I’ll let you in on a little secret. We who carry with us the legacy of a troubled childhood sometimes talk about the people who don’t. You know, the ones who had fairly normal childhoods with just a sprinkling of trauma and have gone on to become well-adjusted adults without years of therapy or going on a spiritual quest in India or having a near-death experience.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I think we attract and are attracted by people who have similar world views to our own. And we are also heavily influenced by the five people we spend the most time with (or three, or ten, but you get the idea). So I have a lot of investment in the idea of spending time with emotionally healthy people, including those who had pretty happy childhoods.
But I’ve noticed a theme in recent conversations about these people. Words like “boring” and “not very deep” tend to come up. And when I pushed a little harder, a friend said, “What I really want is someone who will understand. And people who are happy and healthy won’t be able to understand.”
We get so excited when we find someone who “understands,” and we look with eagerness for our commonalities. “Wow, you’re a Disneyland person? I’m a Disneyland person too!” or “Your favorite book is my favorite book!” or “We both know this obscure fact about this obscure interest!” And abracadabra, instant bonding. We do the same thing with tragedy. There is no time when people will be more likely to share stories of everyone they’ve known who has ever died than when you are grieving yourself.
But I question the whole idea of understanding. Can anyone else ever truly understand what it is to be me, and what it means to have my experiences? We can build up models of each other, sure, and keep adding details for ever-increasing accuracy, but even then we are not understanding so much as empathizing. We can use our imaginations to put ourselves into someone else’s shoes, but we can never truly know what those shoes feel like.
We see this in good writing. It’s why choosing the point of view character(s) is so critical. The story completely changes based on who is telling it, even if most of the events and even scenes are the same. I see this when I talk to my sister. We both lived through many of the same formative events, and yet today when we talk about it, it’s vividly clear that we had completely different experiences. The details we remember are different, and our impressions of each other from that time are often inaccurate. We think we understand, and yet sometimes that false impression has actually kept us farther apart.
Understanding is overrated. What I’m interested in and what I want for myself is empathy. And empathy, and the personal depth and wisdom that having empathy requires, can be given regardless of childhood experience. The whole point of empathy is the cognizance that you can’t completely understand, even if you’ve had similar experiences; that you aren’t the other person and the whole sum of past and present, personality and passions, fears and flaws that makes them who they are. And in spite of that, in spite of the impossibility of understanding, you’re willing to sit with them and listen to them and try to hold as much as them as possible in your mind so you can see who they are, even though it’s sometimes so hard to leave yourself out of that picture. And yet somehow, even though it sounds hard and complicated, many of us are surprisingly good at being empathetic.
I don’t understand you, not really. And you don’t understand me. We come from different places, and we live in different worlds. But we can still find a way to know each other.
The Practical Free Spirit 
The last paragraph is powerful to me. I sometimes wonder of forgiveness is the better part of understanding. Certainly without empathy there can be no connection. Anyway nice to have found this |blog
Yes, it’s amazing how much connection empathy can create.
Yes. I think many people are good at empathy because not understanding is a simple thing – not an easy thing, but a simple one. And we all have a lot more experience not understanding something, but trying to take it in anyway and assuming provisionally that we know what we must to get on, than we do truly understanding something (much less someone) even a little bit. The trouble comes when we go beyond believing that we have provisional understanding to a belief in our true understanding, or so I suspect.
Yet I still want to be understood. I know it can’t happen – but I also know I can’t read every good book that will ever be written before I die, and yet that knowledge doesn’t change the wish for it. I’ll settle for empathy though.
There’s a strange interaction I feel between wanting to be seen as special and wanting to be understood. In a strict sense neither is possible, and if they were then they would preclude each other (since being special includes a sense of being unique, for me, which would be impossible for any theoretical beings who would fully understand each other), and yet through a softer use of these terms (knowing each other through empathy, for instance) it seems to me that both understanding and seeing someone as special become the same thing.
I really like the last point you make there about the softer use of the terms. Yes, that. Thank you.
“What I really want is someone who will understand. And people who are happy and healthy won’t be able to understand.”
A few days ago I was thinking about this question: “If you put two broken people together do either of them ever come out fixed?” I guess this question might be somewhat answerable by a study of people who attend AA meetings or combat veterans dealing with all the psychological scars that leaves.
It’s good to be understood on a certain level. To be able to talk about something you’re passionate about and not have people stare at you like you’re mad, to not have them ask “Why on earth would you like that???”
For a long time I’ve believed “I know how you feel” may be one of the most worthless expressions. Not because it’s insincere or that the reaction so often is “No you don’t!” I think it’s worthless because my response to it is “So what?!” Yes, perhaps you do have a fair to good understanding of how I feel and can accurately empathize with me. But what good does that do? That others have experienced the same pain for the same reason does nothing to alleviate that pain – at least not for me.
I wonder if the mentality of many people like your friend may be skewed for reasons they don’t recognize and/or admit. It’s not that happy healthy people can’t understand them or can’t relate to them. Instead, they know they’re damaged goods; they believe others will see recognize this and reject them. Happy, healthy people can find other happy healthy people to have happy healthy relationships with, to raise happy, healthy families with, etc.
My feelings from my experience are broken people just inevitably start tripping all over the pieces of each other. Sure, they might be able to understand you. But you’re each often caught up in your own problems. And who are you really supposed to turn to for help? How is someone who doesn’t have it together supposed to help you get yourself together? I want someone to call me on my crazy because they have a proper frame of reference for what isn’t crazy.
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