If They Do Not Understand Me, Then I Do Not Exist

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

“If they don’t understand me, then I don’t.”

At the thought of this, the brain of many of us is filled with a thick fog.

It becomes so unbearable that you have to defend yourself. For example, change a combination of words by redoing equality.

Not "they do not understand me = I do not," but "they do not understand me = there is no other for me anymore."

The other is no longer important to me, and no matter what he says, it makes no sense.

We need to slip out of the relationship before we can talk about rapport.

Stay in company with loneliness and fear. Throw about in doubts, but can I be understandable and interesting to someone at all.

Fog in the head limits visibility: before our eyes are only qualities and behavior attributed to another person, through which it is easier for us to explain our own detachment.

"I'm pulling back because you don't understand me."

Whether this is really so, we no longer double-check.

Because we do not know how to recognize mutual differences without blurring the boundaries of our own identity. In my head there is a conviction that there can be only one truth, and if in the dialogue one man was able to defend his truth, then the second, automatically, is not right. Or this truth is so uninteresting that the other does not even honor it with his attention.

If there is no interest, then there are no us either: identity creeps into shapeless fragments from unbearable experiences of oneself. The world becomes dangerous, splits in the borderline paradigm into "friends" and "aliens", where you need to look for the "one" who does not need to explain anything - everything is clear from a half-word, with whom the desires are one for two. In order to be reflected in another by general views on life and in this reflection to feel - I am.

But the real world is different.

Real people live in it, with whom you need to build real relationships. Like us, they are also afraid of something and protect themselves from their fears. Like us, they want to be heard and understood, but they cannot always say so directly. Instead, they argue, devalue, distance themselves, hallucinate in their own projections, refraining from the risk that always exists in a relationship.

Everything is what we do.

And there is no other way to clarify what is happening in our relationship than to start talking about it.

Yes, it's scary. It seems that this is a great risk and it is impossible to "survive" in it. But any real relationship is a risk.

To count on the absence of risk means to feed your own neurosis, to immerse yourself in an internal confrontation in which there is never satisfaction.

Emotions, the experience of living in which is negligible, will always seem to us such that it is difficult to "survive". And for the experience to appear, you need to take at least a small step from internal confrontation to external clarification of relations. It is clarification, not clarification, as many see it.

You can notice that you can SURVIVE in this if you are in dynamic contact with yourself, with others, with the world, creatively react to changes in the environment and in yourself. To see what is actual and "invisible" is what is not realized at the moment, for example, hidden possibilities, including the possibilities of self-expression. Smoothly move from one point of view to another, from understanding your separateness and a broader understanding of the context of what is happening, which can sometimes be very difficult.

To see what your actual needs or previous frozen gestalts you are guided by in communication, what meanings you give to them, how you organize your own experience, what is beyond the limits of awareness and what real choices you still have.