A Thought Experiment.

Good morning my loves and welcome to day 30 of our Dry January Journaling series.

Here is our prompt:

”How important is it to you to be understood by everyone in your life? How comfortable are you being misunderstood? Do you feel like it is more important to be understood or to be true to yourself?”

I started an experiment a few months ago.

I've been trying to be the type of person who vastly underreacts to things that annoy her in order to stop being so annoyed by everything, always.

I've found that the more I make myself a priority, the less I expect my husband to. The more that I take care of myself and my needs, the more I am thankful for what my husband brings to the table instead of constantly making up things in my head that he should be doing for me.

The honest truth is that when I look at things from a distance, I am not being mistreated ever but I do feel unseen a lot. I feel like what I'm doing and what I mean and who I am gets misinterpreted often. I'm not sure why but I do feel misunderstood a lot.

Being misunderstood is very triggering for me because most of my life, being misunderstood has been a sign of rejection. And when you have made it your life’s work to belong and feel wanted by every person you have ever met, rejection is zero fun.

It wasn’t until therapy that I learned that being misunderstood is not the same thing as being rejected. ”I don’t know what you mean” is not the same as “I don’t want to be with you.”

I’m not sure where there correlation manifested itself in my life but I have been actively working on my relationship with being misunderstood for the past year.

The goal of my life is to not be understood. To be honest, asking my husband to 100% understand me is hard because I’m not sure I even understand myself most of the time.

Once I got to work with my therapist, I was able to realize that so much of my being misunderstood really came from my own communication style. I wanted my husband to read my mind so often that I was never stating my own needs.

In turn, he would respond to what he thought I was saying and we would find ourselves in disagreements.

I finally had to start recognizing not only my own triggers but also when I was feeling myself get overstimulated in conversations. This meant speaking up and letting my dude know if I needed to break.

I would find myself getting heated over small things and it was being I was ignoring a lot of the signs in my life that I was feeling unheard and resentful.

The purpose of allowing the uncomfortable feeling of being misunderstood is to free us from the resentment that holding in who we are brings us.

One of the most freeing parts of this decision is when I actually state my own needs, it’s not uncomfortable at all - I am with a partner who wants me to have my needs met and is happy for me when that happens.

I have to risk being misunderstood in order to be heard.

Because even if my partner doesn’t understand me, he validates me. And that is what I realized I was seeking all along.

I didn’t need someone to agree with every piece of my life or predict all of my needs, I just needed someone who validated what I was going through.

But in order to be validated, I had to open up myself to being misunderstood.

It’s okay to be misunderstood. We may never be 100% understood by anyone but ourselves because we are the only people who have lived our entire life experience. That’s the beauty of it, you allow yourself to be misunderstood by others so you can be completely understood by YOU.

When we understand the need behind our motivations, we find ourselves actually finding the answers that help us.

Wanting validation from others isn’t wrong, it’s just usually the way we do it that gets us in trouble. Validation comes most beautiful through vulnerability. Being vulnerable with ourselves and others helps us normalize our struggles and ultimately move through them.