For everyone who feels misunderstood

Just because people don’t understand you doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.

Photo by Luke Dahlgren on Unsplash

Smart, sensitive souls experience life differently.

We feel things. Every nuance and layer of pain and shame, but also presence and joy.

We know things. We’re connected to our intuition, don’t fall for tribalism, and understand deep, existential truths many others don’t care to explore.

We think about things. Deep things. Life and death and purpose and meaning.

We trust our paths, and although we’ve experienced great pain and suffering, we’ve managed to transmute those experiences into wisdom and peace.

The only problem is, these gifts sometimes get lost in translation.

You may do your best to see, hear and reflect the best of others back to them, but sometimes you may not feel seen, heard or witnessed in the same way.

This can make us doubt ourselves, and sometimes, especially if you’re introverted like me, you may have trouble figuring out how to present yourself to the world.

It’s important to lean into the growth of how we communicate who we are, but there’s a balance, which I’ll write more about in a minute.

Beyond that, the experience of yearning for deep connection and understanding yet sometimes feeling nothing but separation and misunderstanding can be painful.

You may try to prove yourself — perhaps to people you don’t even like, who don’t care about you, or who will simply never understand you.

You may try to over-explain yourself in hopes of feeling seen, yet the urge to over-explain is itself a response from a deeper, more primordial wound of not being understood by those you needed to understand you the most.

The task is to come to peace with the discomfort of being misunderstood, to use it to grow.

It’s time to stop changing who you are to fit in with people who will never understand you.

We feel like people not understanding us makes us wrong, without ever stopping to wonder why we assume they’re right.

The issue is more than feeling misunderstood, but feeling like something is wrong with us.

Feeling misunderstood hurts.

But when that feeling mixes with deeper, more shadowy pains of inadequacy, doubt, abandonment or not belonging, we end up seeking external validation that we are loved. Accepted.

In a fragile state, you’ll do anything to create that feeling of being accepted, even if it means abandoning yourself.

Even in stronger states, the ways we abandon ourselves manifest more subtly: self-censorship, second guessing what we say, trying to prove or over-explain ourselves.

All of these things waste our energy and add to the feeling that we’re devaluing ourselves — because we are.

At best, we waste words and time, perhaps minutes, maybe hours or even longer for some, feeling the pain of not belonging.

At worst, we identify with that pain, believing the lies it tells us. This can cause you to drift away from your true self, away from your authentic self-expression, and ultimately miss out on the joy of being who you really are — all because people on a different wavelength couldn’t understand you.

It’s time to focus on your strengths, upgrade your self-concept and derive approval from within.

I’ve always struggled to fit in.

As a little girl, I stayed inside and loved reading books while everyone else ran around the neighborhood.

In high school, fresh off losing my dad and sister, it felt hard to relate to others, whose families were intact. They didn’t understand me, and I wanted more than anything to be like them. Sometimes it worked, but even when it did, I still felt separate.

Loneliness felt like a punishment, for what I don’t know, but why else would someone be so alone?

In college, I drank too much in an effort to appear extroverted. I gauged my worthiness based on the number of party invites I received. Sometimes it worked out okay. Other times, it didn’t.

But by the time I graduated college and left my hometown to explore the world and write about it, I was grateful for the courage those years gave me.

If I hadn’t felt rejected, I may have followed others down the boring stale path of spending my life in a grey cubicle, typing away underneath ghoulish florescent lights.

Instead, inspired by the knowing of how temporary this life really is, I chose to LIVE.

I somehow found the courage to stop judging my idiosyncrasies and instead double down on them. The leap of courage served me well, but time has revealed more reliable ways to further that journey and more fully express who I really am rather than who I thought I needed to be.

We live in crazy times where alignments are shifting, people are polarized, and agendas are masquerading as truth.

You may feel disconnected from people with whom you once shared a wavelength, or feel surprised to find common ground with those you never imagined.

Some people are falling deep into tribalism. They may express anger at you for having a different opinion or even choose to cut off ties.

Feeling misunderstood hurts badly enough when the source is a stranger, but it can hurt even more when the person was once a friend.

Some souls are fundamentally disconnected from their essence, and if you, like me, look for the best with the result of sometimes finding things that aren’t there, that can also create a feeling of being misunderstood.

Other times insecurity may get the best of you, disconnecting you from your essence, possibly missing out on a wonderful opportunity for connection.

Whatever the case — while it’s true that some people don’t understand you, understanding these nuances may help you find peace.

The more you accept yourself, the more space you give to others to be who they are. This creates more opportunities for connection, even if not on a deep soul level. All connections are valuable and meaningful in their own way.

Expanding your perspective will support the most important journey of all:

Life is a journey of remembering your wholeness. The more completely you remember, the more fully you experience all the beauty around you.

How to come to peace with being misunderstood:

1. Sit with the pain of being misunderstood rather than react to it.

People often say thoughts create feelings, but I believe feelings primarily create thoughts.

Consider this: Developmentally, we feel before we think, and therefore it makes sense that feelings influence thoughts more than the opposite. Let me know if you want a blog on this.

Either way, when you feel pain, your mind will react by manufacturing thoughts:

• I’m such a weirdo

• I don’t fit in

• I wish I was normal

Without understanding how to process and release the emotional pain fueling these thoughts, you will attach to them and believe the lies they tell.

When you learn how to process your feelings and use them to guide your inner work, which is what I teach you in the Journaling Club, you understand how to come home to yourself in a deeper way.

Instead of wasting time feeling pain and self-doubt in response to people without the capacity or willingness to understand you, you’ll use those feelings to understand and accept yourself at increasingly deeper levels.

The meditation method I recommend for processing emotions is the Feeling Awareness meditation. (New subscribers receive a link and it’s also in the Journaling Club lounge.)

2. Acknowledge your whole self with love.

We can’t feel rejected if we don’t first reject ourselves. Everything begins within.

In the case of feeling misunderstood, your task becomes accepting your shadows, your quirks, and your shortcomings, and also spending time acknowledging your strengths.

Many of us could spend more time focusing on how amazing we are, all the goodness we have to offer, and how even some of the things we consider flaws pave the way for our greatest strengths.

If you want support and guidance on that journey, you’ll love this week’s Journaling Club prompts.

3. Foster self-respect.

Self-respect emerges from self-acceptance, but they’re not the same. If self-love is the part that cherishes you even when you’re not at your best, self-respect is the part that eventually says — enough, time to get moving.

Self-respect is about carrying yourself with grace and pride, making choices that uplift you and honor your highest potential.

Self-respect is a foundation of worthiness. It’s what creates the self-assurance that erases the need to continually prove yourself or convince others of your value.

4. Create a meaningful life aligned to your core values and soul desires.

When you live a life that makes you happy, that you find meaningful, the less you care about fitting in. When you are tapped into your eccentricities, even using them to fuel your creativity, you care less about what others think because you see your own value.

Embracing your true self aligns you to the right people, situations, and life you’re meant for. You no longer force things, but are focused on showing up as the realest version of yourself and allowing everything to flow from that place.

Entering the pain of being misunderstood will transform you.

The moment you stop reacting to it and instead learn from it is the moment you tap into a deeper sense of self-acceptance, love and respect.

Every ounce of pain you feel is only a reminder to reconnect to your innate value and worth. From this place grows true happiness and fulfillment. Grounded in who you really are, you can’t help but fulfill your purpose and realize your highest potential.

Today, I’m grateful for my past experiences because they helped me embrace my unconventional path. Emotional pain indicates a cry from your soul, yet it’s only by walking through that fire that your character emerges.

This is where you grow your strength, nurture your resolve, and ultimately become the person you are meant to be.

When you understand yourself, you don’t need to be understood by others. This is true freedom.

Do you relate to this? Let me know in the comments!

This week in the Journaling Club, you’ll explore powerful ways to transmute the pain of being misunderstood into total self-acceptance, respect and love.

My goal is for this inner work to be a highlight of your week. A time to scroll your soul and deepen into the core of who you really are so you can expand into your fullest potential.

If you’re not already a member, you can upgrade on the page.

Thank you for reading!

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Love you all so much,

Suzanne