The Best Thing to Say to Someone Who Won’t Understand You

a post by Lori Deschene for the Tiny Buddha blog


“True love is born from understanding.” ~Buddha

I believe one of our strongest desires in life is to feel understood.

We want to know that people see our good intentions and not only get where we’re coming from but get us.

We want to know they see us. They recognize the thoughts, feelings, and struggles that underlie our choices, and they not only empathize but maybe even relate. And maybe they’d do the same thing if they were in our shoes.

Maybe, if they’d been where we’ve been, if they’d seen what we’ve seen, they’d stand right where we are now, in the same circumstances, with the same beliefs, making the same choices.

Underneath all these maybes is the desire to feel validated.

We’re social creatures, and we thrive when feel a sense of belonging. That requires a certain sense of safety, which hinges upon feeling valued and accepted. But those feelings don’t always come easily.

There was a time when one of my relationships felt incredibly unsafe. I never felt understood or validated, and worse, I often got the sense the other person didn’t care to understand me.

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7 Ways to Better Understand and Be Understood

a post by Suzanne Kane for the World of Psychology blog

“The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood.” – Ralph Nichols

Being human, we all have certain basic needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs outlines them quite well and encompasses all that we generally think about when it comes to what we need.


Sorry, not the clearest image at this size but it was the only one I found that spelled out the different layers.
Yet one of our most basic needs, the need to understand and be understood, seldom gets much attention.

It should.

Without the ability to understand what others say or the meaning behind their words, we can miss important cues, lose out on opportunities, fail to see changes in time to appropriately react, and go off in a totally different direction. Worse, if we lack understanding, we’re more prone to selfish acts than helping others.

Similarly, without others being able to understand us, we’re often left confused, frustrated, overlooked, angry, misinterpreted, and taken for granted. We might even feel sad and depressed, particularly if being misunderstood is a constant and we do nothing to help remedy the situation.

How can we work on improving both our ability to understand others and make it easier for them to understand us? Much of the following recommendations follow a commonsense approach, yet there may be some new angles to consider.

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How To Be Open-Minded When Others See the World Differently

a post by Melissa Pennel for the Tiny Buddha blog



When I was thirteen, I experienced a monumental change in my young life.

It wasn’t a big move, no one close to me died, and although puberty was rocking my world in the worst way, it was something else altogether that shook me to the core:

The movie Titanic came out.

I know, I know, it’s just a movie, and I was just another swooning teenager wishing that I was the one Jack never wanted to let go of, but it hit me hard. Truth, love, the pain of loss: a woman following her heart and risking it all for true love. I relished every second of its three hours and fifteen minute run time.

So much that I saw it multiple times over winter break at school – usually with my equally enamored mom, sometimes with my best friend, always with a lump in my throat. I held back tears as I saw Jack’s face disappearing into the icy waters, always wondering why Rose couldn’t make room for him on the raft, each time imagining myself in the situation: falling in love, making tough choices, persevering through loss.

Continue reading please as this intro has a purpose. Not everyone watching that film was moved by it in the way that Melissa was. The image above encapsulates the message. The girl in the rain prevents the water reaching her by using an umbrella, the boy with the bowl is collecting precious water. 

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