What If Understanding Is Not The Goal

Someone tells you, “I understand you,” and instead of feeling comforted, you feel more alone. That’s the tension we’re naming today, because partial understanding can sting in a way that open misunderstanding doesn’t. When someone gets the facts and the timeline but misses what it felt like, it creates a quiet disconnect: they think the gap is closed, while you’re still standing in it.

We dig into the difference between information and experience, and why knowing your story isn’t the same as understanding how it shaped you. We talk about the layers inside highly self-aware people, the way quiet can be mistaken for not caring, and why founders, leaders, mothers, caretakers, and anyone doing inner work often hold multiple truths at once. Love and hurt can coexist. Gratitude and grief can coexist. Healing and struggle can coexist. When people pressure us for a simpler answer, nuance gets flattened and we feel unseen.

We also draw a line between agreement and witnessing. Agreement requires similarity and can drift into enabling. Witnessing requires presence: “I see you,” “I believe this was real for you,” “I can respect your experience,” even when someone can’t fully live it, including around identity and racism. If you’ve been trying to find language for why you feel unseen around people who love you, this is for you. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs the words, and leave a review with what helps you feel truly witnessed.

Transcript

Welcome And The Core Feeling

0:01

Hey guys, welcome back to Exactly What I Mean. Today I want to talk about something that I think many of us may experience but rarely have language for, as most things that we talk about here, but it's this strange feeling that happens when someone says they understand you and you know they don't. Or, you know, maybe more accurately is they understand parts of you, but not all of you. And somehow that feels lonelier than being misunderstood altogether. Because at least when someone misunderstands you, everyone knows there's this like disparity, there's a gap. But when someone partially understands you, they can often be convinced that they fully understand you. And I think that's when things have gotten complicated. Recently, I found myself reflecting on a phrase that has stayed with me. Don't ever say I don't understand you. And on the surface, that sounds completely reasonable and

When “I Understand You” Misses

1:02

it's loving, and the intent behind it is pure, but something about it kept stirring with me because sometimes people do understand you, and just not completely. They understand the facts, they understand the timeline, they understand what happened, but they may not understand what it felt like, and those aren't the same thing. There is a difference between information and experience, and I think often we confuse knowledge with understanding. Knowing what happened is not the same thing as experiencing it. Knowing someone's story is not the same as understanding how it shaped them. Knowing that someone's decision is not the same as understanding what those decisions may have cost them. And you know, sometimes people understand the outcome, but not also like the weight or you know, the true impact. Like the intent can be beautifully pure, the understanding of what you did and like how it came across, but not necessarily what it took from you or what it gave

Information Versus Lived Experience

2:13

you, or there could be an understanding of the way that I responded, but not the internal conflict or battle that came before the response. And when that happens, I believe you can feel incredibly alone standing right next to someone whom genuinely believes that they understand you. But I have an understanding within myself that there are layers to being understood, and there's also layers of access that I've provided to people or haven't provided to people, and someone can understand my actions and still misunderstand my intention, and that goes the same way on the other side. Someone can understand your choices and still misunderstand your fears. Someone can understand your words and still misunderstand your experience. That's come up for me when it came to some like what I perceive to be racism. Someone can know like everything about your life and still not understand what it feels like to be you, and that does not make them bad. It makes them human, it makes you human, it makes the people that you interact with human. The problem begins when this partial understanding gets mistaken for complete understanding. And I believe that we also have to strip this need to be completely understood. Because if we are completely understood, then what is there to learn? You know, there's been this phrase that I've heard growing up about like if you're not learning, you're dead. Like if you're not growing, you're stagnant. So if we have a complete and total understanding of things, then there's no room left for curiosity. So even in relationship, there should still be room for curiosity, like with your partner. There should still be room for curiosity with your business, there should still be room for curiosity in your friendships. Because when there's no room for curiosity, then there's no room left for nuance, and there's no room left for the possibility that there's still maybe more beneath the surface. And this, as the last episode, we talked about like awareness. There is an experience, I think, of highly self-aware people.

Curiosity Beats Complete Certainty

4:36

I think it becomes especially true for who people who spend a lot of time reflecting. In a lot of my relationships, I get quiet, and people think that my quietness is like a lack of care, but it's really I'm processing and I'm reflecting. And I believe that this is extremely true for people that are founders, mothers, leaders, caretakers, people doing the inner work, people who spend time examining themselves because your internal world is layered, especially when there's all these different manifestations of you, and you can hold multiple things at once, you can hold two truths at once. You know, duality was like the trend word a couple years ago, but it's still very much relevant because you can love someone and still be hurt by them. You can be grateful for things and still be grieving things, you can be healing and struggling, you can be confident and uncertain, you can understand someone's perspective and still feel unseen by it. And sometimes when you try to explain those layers, people want a simpler answer that they can kind of put in a box or like be able to flatten, but not necessarily because they desire to flatten you, but because they need to conceptualize it for themselves, and that's where the dichotomy comes in when you want a black and white, you want either or not both and but life truly really happens in binaries. Gosh, I mean, I don't even think that most people are looking for agreement. I think they're looking for accurate witnessing, like an accurate witness, but even that is tough to ascertain because where were they standing for an accurate witness? I think there's also a difference in that same vein of like witnessing says, I see you, I see your experience, like I I saw that, and I think agreement it says I think you're right. Agreement can say like I would have done the same thing, but a witness and someone experiencing these things, like you're not always looking for, you're not looking for agreement. I don't, I think rarely human beings are looking for agreement. I mean, from a healthy perspective, like, because agreement can easily look like enabling, but what I desire is someone to witness. I desire for someone to

Witnessing Versus Agreement

7:11

say I see your experience or someone to say I appreciate where you're coming from and why that felt that way for you. I believe that witnessing requires presence and agreement requires similarity, and that's not always what we're looking for. So I don't know, maybe that's why being seen and witnessing feels so healing because it doesn't require someone to become you or abandon themselves. It just requires them to be curious enough to understand your experience. I don't know. It just I go back to the top of the episode where I really just mentioning to y'all that I think the loneliest experience in the world is just expecting to be seen, but only being partially understood. So in summation, I guess that's one of the loneliest experiences in the world isn't being misunderstood, it's just being partially understood and expecting to fully be seen. Like, do you want to be known or do you want to be witnessed? I know, even in this moment, I think that as I'm saying all this out loud, that there have been years that I've spent trying to explain the difference between those two. Maybe the goal isn't finding people who understand every part of us perfectly, just those that are committed to continuing to be curious without assumption, for people to actually ask, for people to leave room for the nuance, and for people to recognize that there are parts of our experiences that they cannot fully understand, and maybe we can offer that same grace in return. I think understanding can often point to a like destination, like that's the finality of it, and maybe that's the problem too. Well, y'all, if you've ever struggled to explain why you felt unseen despite being surrounded by people who love you, maybe this is exactly what you mean. If this episode resonated with you, please send it to someone who has ever said, I don't know how to explain it, because sometimes the greatest gift isn't solving someone's feelings. It could simply be helping them fine language for them. Until then, I'll see you next time.