Nobody Understands Me? Or I Cannot Understand Them?

We may have experienced situations in life that made us think “nobody understands me”. Or we may have been perplexed by other people’s behaviour and might be thinking “I simply cannot understand why they are like that”.

If this is the case, our experience of being understood or understanding others is not balanced. Let’s work on it! Here, we will identify:

• 3 key reasons for understanding disbalance
• traumatic experiences that caused understanding challenges
• ways to overcome understanding disbalance

3 Key Reasons for Understanding Disbalance

1st Reason – Disbalance in Our Perception of Understanding 

We will start with our perception of understanding. We may stop for a moment and ask ourselves what we believe understanding is. It would be useful also to identify what we perceive to be the opposite of understanding.

If we look into the meaning of understanding we can find two key distinct elements:

• “Being sympathetically aware of other people’s feelings, tolerance and forgiveness”
• “Having insight or good judgement”.

Now we can revisit our perception of understanding. Are we only perceiving the forgiving aspect of understanding or are we focused on insight and good judgement? Our challenge with understanding can be caused by this disbalance.

2nd Reason – Fear of Understanding 

It is interesting that many clients had fears related to understanding. We can feel fears related to both, being understood and being understanding.

The fears of being understood include:

• Fear that if others understand us, they can use this information against us
• Fear that people will know too much about us if they really understand us, and we want to hide parts of us

In the case of understanding others, we may

• Fear that others will abuse our understanding, become selfish and not consider our needs

3rd Reason – Arrogance and Unworthiness 

Not being understood and not being understanding may be hiding our arrogance behind it. Arrogance – If nobody understands me, or I have difficulty understanding others, I may have a belief that I am either very special or better than others. And in this case, lack of understanding is a “good” indicator of our value.

Unworthiness – Alternatively, we may believe we cannot be understood because what we are is worthless and different from others.

It may be important to note here that

arrogance and unworthiness are often two sides of the same coin.

We will dive in now into information coming from the Paradox- x practice on the traumatic experiences that typically cause challenges with understanding.

 Traumas Causing Understanding Challenges

While working with clients on the understanding of disbalance two main types of traumatic experiences surfaced:

• We were judged for something we did without being heard about the reasons for it
• We felt like a bother to others and we could not express ourselves

And we were subjected to harsh judgment, abandonment or ignorance.

 3 Steps in Overcoming Understanding Disbalance

We defined understanding at the beginning of the blog. We also identified the reasons for and causes of the disbalance. Now, it is time to take steps towards transformation.

1^st step – Balance out our perception of understanding

2^nd step – Deal with traumatic experiences that caused fears and created a polarity split (arrogance/unworthiness)

3^rd step – Strengthen the key accompanying virtues that can make understanding possible including

• compassion and empathy
• clarity (to see ourselves and others clearly)
• discernment (what is in alignment and what is not)
• honesty (being willing to share the truth)
• bravery (being brave despite potential consequences or honesty)

In the case of more challenging traumatic experiences, you may resort to therapeutic methods to support you.

Paradox-x Method has proven to be successful in overcoming deep traumas and supporting transformation processes.

Through its processes, we can also address the unworthiness/arrogance polarisation and build healthy confidence and understanding.