Why They Don't Get You— Even When They Love You

How feeling misunderstood points to an essential truth about being human.

Recently my mother and I were sitting on my front porch hanging out, waiting for my father to come back from the hardware store.

She’s an artist with an extremely sharp visual sense. If things don’t look right to her, she notices.

Her acute visual perception, plus the way her personal internal reality works clues her into visual details way sooner than mine.

When something is off visually, it looks and feels wrong, immediately.

And, if she can influence how things look– say, by trimming the trees in my front yard or fixing my droopy shrubs– she will.

She’ll start pruning things.

She’ll beautify and sculpt until everything looks beautiful and right to her.

“The neighbor’s plants over there would look so much better if they did a little more maintenance,” she said.

This idea had not occurred to me in any way.

When I look over at my neighbor’s yards, I don’t usually think about the plants unless there is something extreme going on.

Or my attention is drawn there like she had just done.

I technically “see” the plants and get an idea if I like the whole scene or not, but that’s about as far as my thought process goes on it’s own.

I said slowly, “hmm.. I could see that.”

The way her face changed told me she thought I was hiding my disagreement or disinterest in what she said.

Without really considering why, I shared a truth about myself I had never considered explaining before.

“I don’t think you’re wrong about that. I’m sure those plants could look different with some pruning.

In my mind, it would never occur to me to think about changing those plants unless they are directly pointed out as possible like you just did.

That they could be changed at all doesn’t occur to me.

Plus, I don’t seem to get a good feeling if they were different. I’m not saying this not to disagree with how you think about it though.”

She considered my point and said, “it’s what I see right away and then it keeps drawing my attention. It’s annoying to me when things look overgrown.”

“Interesting,” I said and pointed toward the neighbor’s yard.

“When I look out this way, my eye is drawn to that big tree across the street. It reminds me of when I was a kid and we used to visit Holiday Park.

Then I remember playing at that park and feel a warm, happy feeling.

That the tree could be pruned differently is not a thought I am very likely to think.

Now that you point it out, I suppose it could look different and maybe that would feel better once I saw it.”

She pointed at some exposed pipe near my front door, “Like that. That is offensive,” she said jokingly.

I laughed and agreed the pipe was ugly and I didn’t like it either. We moved on to planning what could be done about it.

This short interaction points out a simple truth which is a big deal.

It’s not only that ugly visual phenomena is offensive to her.

That’s what the world looks like to her.

I love beautiful things when I see them, but creating a beautiful space or changing what I see around me is something that rarely occurs to me.

It’s usually an invisible idea.

In my reality, things in the 3D world simply are how they are.

For example, I would be WAY more likely to move somewhere new than remodel a house without a lot of professional design help.

My habitual thoughts and reference point are completely different than hers (or anyone else’s).

Not just in the content or context, as in “we agree on this or not” or “we don’t know the same amount of data” but in the structure which our thoughts appear and are experienced.

My mother can conjure up something beautiful entirely in her imagination and then switch out the details all in her head before she creates anything in her 3D reality.

This whole ability seems like magic to me.

It’s a giant pain in the butt for me to have to see all the options before I can decide if any of them look right.

Beautification feels annoying and hard and it’s why I have beige walls that require very little thought.

Shopping or discernment around anything that requires visual choices feels draining.

My reality is different than hers (and yours, and everyone’s) in a way we’ll both never be able to completely understand.

And, having this level of awareness around just how different my reality is than anyone else has been both enlightening and useful.

This difference in reality between two people is behind most– if not all– misunderstandings in life.

People tend to automatically think that everyone thinks about things the same way they do and that the real “problem” with another person’s point of view is simple disagreement.

So we go about our lives treating these differences in perception as problems to solve or misunderstandings to be cleared up.

As if true consensus is actually possible in the first place.

There is a world of difference between knowing factually correct information about objective material facts and the implications of, “I think LIKE that, so I think everyone else does too.”

For example, my mother is such a visually aware person, she assumes that everyone else notices what she does.

Someone more likely to consider people and associations first will tend to assume everyone else appreciates connecting with others like they do.

Someone who experiences a lot of emotion will tend to think everyone else feels as much as they do.

People who use a lot of logic and reason tend to think others are willfully ignoring logical conclusions that are dead obvious to them.

It is very human to try to sort ideas and understand people by absorbing knowledge then applying it to our internal awareness of “how things work,” then deciding whether it “makes sense or not.”

Because our personal thinking is so familiar and automatic, we often miss that others don’t just have different beliefs— they experience the world in ways we can’t fully access or feel ourselves.

But, we’re social creatures who want to experience together, be understood, seen, witnessed, and share connection.

Given how different our experiences are, it’s miraculous that we have the potential for such deep connections in the first place.

Because it’s so easy for our experience to get lost in translation, it’s no surprise that we tend to like and love people who think similarly to us.

When there is shared understanding, we have an easier time feeling safe, open and willing to let people know who we really are underneath.

When I’m coaching a couple, the real issue is usually this: their separate realities aren’t meeting in any shared understanding or connection yet.

And it cannot be underestimated just HOW different and separate these realities are.

Not only because of culture, socialization, gender, or lived experience.

Because neither can truly know what the color red looks like to the other.

Or what an experience truly feels like. Or which thoughts follow that experience.

Or what thought sparked that feeling. And that one. And so on.

Since everyone filters reality through their own personal system of mind, consciousness and thought, no one sees their world in exactly the same way.

Elizabeth Stone, Transformative Coach