Have you ever told someone, “I understand”, only for them to respond:
No, you don’t! How could you possibly understand? You haven’t been through what I’ve been through.
Yet, you’ve listened carefully, tried to appreciate their perspective, and offered what you thought was a reassuring expression of empathy.
But still, somehow, your attempt to make them feel understood has achieved the opposite.
Why Can “I Understand” Provoke Such a Response?
Because of the difference between two kinds of understanding:
- Understanding what someone is communicating: grasping what they’re trying to tell you — their thoughts, feelings, perspective, and the meaning they attach to an experience.
- Understanding what someone has experienced: knowing what it actually felt like to live through that experience — a subjective perspective you can never fully inhabit.
You Can Understand What Someone Means Without Understanding Their Lived Experience
Imagine someone telling you about a particularly difficult period in their life.
As they speak, you appreciate what they’re trying to communicate. You hear about the difficulties they faced and why they found the experience so upsetting.
Then, hoping to show some empathy, you say:
I understand how you feel.
Although you may understand what they’re telling you, can you truly know what their experience felt like?
Not entirely.
Even if you’ve been through something remarkably similar, your experience will never be identical. Your history, personality, and circumstances all influence how events are experienced and interpreted.
So they may interpret your words as a claim to know something that cannot be fully known.
Now compare that with saying:
I understand what you mean.
Rather than claiming to know what their experience felt like, you’re acknowledging that you’ve understood what they’re trying to communicate.
Why Understanding Someone Doesn’t Always Make Them Feel Understood
In their review of feeling understood in relationships, psychologist Harry Reis and colleagues distinguished between two different types of understanding:1
- Actual understanding: How accurately another person understands someone’s thoughts, feelings and experiences.
- Perceived understanding: How much that person feels understood by someone else.
The two aren’t as related as you might think.
In a study involving 199 newlywed couples, psychologists Monique Pollmann and Catrin Finkenauer found that how accurately partners knew one another was largely unrelated to how understood they felt.2
In fact, perceived understanding predicted relationship wellbeing, whereas actual understanding did not.
The Importance of Knowing What Cannot Be Known
The developers of Mentalization-based Treatment, Anthony Bateman and Peter Fonagy, emphasise the importance of adopting a not-knowing stance, recognising that another person’s mental world can never be entirely accessible to us.3
People can make educated guesses about what someone might be thinking or feeling, but these interpretations are always open to correction.
For example, telling someone who wasn’t invited to a party, “You must have felt rejected”, imposes an interpretation of their experience.
Asking “How did that make you feel?” allows them to describe their experience in their own words.
Even when offering your own interpretation, phrasing it tentatively as a question — such as “Did that leave you feeling rejected?” — gives them room to confirm or correct it.
By adopting the not-knowing stance, you allow someone to remain the authority on their own experience.
You Don’t Need to Have Experienced What Someone Has Experienced to Understand What They’re Telling You
For example:
- You don’t need to have experienced bereavement to understand someone describing how much they miss a loved one.
- You don’t need to have experienced discrimination to understand someone explaining why they found an interaction humiliating.
- You don’t need to have experienced a mental illness to understand someone describing how it affects their everyday life.
You can:
- listen to someone’s account,
- recognise the emotions they’re expressing,
- appreciate the meaning they attribute to their experience, and
- acknowledge why it matters to them.
How to Make Someone Feel Understood
The next time someone shares a meaningful experience, rather than immediately reassuring them that their feelings are understood, demonstrate that what they’re communicating has been understood.
For example, imagine someone says:
I’m so tired of people telling me what I should do. Nobody seems interested in actually listening to me.
Instead of responding with, “I understand how you feel”, try:
I understand what you mean. It sounds like people keep offering you solutions when what you really want is for someone to hear your perspective.
Instead of claiming their experience, you’re recognising it.
Other useful expressions include:
- “I see what you’re saying.”
- “I think I understand what you mean.”
- “From what you’re telling me, it sounds like…”
- “That helps explain why this has been so important to you.”
- “Have I understood that correctly?”
The Paradox of Making People Feel Understood
You might think that the more confidently you communicate your understanding, the more understood another person will feel.
But often, the opposite is true.
The more certain you become that you understand another person’s experience, the less curious you may become about what that experience actually means to them.
The key is to balance humility about what you cannot know with confidence in what you can understand.
So the next time someone shares something meaningful, remember that you don’t need to have lived their experience to understand what they’re trying to tell you.
Because making someone feel understood requires less certainty about what they feel and more curiosity about what they’re trying to communicate.
