To Misunderstand and Be Misunderstood

The space between hearing a story and fixing a story.

One of my favorite archetypes/personas is the one of the “nerd”, specifically the one that goes:

Um Actually … ☝🤓

There’s something precious about the people who feel compelled to correct the wrongs they see in the world. There’s a sacred drive to preserve the Truth and cohere our social fabric. Otherwise, would we not descend into uncivilized chaos?

There is even a Cunningham’s Law that follows from this archetype, as manifested in society, which goes: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

I, myself, can be quite the representation of this archetype.

Recently, upon overhearing someone saying something like “… and David is very excited to do this.”

I quickly called out, from another room no less: “I’m excited. I’m not very excited.”

This is very important! We can’t just embellish everything without calibration. If we anchor too much on “very excited” as a fair representation of “excited”, then will we represent “very excited” with “very very excited”?! That’s a slippery slope to meaninglessness! Words have meanings! We must have shared and calibrated benchmarks or we will lose our very means to communicate.¹

This can be especially agitating when the subject described is close to one’s sense of identity. It’s not just someone random who’s feeling very excited, it’s me – and I most certainly am not very excited 😤. After all, only I know my interior, so surely I am the authority on what is the “correct” interpretation of my experience.

After all, when others “misunderstand” who we understand ourselves to be, it can feel quite hurtful.

If I believe myself to be a loving friend, my friend says to me “You don’t care about me at all” can be a devastating experience – the erasure of all the effort and thought put into the relationship.

The instinct, stemming from a literal survival sense to protect one’s existence (of identity/ego), often seeks to correct it: “That’s not true! Here is all the evidence that shows why that is not so.” – and on the argument would go, as we try our best to settle on “Truth”.

This is consequential beyond the personal. It’s reflected in the political as well. Imagine a logger who proclaims to an environmentalist that they don’t care about families and children because they are ruining jobs. The environmentalist would probably feel a flash of searing indignation – they are precisely fighting for the future so that there can even be a livable planet for families and children in the first place: “How dare they say this? They clearly don’t know the first thing about me!”

These dynamics are plenty and omni-directional: parent-child, employee-employer, politician-constituent, nation-nation, the polarizing political topic du jour, etc, etc.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. – Victor Frankl

We can certainly say that the desired state is one of curiosity. Some

thing like: “What you say surprises me. Why do you think I don’t care about [this thing that I believe I care about]?”

But how could I not be inflamed when someone misunderstands something so central and critical?

Yet, what does it mean to be misunderstood anyway?

To be misunderstood is to assume there exists a correct interpretation from which to mistake against. Understandably, as a unique consciousness, no one has access to our interiority quite like ourselves. We know and experience the intricacies of our interiority all our lives – naturally, we have advanced insight into its workings.

However, does the familiarity make it True?

To have authority on something is quite different than to claim Truth. It may be that others may have authority on the subject as well. This is not only so for “objective” domains like “How much is climate change man-made”, it’s also the case for our subjective experiences. Consider a wise teacher who may know a student’s experience better than they do, thereby able to act as a guide in learning or a wife who knows a husband’s idiosyncrasies better than he does.

In fact, it’s hard to say whether we can even be a good “authority” with respect to our own experience. I, for one, am often confused about many things. I don’t really know why I might feel less loved or more loved one day. It’d be rather tricky to discern the causality between whether my story about why I’m unloved is the reason I feel unloved or that my feeling unloved generated my story about why I’m unloved.

From my perspective, Intimacy is the quality by which anyone gains “authority” on a subject. By Intimacy here, I mean something like “making contact deeply” – thus gaining access to some subject’s qualitative nature. This could be intimacy with respect to a subject like Calculus, increasingly "grokking" the nature of change and how to describe it mathematically. It could also be with something ineffable like “Nirvana” or “Love”. Of course, this also applies to intimacy with respect to another person (or any organism for that matter), deeply relating to their life and experience.

Any sufficiently profound phenomenon in the universe, which certainly includes human experiences, should be multi-faceted enough that we can only ever have a partial grasp, or “map”, of the "territory".

This suggests that even with the greatest degree of “authority”/intimacy, one is still giving a perspective about some subject; which may or may not be relevant, nuanced, or profound.

Consider an example.

Let’s say I have a daughter. I love her and work hard to give her a fulfilling life. Naturally, I hope my daughter can appreciate this and that she also loves me.

One day, she says to me: “I hate you Dad! You ruin everything!”

What should I do upon hearing this?

Should I update my sense that perhaps I’m not as good of a father as I had thought? After all, regardless of my efforts, if the end result is her feeling this way, then clearly, I haven’t been effective. In fact, like how I might feel about my own parents as uncaring, I’m probably falling into the same pitfalls. She is probably correct.

Or, should I say that she’s wrong? I am her father and she doesn’t understand how much I do for her and the family – she’ll understand when she’s older. In fact, to demonstrate to myself I’m a good father, I know saying she misunderstands won’t help, so I won’t even argue with her. After all, I am the authority on my own experience and it’s understandable for her to misunderstand.

Rather than who owns the truth (or the authority to determine it), both perspectives can stand on their respective grounds, available for further investigation and intimacy.

I may be able to consider, at the union of both paths, that I still recognize what I do for the family and that surely for a subject as complex as fatherhood, I also only have a partial grasp on it. Here, my daughter is offering me an additional perspective, one that might help me understand fatherhood better. Sure, the perspective is rather emotionally charged and feels hurtful to receive, but wow, she sure feels strongly about it – what is this “everything” referring to; I certainly didn’t know I was ruining it. If I sufficiently felt why she feels I have so missed what she cares about, she may even be interested in how I felt about what she said.

In this interpretation, what matters is the draw towards further intimacy (as facilitated by a desire to understand). whether I am a “good” father is less relevant than my interest in what my daughter is perceiving. Who is misunderstanding whom and thus proves who has the “true” perspective is also less relevant than simply the information latent in her perception.

In this interpretation, there’s no such thing as a mis-understanding. There are only different understandings, with varying degrees of intimacy, which all aggregate together to form the wholeness of the subject in question.

I’m the father who works hard for his family and the father who in this moment his daughter experiences “hate” for him.

In the moment when the person said “David is very excited to …”, my correction to “excited” may have prevented a misunderstanding, but in doing so, I simultaneously closed off the re-understanding that I could be “very excited” instead.

To protect my notion of “truth”, I’ve tossed aside “possibility”.

Surely, I’m large enough that the seed of “very excited” was waiting to sprout, and perhaps what I needed was just a “misunderstanding”.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

1. Some of the most impression institutions in the world recognize this, where standards are created for words to more closely follow precision in communicating uncertainty: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Scales-of-Uncertainty-See-Sherman-Kent-reference-26-R-H-Moss-and-S-H-Schneider_fig1_233467407