Being understood is overrated.

Being understood is overrated. 

I know, we want to be understood. Especially if we grew up feeling like an alien. 

You know the feeling I mean. That we’re not of this earth— that we are somehow fundamentally separate from the other humans. That the best we can do is imitate them, guess at what it would be like to be an actual human. 

More people reading this grew up feeling like that than you’d believe. 

So, sure: it may be natural to seek out or crave being understood. 

The thing is, being understood may not be as awesome as we think it will be. 

It may not solve the problems we think it’ll solve. 

At a certain point we come to realize: being not understood, or misunderstood, was never our real problem. 

It was only a symptom of our real problem. 

Our real problem was not that we weren’t understood— it was that we weren’t accepted. 

We weren’t supported. 

We weren’t loved— especially by the people who were supposed to love us. Maybe who said they loved us. 

Being understood isn’t of much value without acceptance, support, and love. 

I’m aware that many people think trauma survivors think— and feel— too much about what we didn’t get growing up. 

My experience, however, is that we survivors actually try very had to NOT think about our past. 

It often takes a lot of trauma recovery work to get to the point of even identifying what we didn’t get once upon a time— or how those deficits affected us, then or now. 

Here’s what I can tell you about that: we can’t develop and integrate ad build on what we never got in the first place. 

It’s really hard to develop self love, when we don’t have a model of love to build on. 

It’s really hard to develop self acceptance if we never saw or felt what “acceptance” looked like growing up. 

None of this means we can’t develop self acceptance, or self love, or self respect— it just means we’re going to have to come at it a little more intentionally than those who grew up with those experiences. 

Being understood is nice. 

But being accepted, supported, and loved— that’s what cultivates self reliance, self respect, and resilience (ugh, that word— but still). 

Breathe. Blink. Focus.