How Could You Think That of Me?

Written By Libby Sinback

Transcript

Early on, in my relationship with Drew, we had a somewhat memorable fight. Drew was telling me about a new coworker at his office and he referred to this person as a girl. And so I think I kind of just quipped back at him. I don't think your company hired any children. So I think the appropriate term for your coworker is woman or something like that. And drew just sort of scoffed at me and said, well, yeah, of course. And then I think I probably felt a little bit like my point wasn't being taken seriously. So I pressed a little further to say that referring to adult women as girls is sexist after that drew got kind of quiet and maybe I might have pushed on my point a little bit more, but he didn't really engage with me any further on it. Then for the next few days, he, at least this is what I remember.

He acted somewhat cold and withdrawn towards me. I think I didn't really understand why at the time, but when he was ready, he told that he'd been really hurt by what I'd said. He told me that I should have known him well enough to know that he's a feminist and that he would never be intentionally sexist. I think I might have gotten defensive then and said something like that. I, I did know that he was a feminist, but that I still think it's sexist to call adult women girls. And then he kind of pushed back and said that I should know that he didn't mean it that way. And you know, give him the benefit of the doubt. Have you ever had a fight like this with someone you love where you know, there's some kind of conflict, but the conflict is made even worse because either you or your partner just don't feel properly seen or understood. Well, that's what I'm gonna talk about today.

So I saw this meme on the internet the other day, it was a drawing of two books. One book was very, very slim, just a few sheets of paper. And that book had the title. What you said the other book next to it was huge thousands of pages and it towered over the other book. The other book was titled how much I read into it. Of course, we all laugh at this meme. The, because this kind of misunderstanding or mischaracterization is so common. And I'm gonna tell you today about why it is so upsetting, why it's inevitable, how not to handle it and what to do. Instead, the moments when you don't feel seen often happen when someone in your life misperceives your intent. And that usually becomes a problem because whatever they are perceiving is upsetting them or it's causing them to bring up some kind of concern they have to you.

So usually what's going on is some kind of conflict. In the example I gave just a little while ago with drew, I was bothered by the sexism of the word choice girl, to be clear, I didn't actually believe he was consciously being sexist. I know we're culturally conditioned to describe women as girls. I've probably described women as girls. And I figured that this was just something he hadn't examined and bothered to fix in his usage rather than something he was deliberately trying to do to diminish his female coworkers. But he was really upset that I would even think that he could possibly be in any way sexist. And he was honestly more upset about what he imagined that I was thinking about him than I actually was about his word choice. And it's so easy for some like this to get really blown up. It's because with our loved ones, we are seeking intimacy, which Esther Perel beautifully describes as into me, C we want to be seen and understood by those closest to us.

We wanna be truly known. Some psychologists believe that we actually really need understanding more than we need love a and this kind of makes sense to me because if we're loved but not seen, then it can be hard to believe that that love is even really real, that we're really being loved for who we truly are. And here's an interesting one. When researchers put subjects into an F MRI, when subjects felt like they were understood the regions of the brain that lit up were the ones associated with reward and social connection being seen and understood increases our sense of wellbeing and belonging to others. Scientific research has shown that feeling understood actually increases not only our mental health, but also our physical health too. <Affirmative> and when we're not understood, we end up feeling lonely and estranged and loneliness has been shown by multiple research studies to not only be emotionally and psychologically taxing, but as harmful to physical health, as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, loneliness can kill you.

Not being understood can also affect feelings of secure attachment. Do you remember the three components of healthy attachment, accessible, responsive, attuned? If your loved one isn't seeing you clearly, or you don't feel seen by them, then you probably don't feel that they're attuned to you. And if you're trying to make yourself understood, but your partner isn't catching on, then you might feel that they're not accessible or responsive. Either. All of this shows me why drew was hurt by our interaction. He really is the sort of person who does the work to help mantle systems of oppression. So I get that me calling him on a blind spot that he had and him imagining what I might have been thinking about him as a result of that was really upsetting, especially cuz like I was his closest person. And I wanna say that even though in this particular example, drew was the one who felt misunderstood.

There have been heaps of times between us where it's gone the other way. And I didn't feel understood by him. And in the past when this would happen, you bet I would get super reactive to it. Super defensive feeling misunderstood has actually been a huge kryptonite for me. I used to find it devastating and it didn't even have to be someone I was close to understanding me. It could be pretty much anyone. I think this is because my intention is to always present myself as authentically as possible. And so when someone would misinterpret something I said or did, when I'm putting everything out there at face value, it would just send me into a tailspin. But here's the bitter pill. No one we'll ever perfectly see you or understand you all of the time. Yes. Even your closest, most beloved people. Remember when I told you about this phrase, the story I'm making up.

Well yeah, you make up stories and so does every person in your life, they are all going to make up stories about you based on what you say and the actions that you take. Hopefully most of the time, the stories will be aligned with who you truly are. And sometimes the people who really love you may even interpret your words and actions more generously than you would. I call this rounding up. But sometimes people just get it wrong. Even people you're super close to who love you deeply. And why? I mean a whole bunch of reasons, because it often happens in a conflict. They might be upset. They might be triggered. They might be depressed. They might be projecting or they, they might just be having a bad day. But also sometimes we are just different and we see things differently as I think was originally written in the Talmid.

We do not see others as they are. We see them as we are. We are always going to be perceiving other people's behavior through the lens of our own behavior and our own perceptions and our own experience, our own triggers, our biases, et cetera. And if we're different, sometimes we may have a harder time understanding and being understood. And yet it's really common to end up partnered with people who are very different from us, even polar opposite to us. I mean, how often do introverts partner with extroverts neuro atypicals partner with neurotypicals boundary people ending up very close to people who are boundaryless, pursuers being drawn to ERs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. <Laugh> and I think there's a good reason for this. I think we often seek out people who are different from us because we want to be understood by them and we want to understand them and we want to understand ourselves better.

This last one is huge because just as I said that others aren't able to perfectly understand you. You also can't perfectly understand yourself all on your own. You actually need other people as reference points. Other people who are different from you, other people who are the same as you, other people who can help us better know ourselves through knowing them and being known by them. There are some people who believe that this is one of the main purposes of relationships to grow and create a better understanding of ourselves. People can act as mirrors and mirrors are not just valuable because they reflect us back to ourselves, but they can also help us see our blind spots. I mean, think about it. Isn't that why we have mirrors when we're driving a car so we can see our blind spots and we all have blind spots, particularly because we see things through our own lens.

So others can help us see better. Some times someone may see something about you that you could never have seen without them. And being able to be seen better than we can see ourselves is one of the tremendous gifts of relationship. But of course it can be hard if they're seeing something we don't like. And of course it can feel terrible if it doesn't ring true or fair. As in the case of my example with drew, it was a little bit of both. I was intending to reflect back blind spot to him. But what he experienced was me saying that he was a sexist person and that part was actually him misunderstanding me, but I can see how it hurt. So what do you do when someone totally misreads you or you think they're misreading you? I have a practice for you, but first I think I need to touch on intent versus impact.

A lot of times when we're feeling misunderstood or not seen properly, what we're upset about is someone misreading our intent and thing. People like to say nowadays is that your intent doesn't matter. Only your impact. This concept shows up a lot in callout culture. When someone is called out for a harmful action, such as a racist or a sexist remark, often the person called out feels the need to defend their intent because they don't wanna be seen as a person who is racist or sexist. And I personally believe that most people who say hurtful, things like that, don't intend to, they just have a blind spot. They have some work they need to do. They need to take a look, but in call out call culture. The resounding position is that whether someone intends to be harmful or not is irrelevant. If you say something harmful, you're wounding someone.

And it's just like, if you accidentally elbow someone in the face and break their nose, it doesn't matter whether or not you meant to do that. The person's nose is still broken and they're still bleeding. And I really, I rock that. I can see why intent really does feel irrelevant to the person who has been hurt. Because if you're like bleeding, you don't really care whether someone meant to do it or not. You just need some first aid. But for the person who took that action, if that's you, your intent matters a lot to you and how you're seen others probably also matters a lot to you too. This can especially feel important to you if this kind of thing happens within a small community where how you're perceived impacts whether or not you're included or feel like you belong. And I can imagine it feels even more important.

If we're talking about an intimate relationship where how you're seen affects how you're loved, but okay. I, I still, I need to go back to this. Have you ever seen a fight like this? Like this call out kind of thing, go down on the internet, say in like a Facebook group or something. I, I swear I could write out the pattern and it's always the same person makes harmful comment. Other community members point out the harmful comment person gets defensive points out that they had good intent. Maybe even doubles down on their comment because they think that if they show their intent as context, then the comment will be taken the way that they meant it. Community members get upset because their harm goes unacknowledged and they push harder on their point. Person gets defensive and angry and maybe hurt. And then eventually they feel kind of drummed out of the community and maligned the community members write that person off because they were never accountable for the thing they set.

And this is also how fights often go. When there's a misunderstanding in close, loving relationships, they can escalate in the same way. Your partner comes to you with a concern or a hurt about something you've done or said, you get upset about how they're interpreting your actions and you get defensive. And then they have to defend bringing up their concern or hurt against your hurt that you're not seen properly, which can get really upsetting because then what they are upset about, isn't getting addressed and then you'll get hurt and they'll get hurt. And up and up, it goes until so while I get how upsetting it is to be misunderstood. And I mean, I, I really get it. It doesn't work to try to defend yourself. Believe me, I've tried that one way too much. So just trust me ironically, by defending yourself, you can even end up re thing.

Someone's negative story about you. Here's an example. Let's say someone is accusing you of acting self-absorbed and then you get in an argument with them about how you're not self-absorbed. And then what you're doing is you're making the fight about you and the fight about correcting how they're seeing you. Instead of getting curious about what it is, that's actually upsetting them. That's making them think yourself absorbed and isn't that kind of self-absorbed <laugh> I think it's so common for us to get caught up in the stories. Other people are making up about us, but it's a losing strategy to try to change someone's mind directly. When I, I offered you the phrase, the story I'm making up, it was to help you examine your own perceptions of a situation and accepting that you can't see things perfectly. So as to give the other person, you're talking to a chance to make themselves better understood, but at the end of the day, you can't control someone else's perception of anything, including you trying to talk them out of what they believe they're seeing, can feel controlling and making it all about you.

It is important to remember that whatever someone might be seeing is just a story. It's still just their perception. While I think it's really important sometimes to get perspectives from the people in your life about yourself. You also can't define yourself around what someone else thinks about you. Even someone you deeply love. You also need to have your own sense of who you are. And what's true for you. This is what Brene brown was talking about when she wrote her book, braving the wilderness, which is about this idea of true belonging. She said that she initially defined belonging as the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Then she said, because this yearning is so primal. We often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutions for belonging, but often barriers to it.

True belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world. Our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self acceptance. But then she goes on. She writes, this definition has withstood the test of time, as well as the emergence of new data. But it is incomplete. There is much more to true belonging. Being ourselves means sometimes having to find the courage to stand alone, totally alone. It's not something we achieve or accomplish with others. It's something we carry in our heart. Once we belong thoroughly to ourselves and believe thoroughly in ourselves, true belonging is ours. And I think here, what she's getting at is that, yes, it's so important to allow yourself to be completely seen by those you love. And it's also important to be okay if they don't. What I want to offer you now is a practice that will help you belong to yourself so that your sense of belonging doesn't depend on your loved ones or anyone really seeing you perfectly all the time.

The goal here is to help you stay out of reactivity and instead engage with curiosity. And in order to do that, you need to protect yourself a little. Now I have to give credit. I learned this practice from Terry real. I was in a training with him a few years ago, and I asked him about this issue of not feeling seen. And he told me what I've told you, which is that no one is always gonna see you perfectly. And some people have a bad day. And then he said this, which I'll never forget. He said that new eating someone to see you perfectly all the time means you need better boundaries. He then explained what I'm gonna teach you now, which is how to create a protective boundary. You've heard me talk about emotional boundaries before, but this is a little bit different while your emotional boundary keeps you separate from another person's emotions.

This will help you separate your true self from other people's stories about you to make this more embodied. If you're in a safe place where you can do this and don't do this, if you're driving a car, please, <laugh>, I invite you to take one hand and place it on your abdomen. And then put the other hand Palm out in front. You like you're saying stop in the name of love. Anyway. the hand on your abdomen is what Terry real calls your containing boundary. That boundary controls what you let out of you. What you say, what you do this boundary is gonna keep you from defending yourself. So as you feel your hand on your abdomen, make that a signal to pause rather than react. The handout in front of you is your protective Foundry, which decides what you let in. And then the space in between your hands is a sort of decontamination area or a filter.

It's the space where you sort through the things that are said and determine what is, and isn't true for you. Your protective boundary does not let in what is not true for you now, what I mean by true here, isn't objective truth. Because in this case, there, there isn't really a, a thing. You know, it's all subjective, but in this case, it's what is, isn't true for you? Anything that doesn't ring true for you about you goes splat on your protective boundary, like a bug on a windshield. So in the example with drew the idea that he's a clueless sexist dude that goes splat, cuz it's, it's not true. Things that are true or are worth considering are allowed to go through your protective boundary. And so for those things, you lower your hand and you invite them into that space between in that space, you assess what you heard and determine what's true and what isn't, and then you fully let in the things that are true and consider them, you know, in the, in the example with drew, he did call a grown woman, a girl, and that's worth taking in and examining and deciding whether or not he needs to make a change to how he refers to people.

And you know, all throughout this, you keep your hand on your containing boundary to stay out of reactivity. This is essential to keep you open and curious as you're doing this, make sure you keep your protective boundary soft. You want it to be permeable. You don't wanna let it become a wall. You don't wanna be a person where everything you don't like that gets said about you go splat on your protective boundary because sometimes the things that come to you are things you need to hear allowing others inside your protective boundary can be incredibly valuable for growth and understanding. And it's also an opportunity to deepen connection, but you also need, need to be willing to let go of rather than fight whatever isn't true. I realize as I'm saying this, that some of you may want to resist this practice. I acknowledged earlier that not feeling seen feels lonely and I get that.

So you're urge to fix the misunderstanding and have it fixed as quickly as, as possible is really understandable. But do you know what feels even more lonely than not being seen escalated, unresolved conflict. And if someone is expressing something that they're concerned about, even if they have it all wrong, they might be feeling awfully lonely to, that's why it's so important to get curious, instead of reactive, reactive means nobody's gonna get heard. Curious means there's the opportunity for everyone to get heard. And remember before what I said about intent versus impact and that person with the bloody nose in real life, if you had accidentally elbowed someone in the face and broken their nose, you wouldn't be making a big effort to fight with them in that moment about what you intended, even if they were cursing you out for breaking their nose and blaming you and telling you that you did it on purpose, you probably wouldn't argue with them in that moment.

You would probably just get them some first aid and you'd probably be apologizing profusely for being such ALU. And probably as you cared for them, that would more clearly demonstrate that you didn't mean to harm them than any amount of defending yourself. Could it's the same when someone is raising an issue to you, the first order of business is to address the primary hurt or upset rather than worrying about whether or not you're being seen. Clearly, you can't do that though. If you're in a reactive state and you're being defensive, which is why you need your protective boundary. In the case of my example with drew, you know, drew eventually was able to acknowledge that calling women, girls isn't a appropriate and has gotten more vigilant about checking his language for things like that, that don't align with his values. And we've actually had many conversations with this fight over the years.

And today he agrees that he had no business getting upset with me for bringing this up to him. And that it was probably an example of male agility. And he's been able to hear from me that my intent was to prevent him from saying something that would make other people, perceive him in a way that I knew he wasn't. However, in some cases, someone will raise something to you that you can't fix because it's all in their perception, which is at the moment completely off. And again, they might just be having a bad day or you may have inadvertently triggered them or they're projecting or transference or whatever whatever's going on. It's still something worth investigating and learning about if it's someone you care about and you can only do that. If you're able to stay out of reactivity, your goal is to speak, to understand and to figure out if anything you can do to make it better, a useful phrase I've picked up when someone is sharing an interpretation of my actions that I totally don't agree with is yeah, I can see that or I can understand how it felt that way.

It's a way of acknowledging their reality without agreeing to it. Whatever's going on in that moment where the person you love, isn't seeing you clearly you putting that aside and instead seeking to understand them will help them move through it. Then after their concerns have gotten some attention, if you still feel the need, you can circle back with them and attempt to clear up your own intent or any other misunderstanding you can say, even, Hey, you know, I heard the thing that was upsetting to you, but I just want you to know that it really hurt me that you thought that I would do it that way or that I would think that way or whatever you may find though, that in the process of repairing the initial issue, that the person you care about fixes the story all on their own, because actions speak louder than words.

When I made this shift and working my protective boundary and really started letting go of other people's stories about me, that didn't feel true or fair. It was a game changer. Like it really changed my life when I was able to accept that. It's just not possible for everyone to perfectly understand me all the time. And then just stop worrying about that so much. I found the peace and freedom to reach deep into who I know I truly am to be more generous with those I love and where I needed to to do better and act more in alignment with who I want to be. And then I'll just say, if you find yourself close to someone who consistently mischaracterizes you or persists and misunderstanding you, despite efforts to clear things up, then you might just wanna evaluate whether that person's really someone you wanna remain close to.

But again, try the not defending yourself thing first. So to recap, if you tend to get really hurt by being misunderstood, mischaracterized, not being given the benefit of the doubt or just not feeling seen, that's really understandable, but defensive won't help you get back into connection instead of getting reactive, it might be time for you to practice using your protective boundary. If it's true, let it in. If it's not keep it out and then consider getting curious about the other person who has their story, try to understand them. And if you can see what you can do to make things better, those actions are your best strategy to reconnect. And they'll demonstrate who you really are better than defending yourself will. And while it can be a little bit lonely, not to be seen, it's important to be able to roll with that sometimes because no one can ever see anyone else perfectly all of the time. We're always filtering everything through our own lenses, but moving through that and learning about each other is how we can create deeper understanding of ourselves and others and find our way back to connection together.

 
Libby Sinback
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