Why sensitive people can feel misunderstood

Some people are affected by details that others hardly notice. It could be how a photograph of a happy time can now seem, with the passage of time, poignant; or how a hesitation in someone’s voice betrays a lack of commitment; or how a small gesture shows an unexpected kindness.

What moves such people is not simply the event itself but the layers of resonant meaning. Indeed, sensitive people are alive to how what is present highlights what is absent, how what is expressed reveals what was left unsaid and how what was once viewed as possible has now been lost.

To others, such heightened responses can seem excessive or difficult to understand, as emotional sensitivity is a rare form of perception, a heightened capacity to notice and respond to emotionally significant aspects of ourselves, other people or situations that others may miss. For sensitive individuals, if their responses are judged as overly dramatic or bewildering, they may feel that an important part of their inner lives is invisible to others. This sense of alienation can lead to feeling isolated and misunderstood.

In this article, let us look at some of the key reasons why sensitive people can experience isolation and feel misunderstood and how to cope better with what might seem, at times, like invalidating encounters with others.

Sensitivity makes rich inner experiences difficult to translate

Whenever we try to put into words what we are feeling, there has to be an act of translation. Indeed, the more common and straightforward our experience is, the less likely we are to struggle to be understood. But if we are sensitive, and therefore attuned to the complexities of experience, we may find it difficult to offer a nuanced and authentic description of how we feel.

For example, if after a loved one dies, we feel grief, it is highly unlikely that others will struggle to get where we are coming from, but if our emotional experience is an admixture of grief, relief, resentment and a sense of meaninglessness, it will take longer to describe the various aspects and how they interact with each other, and there is a greater risk that we won’t be able to articulate how we really feel.

In reality, sensitive people can make this process of translation easier for themselves if they acknowledge that it is inherently difficult because it is a process that requires us to be patient with ourselves. The philosopher Milton Meyerhoff wrote the following about how caring for another requires patience:

To give ourselves the chance of articulating the complexities of our rich inner landscape, we must give ourselves that room to live. Indeed, we do not owe others a prompt description or explanation of our inner life, even if we are grateful if we receive their patient attention. But if we wish to honour our sensitivity and be committed to our authentic self, we do owe it to ourselves to be patient and to allow our self-understanding and our words to emerge in good time, like what happens in successful therapy.

Overall, this commitment to patiently articulating how we feel is an existential task requiring our sustained attention, but also our courage to risk being misunderstood.

Emotional sensitivity can be judged harshly

There is always a risk when sharing our emotional sensitivity that some people will be judgemental, and being judged harshly is one of the painful ways of being misunderstood.

They might, for example, say to others, “X should be over that breakup now”, as if there were a standard time and response to a difficult life event. Perhaps those who are being critical are genuinely bewildered as to why there is this prolonged and involved response, and they accuse the sensitive individual of being overly sensitive, meaning fragile.

Alternatively, it is possible that the sensitive person’s complex response unnerves the judgemental person’s heavily editorialised reaction, as the latter may, for example, prefer to keep their sadness straightforward rather than acknowledge to themselves that it is tinged with a sense of meaninglessness.

Naturally, sensitive people cannot prevent others being judgemental if that is how they wish to be. What can help, though, is for the sensitive individual to recognise for themselves that their sensitivity is not inherently fragility and it is not a sign of weakness. To see that sensitivity and weakness, in the sense of a lack of resilience, are not the same thing, we can say without any contradiction that, “X deeply misses their father, but they are coping well”. A deeply sensitive response therefore does not rule out being resilient, and so it is not weakness to see more and to feel deeply. These are capacities that can make us more vulnerable to pain, but they do not mean we are weak.

Those that misunderstand the nature of sensitivity are almost fated to misunderstand someone sensitive. We can hope that they come to see through their bias, but, in the meantime, we can make it easier for ourselves by not opening up to those who hold this harsh and sentimental view. I understand that the word sentimental may sound strange here, but the harsh judgement towards those who recognise emotional complexities is a sentimental view, because sentimentalism is a perspective based on overlooking aspects of a situation that should complicate and deepen our response.

Sensitive people may have high standards for being understood

Sensitive people see deeply and broadly, and it is not usually difficult for them to understand quickly another’s object of concern and its consequences. It is a quirk of human nature, though, that we may exhibit a form of humility about our strengths where we may unconsciously assume that what we can do others easily can do too.

When we are frustrated at not being as easily understood as we can empathise with others, our frustration can lead us ironically to be judgemental towards others and expect a degree of understanding that we cannot always receive.

Two considerations can help us cope with our frustration of being misunderstood some of the time, if not most of the time.

Firstly, being understood exists on a spectrum, where on one side we have a sense that another gets us, and on the other side we feel completely misunderstood. It is as rare for us to feel really understood as it is for us to feel completely misunderstood, and so it is inadvisable to expect total understanding, which may make us overlook the understanding that we have received. If we receive some understanding that was freely, and perhaps lovingly, given, then that is something to be grateful for, even if we wanted more to assuage our pain and our loneliness.

Secondly, it is helpful to appreciate that the desire to be perfectly understood may be what we think we wish for in our moments of isolation and frustration, but it is actually a tyrannical and unachievable demand. In philosophy, ought implies can, meaning we are only obligated to do that which we can do. Perfect understanding is impossible, as it is a fiction of our pain and idealising, and so we can neither give nor receive such total understanding.

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote “Only the idealised mother – the perfect, wished-for mother in the child’s mind – always gets it” and “All tyrannies involve the supposedly perfect understanding of someone else’s needs.” To make total understanding a condition for the love we receive therefore only makes us ironically less loving.

Overall, then, when dealing with the pain of being misunderstood, we can assuage our frustrations and our sense of isolation by appreciating that emotional sensitivity is a strength that can deepen our capacity to connect and to love and that judgemental responses towards the gift of sensitivity are due to misunderstandings, either because of ignorance or a fear of confronting their own pain.

Furthermore, we can reduce the unnecessary suffering that can come with our sensitivity by developing realistic, rather than idealistic, expectations that do not expect total understanding. As Plato and Socrates recognised centuries ago, human understanding exists in the realm of the ‘in between’, in the sense of us being between total ignorance and total knowledge.

There is therefore always more for each of us to understand about ourselves and others, and we can be grateful when we experience those moments when the richness of our lives has been understood and valued, as can happen in real life and in good therapy.