Or maybe it can and I have just never been able to find anyone that is able to.
Basically you understand other people with reference to your understanding of yourself, to become better at understanding other people you need to change the way you understand yourself.
Someone else will not be able to change your understanding of yourself. You must do that yourself.
But people can make you think the thoughts and feel the feelings that you wouldn't have otherwise.
And those new things can improve your understanding of yourself.
I recently understood that I need to avoid people with fragile ego, that get hurt when their opinion is challenged or proven wrong and people that assign to other people the responsibility not only for their speech and actions, but also for the emotions those things invoked in them.
I also need to build up my emotional resistance to being misjudged and cut off without chance of defending myself, because it turned out I'm quite sensitive to that.
> But people can make you think the thoughts and feel the feelings that you wouldn't have otherwise. And those new things can improve your understanding of yourself.
True. However those insights can’t be reached from learning about them through a verbal description on the meta level like they are in this article. If I tell you it is good to be happy does that realization make you happy? No. To make you happy I must “manipulate” you (or to use terminology from the article your elephant) into being happy. Just telling you “be happy” does not work.
I can speak to most mammals and many reptiles, but that "body language" sense interferes severely with understanding people. They're almost always unaware of and fighting those layers of themselves, and my guesses as to the mental states causing that are no better than random. Their inner demons and happy ponies are totally different from the ones leading me astray.