You Are a Lot Harder to Understand Than You Think You Are

Do you ever feel misjudged or misunderstood? It happens to everyone. Here’s an explanation for why, and some things you can do about it.

Mark Wahlberg knows what we’re talking about. Or, does he? (Image/Twentieth Century Fox)

I felt it in my marriage. I feel it sometimes because of feedback on my work. And you probably have too.

That feeling of being misunderstood or misjudged. Maybe by your romantic partner or child. Maybe by a friend, neighbor, or colleague at work.

It’s a problem for all of us as we attempt to build and maintain relationships in all walks of life.

Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson is among the world’s thought leaders on the subject. Halvorson is a social psychologist and associate director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. She is also the author of No One Understands You and What to Do About It.

The premise of my work is rooted in the strong belief that most marriages and romantic relationships break down slowly over time because of the accumulation of experiences (most routine and appearing to be minor and largely non-threatening) that erode trust and result in the loss of connection and intimacy with one another. It’s a long way of saying, two people accidentally hurt each other, are ineffective at repair, and eventually one or both of them will want to leave.

It's not what anyone wants. They didn’t get married and have children just to watch their personal lives implode 10-20 years later. It’s the byproduct of how our behavior is affecting another person without us taking meaningful action to repair the damage and curb relationship-harming behavior.

Interestingly, to me at least, is the notion that two people often disagree on whether their behavior is actually harming the relationship. When we don’t understand the problem, or are not understanding the other person, then we’re also not doing anything to make it better.

That, in my estimation, is most relationships in a nutshell. And it largely comes back to this idea that Halvorson has spent so many years studying: You are a lot harder to understand than you think you are.

Much of Halvorson’s work focuses on workplace relationships, but one of my favorite things is borrowing awesome ideas from other places that can be applied to our interpersonal relationships, and near as I can tell, Halvorson’s work has a ton of crossover.

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How and Why Do the Misunderstandings or Misjudgments Happen in the First Place?

It seems obvious when you hear or read it, but most of us don’t calculate for the conditions which result in the first misunderstanding domino to fall.

People misunderstand and misjudge us (and we do so to them) because of the discrepancy between what we know about ourselves versus what someone else knows about us. For a moment, set aside the idea that most romantic partners are quite familiar with one another. Halvorson’s lesson here is contextually designed for first meetings and professional relationships. But that doesn’t make it irrelevant to how we’re showing up with our partner or children at home.

Things You Know That Others Don’t Know

• Your intentions

• Your thoughts

• Your feelings

Things They Know That You Might Not Know

• Your facial expressions

• Your body language (if you’re not playing close attention)

Things They See and Have Access To With Limited Context

• Your behavior

• What you say

“Beauty is in the eye of the perceiver, but so is everything else,” Halvorson said while giving a 99U talk.

Other people’s impressions of us have almost as much to do with them as what we might be doing and saying, but I would argue that we are responsible for doing the work to be understood. We don’t get to simply write people off as misjudging us whenever we feel misunderstood and expect our relationships with them to be healthy and functional. Multiply that by a thousand for interpersonal relationships like marriage and long-term partnership.

Here's an example from an article in The Atlantic showcasing the innocent way two well-intentioned people can misunderstand one another:

There are two co-workers. One of them appears to be overworked and stressed because he’s been coming into work early and going home late. So his colleague, wanting to be helpful and generous, offers some of her time to help him with his project workload. But he doesn’t interpret her offer as generous whatsoever. He interprets her wanting to help as a lack of faith in his abilities.

It’s one of many psychology quirks that can make it tricky to get an accurate read on someone’s emotions, which I submit is at the epicenter of the accidental conflict that can arise in marriage and romantic relationships.

It's nonetheless useful to consider the ingredients people are using when forming their impression of us (and for self-awareness—how we are perceiving them; because we are equally likely to be misjudging others as being misjudged ourselves).

It’s not a clean psychic transfer of all of our beliefs and emotions clearly being registered by other people. They have an interpretation process that interrupts the transfer of information and sometimes (maybe even often) conclude something quite a bit different than what you intended and believed you were communicating.

The ingredients people use to interpret what they’re seeing and hearing are:

• Your actual words and actions go into their interpretation machine. And then they are filtered through another person’s stereotypes and assumptions, all of which happens subconsciously, Halvorson says. “You don’t even have to agree with a stereotype to be affected by it.”

• Their past experience with you gets mixed in.

• Stuff about them, Halvorson says, gets mixed in as well. “Their own issues and past experiences,” she said.

• And finally: Context. “Brains do not take context into account unless they have a lot of time, or are really motivated to do so,” Halvorson says.

What Kind of Assumptions Do People Make About You?

Let’s reverse-engineer that for perspective-shifting’s sake.

There are two things humans do, Halvorson says, that muck up our internal interpretation machines:

1. The assumption of false consensus – We believe our beliefs and preferences are shared by a lot of people. Religious or political beliefs. Our favorite foods or music or movies or activities. We have enormous blind spots to diverse thought and experiences. People who like chocolate ice cream believe more people like chocolate ice cream than actually do.

2. The assumption of false uniqueness – We tend to believe our good qualities are unique. Like how everyone believes they’re a good driver.

“It’s a big problem,” Halvorson says. “A problem for all of us.”

In general, people don’t realize how they’re coming across to others. But there’s good news when it comes to perception.

“People are wrong about us a lot of the time, but they’re not randomly wrong. They’re predictably wrong,” Halvorson says.

There’s a signal we’re trying to send. So the work of overcoming this misunderstanding tendency in human behavior is to amplify the signal to break through all of the noise of everyone’s subconscious biases and preconceived notions.

There are Three Lenses of Perception that shape how people see us, Halvorson says.

• Trust – We are wired to ask: Can I trust them?

• Power – What happens when people are in a position of power relative to you?

• Ego – What happens when you’re collaborating with other people, you’re successful, and how that affects them.

Power and Ego come into play a great deal in various work settings, but as I want to focus on our personal relationships, we’re going to lean into Trust, which I’ve long believed is the condition that correlates most closely to whether relationships are healthy and sustainable versus the ones that will end. Marriages last when two spouses trust each other. Marriages end when one or both spouses do not. And trust is eroded in relationships because of behaviors—sometimes seemingly tiny, no-big-deal incidents, as one partner sees them—many of us are not paying attention to.

When we mindfully focus on Trust, we can’t help but pay attention to the behaviors, situations, or conditions affecting it.

Trust, in Halvorson’s work, is earned by your ability to project two qualities: Competence and Warmth, which she illustrates in this fantastic chart of Simpsons characters for ease of understanding.

Image/Heidi Grant Halvorson

Building and maintaining trust in our relationships happens when our words and actions result in other people feeling known. Like, they believe wholeheartedly that we fully know and understand them (which doesn’t happen when there is a lot of conflict, misunderstandings, etc.). This happens by truly seeing and truly hearing someone else when they share themselves with us—a process that breaks down consistently in romantic relationships and leads to all sorts of problems and pains.

Halvorson’s lesson on projecting warmth is no more complicated than a handy checklist for how we must be showing up in our interpersonal relationships if we want trust and connection.

How to Project Warmth

• Maintain eye contact

• Smile

• Nod

• Actually listen

• Be affirming

Again, these are Halvorson’s tips for building trust and not being misunderstood in professional settings. But think about how often we fail to execute some or all of these basic communication behaviors with the people we claim to care about most.

Want to project warmth? Want to build (or attempt to rebuild) trust in your relationships? Be very, very, very mindful of these basic How to Show Up in Conversation tips, and give those you love the gift of making them feel seen and heard and known because of your words and actions in everyday conversation.

It can be upsetting to feel misjudged. It can be uncomfortable and frustrating to feel misunderstood.

But if we can become more mindful of how we work, and how other people work, and focus on positively influencing whatever is within our sphere of influence, then we can make meaningful change to the degree of mutual understanding between us and the people we care about.

And sometimes that’s the difference between marriage, and families, and relationships that last a lifetime, and those that do not.

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Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.