"Am I being heard?"
It is the desperate cry of Valerie Cherish, Lisa Kudrow’s lovably self-centered protagonist in the acclaimed television series The Comeback. Throughout the show, Valerie demands to be heard by directors, costars, and crew members, with wildly varying degrees of success and a heavy dose of secondhand embarrassment for the viewer.
Yet, beneath the comedy of Valerie’s cringeworthy Hollywood exploits, there is a fundamental human truth that resonates deeply with audiences. When we speak, we want people to listen. We want our voices to register in the physical space of a room, to command attention, and to leave an imprint on the minds of those around us.
However, what Valerie—and by extension, the rest of us—is truly begging for isn’t simply to be listened to in a mechanical or superficial sense. She wants to be understood. And in the complex landscape of human communication, that distinction matters profoundly.
There is a rapidly growing self-help and psychological wellness industry that promises to transform everyday people into better listeners. Workshops, podcasts, and best-selling books regularly preach the virtues of active listening, eye contact, and nodding at appropriate intervals. Interestingly, while most people already consider themselves to be good listeners, those same individuals overwhelmingly report that others simply do not listen well enough to them. That persistent disconnect is worth pondering. It suggests that spending all of our time and energy trying to train people to listen better might not be time well spent after all.
Listening Versus Understanding
To unpack this societal paradox, clinical psychologist and Brown University assistant professor Yael Schonbrun explores our deeply ingrained, often frustrating need to be understood in her book, Why Don’t You Understand Me?. While listening is certainly a component of understanding, Schonbrun’s work makes it clear that listening on its own is just not enough to bridge the gap between human minds.
First, it is vital to recognize a fundamental limitation of the human condition: it is entirely impossible to fully understand another person in the absolute sense. We can never read someone else’s mind, peer directly behind their eyes, or genuinely experience what consciousness is like from their unique vantage point. This establishes a permanent, immutable obstacle when it comes to human connection. On a baseline neurological and experiential level, we simply cannot inhabit another person’s reality.
Yet, achieving total comprehension is not necessarily the ultimate objective we are chasing in our daily interactions. Schonbrun explains that what we are actually after is the felt experience of other people trying to understand us. When someone makes a sincere effort to understand you, it signals that they are not leaning on lazy assumptions. It means they are not assuming that your internal experience, your triggers, your history, or your perspective are identical to their own. Instead, they are approaching the interaction with a posture of humility and curiosity. They are operating on the assumption that this person is fundamentally different from them, and that they genuinely want to know more about that unique perspective.
That level of engagement 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 be completely different from your own without feeling the urgent need to correct them, fix them, or bring them over to your side. If it is fundamentally impossible to get inside someone else’s head, the least we can do is let them be the ones to explain what is going on in there.
Shifting From Noise to Genuine Comprehension
Moving past the illusion of listening and into the realm of true understanding requires a conscious shift in how we approach conversation. According to psychological insights highlighted in Schonbrun’s research, the process begins with the deliberate decision to stop talking. It is impossible to truly understand someone else if you are filling all the available audio space with your own commentary, anecdotes, and noise words.
Beyond simply keeping quiet, real understanding requires us to pause, reflect, and cultivate authentic curiosity. Instead of asking questions merely to keep a conversation moving, or hastily making assumptions about where a story is heading, we have to set a genuine intention to get to the bottom of what makes another person tick.
Because it is impossible to know what is happening inside someone else’s mind, asking open-ended questions is a necessary tool for inviting them to share their version of events. But the inquiry cannot stop there; it requires sustained attention. It means letting another person’s perspective truly land without constantly scanning ahead to formulate your next talking point, and without silently judging them while they are still in the middle of explaining themselves. It demands listening without a hidden agenda, without rigid assumptions, and without scripting the rest of the interaction before the other person has even finished their sentence.
Understanding Starts With You
Listening is undeniably a part of understanding, but true comprehension demands much more of us. It requires us to drop our preconceived notions, silence our defensive instincts, and allow conversations to unfold organically rather than forcing them toward a predetermined conclusion. It requires the humility to accept that we do not have all the answers, and that not every conversation needs to end with a neat, tidy solution.
Human life is messy, complicated, and frequently contradictory. When we fail to strive for genuine understanding, we ultimately isolate ourselves, effectively stranding ourselves on emotional islands where we feel perpetually unseen. That is the ultimate paradox of human connection: when we put aside our own need for validation and try our best to genuinely understand others, we are far more likely to be understood in return.
Rather than waiting indefinitely for the rest of the world to finally understand you, the path forward begins with turning the lens outward. By making a conscious effort to truly understand the people around us, we might just save ourselves from our own Valerie Cherish-esque misunderstandings.