“Am I being heard?”
For anyone familiar with television comedy, that desperate, recurring plea immediately calls to mind Valerie Cherish, Lisa Kudrow’s lovably self-centered protagonist in the HBO series The Comeback. Throughout the show, Valerie bounces from production set to production set, demanding to be heard, acknowledged, and validated by everyone around her, with wildly varying degrees of success and grace.
It is a comedic performance, certainly, but beneath the cringe-inducing satire lies a universal human truth. We can all relate to Valerie, even if just a little. When we speak, we want people to listen. We want our voices to register in the minds of others, to break through the ambient noise of daily life and make an impact.
Yet, as clinical psychologist and Brown University assistant professor Yael Schonbrun points out, what Valerie—and by extension, the rest of us—is begging for isn’t simply to be listened to. She wants to be understood. And that distinction matters profoundly.
In recent years, a burgeoning self-help industry has emerged, promising to transform everyday communicators into better listeners through active listening techniques, workshops, and communication apps. Curiously, public opinion surveys reveal a widespread paradox: most people already consider themselves to be good listeners, and yet, an equally large majority report that others simply do not listen well enough to them. That disconnect is worth pondering. It suggests that spending all of our collective time and energy trying to train people to be better listeners may not be time well spent. Sorry, Valerie.
Listening Versus Understanding
Schonbrun explores this exact dynamic in her book, Why Don’t You Understand Me?: The Surprising Science behind Connecting in a World of Missed Signals. While listening is undoubtedly a foundational component of human interaction, Schonbrun’s work makes it clear that it is simply not enough to bridge the gap between two distinct minds.
To understand why, one must first recognize a fundamental biological and psychological reality: it is fundamentally impossible to fully understand another person in the absolute sense. Human consciousness is subjective and private. We can never truly read another person’s mind, crawl inside their skull, or experience exactly what consciousness is like for them from their unique vantage point. This establishes an inherent, immutable obstacle when it comes to human relationships. On a strictly literal level, we cannot completely know what it is like to be someone else.
However, true, flawless understanding is rarely what we are actually after when we crave connection. Instead, Schonbrun explains that what we truly desire is the felt experience of someone else trying to understand us.
When another person makes a genuine effort to understand you, it signals that they are consciously withholding assumptions. It means they are actively resisting the temptation to assume that your internal experience, your emotional triggers, or your worldview are identical to their own. Instead, they are approaching the interaction with humility and curiosity. They are operating from the mental framework that this person is fundamentally different from me, and I genuinely want to know more about their perspective.
That commitment requires asking questions and sincerely wanting to know the answers, rather than simply waiting for your turn to speak. It means allowing another person’s point of view to differ wildly from your own without rushing to correct, debate, or invalidate it. If it is impossible to genuinely get inside someone else’s head, the least we can do is let them be the ones to explain what is actually going on in there.
Shifting the Approach to Human Connection
To move beyond superficial listening and genuinely attempt to understand one another, experts suggest a fundamental shift in how we approach conversation. The process begins with the most basic physical adjustment possible: stopping the talking. It is impossible to truly process someone else’s narrative if you are constantly filling the audio space with your own noise words, anecdotes, and interruptions.
Next comes internal reflection and the cultivation of curiosity. Rather than asking questions merely to fill an awkward silence or steering a conversation toward a preconceived narrative, true understanding requires pausing to reflect. It requires setting a conscious intention to get to the bottom of what makes the other person tick, acknowledging that their background and emotional landscape may be entirely foreign to your own.
Because you cannot simply look inside someone’s head and deduce their thoughts, asking questions is essential. However, the nature of those inquiries matters deeply. Meaningful connection calls for open-ended questions designed to invite the other person to share their version of events, free from leading prompts, judgment, or underlying agendas.
Finally, this approach requires a radical brand of listening—listening, but really listening. It means letting the other person’s perspective actually land with you. That requires letting go of the internal monologue where you frantically try to figure out what you are going to say next, or silently judging their choices while they are still in the middle of explaining them. It means digging deep and engaging without an agenda, without assumptions, and without scripting the rest of the interaction beforehand.
Understanding Starts With You
Active listening is undeniably a part of understanding, but true comprehension demands much more of us as social beings. It requires us to drop our preconceived ideas, abandon our desperate need to be right, and allow conversations to unfold organically. It requires us to embrace humility, to lean into curiosity, to accept that we do not have all the answers, and to recognize that not every conversation needs to land on a neat, tidy solution.
Human life is messy, complicated, and frequently frustrating. Often, we end up feeling emotionally isolated on an island simply because we do not strive for deeper understanding. That realization reveals the true paradox at the heart of human connection: when we try our absolute best to understand others, we are far more likely to be understood in return.
So, rather than waiting indefinitely for the world around you to finally understand your unique perspective, the most effective path forward is to start trying to understand others first. It just might save you from some classic Valerie Cherish-esque misunderstandings along the way.
