Tolerating Being Misunderstood

By Tyler Seabolt, LMSW | Bridge Family Therapy

Can You Tolerate Being Misunderstood?

Or: can we? And what if the thing to trust was never understanding — but curiosity?

Almost everyone wants to be understood. It is one of the most basic things we bring to a relationship — the sense that another person gets what it is like to be us. When it happens, something in the body settles. When it does not, something sharpens.

A note on scope: the examples here lean on romantic partnership, because that is often where this runs hottest. But the skill is the same with a parent, a friend, a coworker, a whole room. Read “partner” as whichever relationship is loudest for you right now.

There is a large research literature on this wish. It even has a name — felt understanding — with decades of study behind it. Feeling understood by a partner predicts trust, closeness, and well-being. Feeling misunderstood does the opposite (Reis, Lemay, & Finkenauer, 2017). In some of this work, feeling understood even helped people tolerate physical pain a little longer. The wish to be understood is not a weakness. It is wired in.

But here is what I kept running into in the room. Almost all of that research is about the wish to be understood — and almost none of it is about the skill I actually find myself teaching. That skill is not “get understood more often.” It is closer to the opposite:

Can I tolerate being misunderstood — right now, in this moment — without it turning into a fire?

And its partner, the question that turns a solo skill into a shared one: can we tolerate misunderstanding — together — without it turning into a fire?

I have looked, and I have not found a name for that one. The research on being understood is about the longing. The research on sitting with hard internal states — distress tolerance, tolerating uncertainty — lives in a different corner of the field entirely. As far as I can tell, nobody has connected the two. So I am going to. This post is about the skill in the gap between them.

And there is a turn hidden inside it, which is really the whole point. Most of us are trying to trust understanding — to feel safe only once we have been fully gotten, or once we finally see the same thing. But understanding is not steady enough to stand on. What you can actually build on, and come to trust, is something quieter: not the arrival of understanding, but the willingness to stay curious. More on that at the end — it is where all of this is headed.

Why this is the hardest question in the room

Let me say the quiet part first. Underneath a lot of conflict is a single, mostly unspoken belief:

I am safe if I understand. I am safe if I am understood.

When that belief is running, being misunderstood does not feel like a small mismatch. It feels like a threat. And the mind does what minds do with threat — it tries to resolve it fast.

Psychologists have a name for the pull toward fast resolution: the need for cognitive closure — the desire for a firm, definite answer, and a discomfort with ambiguity (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996). It is worth being precise about what that is and is not. It is a motivation, not a defect — a proclivity, in the original authors’ words, “rather than a tissue deficit.” Some people carry more of it as a trait. Everyone carries more of it under pressure — tired, rushed, overloaded, or scared.

The need for closure works through two moves. Seizing — leaping to an answer quickly, on thin evidence. And freezing — locking onto that answer and resisting any revision. If you have ever decided what your partner meant before they finished the sentence, and then could not let the interpretation go, you have met both.

A close cousin is intolerance of uncertainty — reacting to not-knowing as if it were danger (Einstein, 2014). And here is the part that matters most. Intolerance of uncertainty is treatable, and the treatment is not “get more certainty.” It is the reverse. People get better by showing themselves, over and over, that they can survive not knowing — that they can tolerate it. Which is exactly the move this whole post is about, just pointed at a different target.

A note on neurodivergence. If you are autistic, ADHD, or somewhere in the wider neurodivergent landscape, the need to understand can run especially strong. A world built for other nervous systems makes predictability precious. But I want to be careful here. This is not “an autism thing” to then pathologize. The need for closure is a normal human motivation, turned up — by neurotype for some, by a history of unsafe surprises for others, and usually by both at once. Naming it is not diagnosing it. It is seeing it clearly enough to work with.

The trap: reading each other too fast

Couples who have been together a while — and neurodivergent couples especially — often share a particular talent. They read each other fast. Before anyone finishes a sentence, sometimes before anyone opens their mouth, each already has a read on where the other is.

Stephen Porges gave this wordless read a name: neuroception — the nervous system’s under-the-radar sense of safety or threat, the thing behind the hair standing up on your neck. (The finer neuroscience of Porges’s larger theory is genuinely debated, so I use the word as useful shorthand, not settled fact.) The point holds either way: you are reading each other constantly, beneath language.

That talent is often what makes the connection feel deep. It is also exactly what gets you into trouble. Because a fast read is a seizing read. One thing gets said, and in a quarter of a second it has become a whole story — that comment means they think this, which means they have always thought this, which means I am not safe here. One sentence, and you are five moves down a staircase into the past.

For some of us the staircase is even faster. If you live with rejection sensitivity, the hurt can arrive before the sentence even finishes — the wound lands before the words do. That is not being dramatic. It is a nervous system that learned to flinch early.

I have a blunt rule for this: one thing said is just one thing said. It does not automatically mean A, then B, then C, then D. When you catch yourself stacking meaning onto a single moment, that stacking is the thing to notice. Relationship researchers describe a background version of this called negative sentiment override — a global negative frame that colors how you read every specific thing your partner does (Gottman, 1994). Once it is on, the most neutral sentence arrives pre-loaded.

There is a deeper version worth naming, too. When two people are wired differently, each keeps guessing at the other from inside their own operating system — and each guess feels obvious and correct. The autistic scholar Damian Milton called this the double empathy problem: the misunderstanding is not one person failing to understand a “normal” one. It is a two-way gap between two equally valid ways of being (Milton, 2012). Nobody is the broken translator. The translation is genuinely hard.

Why it collapses right now

Here is a paradox I see constantly. The couples who hit this wall hardest are often the ones who have been doing the most growth.

For years, many people get through conflict with old, trauma-shaped tools — going numb, going scorched-earth, going until everyone runs out of adrenaline and the fight ends by sheer exhaustion. (These old tools are often the Four F’s — fight, flight, freeze, fawn — running hot.) Those tools are not the enemy. They kept you safe once, and they deserve some gratitude for it. But in a safer place, they become surplus to requirements — not bad, just no longer needed.

When you set those tools down — and growth means setting them down — you do not automatically get new ones. You end up in the gap. The old move is gone, the new move is not built yet, and you are standing in a hard moment thinking, in effect, I don’t know what to do with my hands.

I call this a compensatory strategy collapse. It is not a relapse. It is what progress feels like from the inside, right before the new skill arrives. So if you are hitting this wall, hear this plainly: you are most likely not doing worse. You have probably outgrown the thing that used to carry you, and you are in the gap before the replacement lands.

The skills below are for that gap.

The move: become a scientist of your own state

Here is the intervention — and it is better supported by research than almost anything else in this post.

When you are inside a hard feeling, you can relate to it in two very different ways. You can be immersed — living inside it, seeing through its eyes. Or you can step back and observe it from a small distance — a scientist watching a reaction, rather than being the reaction.

Two decades of experiments show the second stance does something real. When people analyze a painful experience from a self-distanced perspective — watching themselves “like a fly on the wall” — they come out less flooded than people who stay immersed in it (Kross & Ayduk, 2011). It is not magic and it is not enormous; the effect is modest, and it does not erase the feeling. But the direction is reliable, across many studies.

Why does it work? It changes what you do with the moment. Immersed, you tend to recount — reliving the details, feeling them all over again. Distanced, you tend to reconstrue — making some meaning, finding a little insight or closure. That shift, from reliving to reframing, is a good part of what takes the edge off (Ayduk & Kross, 2010).

And this is the part that matters for couples: it shows up between partners, not just inside one head. In one study, people who naturally took the distanced stance reciprocated less of their partner’s hostility during a real conflict. The observer stance did not make them cold. It made them less flammable.

The second half of the move is even simpler. Put the feeling into words. Not a story about the feeling — a plain label. “My heart is pounding.” “I’m at about a seven.” “My system just spiked.” When people put feelings into words, the alarm centers of the brain quiet down and the regulating centers come online (Lieberman et al., 2007; Torre & Lieberman, 2018). Naming is not the same as fixing, and it is not an off-switch — the feeling gets turned down, not off. But it is a lower-effort move than trying to reinterpret the whole situation — once you make yourself find the words.

Put the two together and you get the stance I keep asking couples for. Step back and watch your own weather. Then report it, plainly, as data. Done with a little warmth, this is also a quiet form of self-caregiving — you meet your own reaction with curiosity instead of a verdict, which is its own deeper practice (cultivating an ideal internal caregiver).

A few small tools

Not a long list. These are for the tight windows, not for every day.

1. Play scientist, not detective. A detective is building a case — gathering evidence, assigning fault. A scientist is just observing what is happening. Step back and say it out loud: “Huh — my system just spiked.”You are reporting the weather, not solving the crime.

2. Trade data, not details. When you read each other this fast, details become ammunition. So hand each other the nervous-system read instead — “I’m running low,” “I’m about at a seven,” “my alarm is loud right now” — and leave the interpretation out. Data is harder to weaponize than a story.

3. Do not ask the follow-up question. This is where curiosity gets tricky, because there are two kinds. One is open — it can wait, and it does not need an answer to feel safe. The other is a search for safety wearing curiosity’s clothes: the follow-up that has to be answered right now, or the alarm gets louder. The first kind you can trust. The second kind is the spiral. So when your partner says something and you feel the probe loading — what do you mean by that, why would you say that — let it be. “Okay.” “Interesting.” “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Researchers who study co-rumination — hashing a thing over and over — find that more digging often makes distress bigger, not smaller (Rose, 2002).

4. Let one thing said be just one thing said. One comment gets said, and the mind starts stacking meaning on top of it — this means that, which means that. The moment you feel that stacking start, say it back to yourself plainly: “That was one thing said — just one thing.”Then get curious about the stacking itself, rather than the comment.

Tolerance is variable, and it is shared

Two last things, because they take the pressure off.

First, tolerance is not a fixed setting. Each of us has a window of tolerance — a range inside which we can stay regulated and think clearly (Siegel, 1999). The window is wider on a good day and narrow on a bad one. You will tolerate being misunderstood far better after sleep and food than after a week without either. That is not a character flaw. That is a nervous system.

Second, in a close relationship, tolerance is shared. When one of you slides toward the edge of the window, the other feels the pull — nervous systems track each other, especially tethered ones. So when your partner has less to give in a hard moment, it often is not that they are misunderstanding you. It is that the whole system is running low. Less capacity is not the same as less care. And it moves — you are not static, and neither is the day.

The point

The goal was never to stop being misunderstood. That is not on the menu. Two people, two nervous systems, two operating systems — you will misread each other again, probably this week.

The goal is a kinder relationship with the gap. To stand in a moment of not-being-gotten, notice the fire starting, and not pour gas on it. To say — alone, or together — we are misunderstanding each other right now, and we can tolerate that.

And here is the turn the whole thing rests on. For most of us, safety has been pinned to understanding: I will be okay once I am finally gotten, once we finally see the same thing. But understanding is not steady enough to stand on. It comes and goes. What you can actually build on — what you can come to trust — is not the arrival of understanding. It is curiosity: the willingness to keep wondering about each other, without needing the wondering to resolve.

That is a skill, and it is buildable. As the research on tolerating uncertainty already shows, you build it the same quiet, powerful way every time: not by finally getting understood, but by discovering, again and again, that you can survive not being — and stay curious anyway. Curiosity is the thing that holds. Understanding was never going to.

If this resonates and you are looking for support, Bridge Family Therapy offers neurodiversity-affirming, trauma-informed therapy in Athens, GA and across Georgia via telehealth. You can meet our team and schedule a consultation.

References

Ayduk, Ö., & Kross, E. (2010). From a distance: Implications of spontaneous self-distancing for adaptive self-reflection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(5), 809–829.

Einstein, D. A. (2014). Extension of the transdiagnostic model to focus on intolerance of uncertainty: A review of the literature and implications for treatment. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 21(3), 280–300.

Gottman, J. M. (1994). What predicts divorce? The relationship between marital processes and marital outcomes. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Kross, E., & Ayduk, Ö. (2011). Making meaning out of negative experiences by self-distancing. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(3), 187–191.

Kruglanski, A. W., & Webster, D. M. (1996). Motivated closing of the mind: “Seizing” and “freezing.” Psychological Review, 103(2), 263–283.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887.

Reis, H. T., Lemay, E. P., & Finkenauer, C. (2017). Toward understanding understanding: The importance of feeling understood in relationships. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 11(3), e12308.

Rose, A. J. (2002). Co-rumination in the friendships of girls and boys. Child Development, 73(6), 1830–1843.

Siegel, D. J. (1999). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. Guilford Press.

Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116–124.