was real. This is not the same as empathic presence in the way the chapter uses it — but it is a form of compassionate action that is related: the willingness to see specifically, to notice accurately, to name what is real.

He is better at this direction — caring outward — than at receiving it. He knows this. He is working on the other direction, too.

Analysis Questions

1. Jordan identifies several reasons for his deflection of care: acknowledging need means acknowledging he needs it; receiving care makes the struggle more real; there is a performance of capability at stake. How do each of these connect to Jordan's family of origin (the emotional climate in Chapter 19, Edward's implicit "work = seriousness" frame)?

2. Dev's response to Jordan's good news — "you have been working on this for two years, this is what you were afraid wouldn't change anything internally" — is a form of empathic presence, not sympathy. What specifically makes it empathic rather than sympathetic? What does Dev do that a sympathetic response wouldn't?

3. Jordan's therapist offers the phrase "accurately scaled" — capability seen in accurate proportion to what was being carried. How does this reframe the identity story that is at the center of Jordan's deflection pattern? What is the identity threat that receiving care poses, and how does this reframe address it?

4. Jordan's recognition scene with his team — naming each person's specific contribution — is described as "compassionate action" of a specific kind. The chapter notes that "acts of specific attention — noticing someone's effort, naming what you see in someone" are among the most reliably impactful compassionate behaviors. Why is specificity more impactful than general appreciation?

5. The chapter argues that receiving care and giving care are both skills that can be developed. Jordan's case study shows both sides of this: he is well-developed in giving (empathic outward capacity) and underdeveloped in receiving (allowing others' care to land). What would it mean to say receiving care is a skill, and what would the practice of developing it involve?