The Reason You Know Everyone's Needs Except Your Own
Have you ever noticed that you're incredibly good at reading other people's moods, anticipating their needs, or sensing when something feels off?
But at the same time, you struggle to recognize what you're feeling, know what you want, or trust your own judgment.
So why do we sometimes become so good at understanding what's happening around us while struggling to understand what's happening within us?
A lot of it has to do with how our nervous systems develop and how we learn to relate to ourselves.
Prefer to watch or listen? Here's the video version of this article.
How Our Nervous Systems Learn to Adapt
When we're young, our nervous systems are especially impressionable. We depend on the people around us to help us feel safe and manage experiences that are too much to handle on our own.
But when our environments are unpredictable, or the people caring for us aren't consistently emotionally available, our nervous systems have to adapt.
For some of us, that means becoming especially alert to what's happening around us. We learn to read people's moods, anticipate conflict, and adjust our behavior to avoid upsetting anyone.
For others, it means learning to disconnect from certain feelings or suppress our own needs.
And often, these patterns overlap.
These are protective adaptations. But they can become conditioned ways of responding that continue long after childhood.
And there's another important piece to this, which has to do with how we learn to relate to our own experience.
How We Learn to Relate to Ourselves
When we're young, we don't automatically know how to understand or respond to what we're feeling. We learn much of that through our relationships with the people caring for us.
There's a process in early development called mirroring, where a parent reflects back what a child is experiencing in a way that helps them feel seen and understood.
So imagine you're a little kid and you're really upset because you can't find your favorite blanket.
If your parent responds with something like, "Oh no, you can't find blankie. Of course you're upset. You love your blankie. Let's look for it together," you're receiving the message that your feelings make sense and that they matter.
But imagine instead being met with, "Oh my god, calm down. You're being so dramatic. It's just a stupid blanket."
Now, instead of having your experience acknowledged, you're being taught to question or dismiss it.
And when that happens repeatedly, we begin relating to ourselves in those same ways.
We question whether our feelings are valid, whether our needs are reasonable, and whether our perceptions are accurate.
So we start looking outside ourselves for answers.
When We Learn to Trust Others More Than Ourselves
When we put these two pieces together, something interesting happens.
On one hand, our nervous systems may have learned to pay close attention to everyone around us in order to maintain some sense of safety.
And on the other, we've learned to question or disconnect from what's happening within us.
So we can become incredibly skilled at understanding other people while struggling to understand and trust ourselves.
In adulthood, that might look like constantly second-guessing our decisions, struggling to set boundaries, or being so focused on other people's needs that we lose touch with our own.
And often, there's an ongoing sense of internal conflict. We feel something, and almost immediately another part of us questions it, criticizes it, or tells us we shouldn't feel that way.
But these patterns can change.
Our nervous systems can learn new ways of responding, and we can develop a steadier, more supportive relationship with ourselves.
In other words, we can rebuild self-trust.
Why Understanding Our Patterns Isn't Always Enough
There's an important distinction here.
We can understand exactly why we have a particular pattern and still find ourselves repeating it.
Maybe you know intellectually that you have every right to set a boundary. But when the moment comes, something in you still feels deeply uncomfortable about disappointing someone else.
That's because these aren't simply beliefs we can decide to change. They're deeply learned ways of responding.
So while insight is valuable, understanding a pattern doesn't necessarily mean our nervous system has learned a different way of responding.
And that's where a lot of us get stuck.
We keep trying to think our way into a different relationship with ourselves, when what we actually need are new experiences of that relationship.
Experiences where we begin to recognize what's happening within us without immediately questioning, dismissing, or fighting against it.
Where we learn to stay with our experience, even when it's uncomfortable, and respond to ourselves with understanding and care.
And through repeatedly relating to ourselves in this way, we begin learning that we don't have to abandon ourselves when things get difficult.
And that's the heart of rebuilding self-trust.
We're learning to trust that we can stay with ourselves as a kind, steady, and supportive presence, no matter what we're experiencing.
And that's why I call my work Withness. Because so much of it is about learning how to stay with ourselves amidst the messiness and challenges of life.
See Withness in Practice
If you're curious what this looks like in practice, you can watch a real partnered Withness session in which I work with a recent experience of anger and nervous system activation.
Watch: Being With Anger and Activation | Withness in Practice
Explore a Different Way to Be With Yourself
If you'd like to explore these ideas further, I invite you to watch my free class, Beyond Self-Awareness.
In it, we look at why insight and self-awareness aren't always enough to create lasting change, how the nervous system shapes our experience, and what can begin to shift when we learn to relate to ourselves differently.