What Happens When We Don’t Feel Understood?
Recurring nightmare: I cannot make myself understood.
Often, the person simply doesn’t understand what I mean and thinks he does. I know what I mean, I try several times to explain and reexplain, and the other person assures me he understands, even rephrasing what he thinks I mean to reassure me. Though what he says is not what I meant. And repeat.
Sometimes, when the nightmare morphs into one that jolts me awake with a gasp, my interlocutor’s lack of understanding could have grave consequences. Maybe these consequences affect someone else or another group of people, who will be inconvenienced or harmed if I cannot make myself understood. Maybe these consequences affect me. Often, in these latter cases, the situation has a medical or clinical tinge. If I cannot make myself understood, I could suffer grave harm or disastrous lack of treatment.
The first case makes me feel alienated, isolated, muffled. The second generates genuine fear.
Both are horrifying in different ways.
The Source of My Nightmares
Anyone could have this flavor of dream.
In my case, though, as a nonnative French speaker in a francophone region of the world, the universal context of these dreams stems from an unease about my fluency in the language. I can’t find the right nuance or shade of language in French, in these dreams. Whatever I need to communicate, I know for certain I could communicate perfectly well if only I could use English (my native language).
Most people who want to learn a language do not plan to use the new language as their daily language. They want a new language for travel. They want to read literature or watch films in the original. They find language learning fun and want to add to their collection.
The more ambitious language learners want to gain as much fluency as possible in an additional language in all the language’s facets—written, spoken, read, heard, formal and informal, official and slang—and want to use it as often as possible.
They don’t expect to use the acquired language for everyday and even critical life functions.
They don’t plan to live almost full-time in that new language.
And therein lies all the difference.
When you live in a language foreign to you—even one you speak “fluently”—you always feel slightly uncertain. (At least, such is the case for everyone with whom I’ve spoken, even people who have lived in a language other than their native tongue for decades.) If you haven’t spoken this additional language since relatively early childhood, native speakers will always suss you out as a nonnative speaker. They can detect a slight accent, a quirky turn of phrase, a mispronounced word.
Even if you can make yourself understood in an additional language, even if you speak that language fluently, you will have a nagging doubt that just maybe the world around you didn’t get what you wanted to say in all its color.
I had someone say to me recently, in frustration, that people find her smart and funny and engaging in her native language and she feels keenly her lack of dexterity in her new language when it comes to transmitting her naturally clever and amusing and charming self. This lack throws her off, dampens her self-confidence.
When you compound onto this uncertainty the cultural differences that will always throw a foreigner off balance, well. That’s a recipe for nightmares.
Communication, Psychology, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Musing on it, the human need for understanding from other humans ranges across the classic Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. (Quick refresher: Maslow’s theory, simply stated, argues that human needs have a hierarchy; the most primal and essential needs require satisfaction before a person can truly address higher-level needs.)
A person fluent in a language can avoid most risk to physiological and safety needs, the essential ones at the base of Maslow’s pyramid—although perhaps not if, as in my nightmares, the inability to communicate a nuance puts one’s life or others’ lives in danger.
However, an inability to communicate well enough to have others in your orbit understand you at a nuanced level and accept you despite your language oddities, regardless of fluency, threatens your needs for what Maslow and further researchers in his field call “belonging and love” and “esteem from self and others.”
For supporting clinical evidence, a study published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience titled “The Neural Bases of Feeling Understood and Not Understood” used functional MRI—which takes pictures of the brain in activity—to indicate that, according to their interpretation of the data, feeling understood lights up the parts of the brain associated with reward and social connection.
The authors enumerate other empirical support and state that “feeling understood activates neural regions previously associated with reward and social connection (i.e. ventral striatum and middle insula), while not feeling understood activated neural regions previously associated with negative affect (i.e. anterior insula).”
In conclusion, the study’s researchers state that “feeling understood makes individuals feel valued, respected, and validated […] and leads to important changes in affective experience and feelings of social connection.”
These reflections beg questions:
What long-term psychological dangers exist for people who feel they cannot communicate and cannot manage to make others understand them? Wouldn’t this result in alienation, depression, and loneliness, if not carefully monitored and addressed?
And do these challenges apply for all members of society, not only to nonnative speakers of the local language?
Communication Challenges for Nonnative Language Speakers
If it follows that yes, people who feel they cannot achieve understanding from others become alienated, depressed, and lonely, what does this say about the importance to societies of
helping people who do not speak the local language as their native language ensure they have access to other people who speak their same native language and that they build communities with fellow native-language speakers?
funding or creating charitable funds and nonprofit organizations dedicated funding language learning for migrants and immigrants? (After all, education of all kinds has a price tag and learning a language to fluency level has an prohibitive cost for many people.)
ensuring that in certain domains, such as health care, nonnative speakers of the predominant local language have access to people who speak their original language as translators for the local language and the culture, despite the cost of creating and managing this network?
The danger with these reflections, of course, wraps around the question of assimilation and integration, and could fuel antiimmigration rhetoric.
Any moves in the direction of helping migrants and immigrants better communicate and find other people from their countries of origin who speak the same language would need support from the many studies that show that migrant and immigrant populations enrich the receiving nation.
Nations make a mistake in seeing migration as a threat and not as an opportunity.
Communication Challenges for All Members of Society
I have the good fortune of having the resources to fund the time and money required for my language learning. And I can take heart in knowing that I’m not alone, even if the knowledge doesn’t cure my nightmares: Conversations with other migrants and immigrants have convinced me that the uncertainty around communication—especially when it comes to nuance—never really goes away.
That feeling of “otherness” is one people who live far from their places of origin simply must manage, as best they can.
Further, I’m fortunate to have facility in my language of origin (U.S. English), to have received extensive communication training during school and work, and to have striven throughout my life to build mutually supportive connections with people in my country of origin and elsewhere in the world.
Many others—no matter their backgrounds or living situations—cannot say the same.
Frankly, even native speakers of a language often struggle to feel understood by other native speakers in their own societies. You don’t need to move countries or cultures or local languages to feel isolated and misunderstood.
From the articles I see across newspapers, magazines, books, and courses, more people than ever—even living in their places of birth and in their native languages—feel lonely, isolated, and alienated. These feelings connect, in my thinking, to challenges with communication.
An inability to communicate effectively makes it difficult to build a social network. And even for people with a social network, the lack of tools and competency for effective communication can lead to feeling misunderstood. Worse: Even if the person who needs to talk can effectively communicate, many people lack the ability to actively, compassionately, and empathetically listen.
These challenges in communication—even among natives—results in serious societal challenges.
What danger comes from significant numbers of the population feeling alienated, isolated, depressed, and misunderstood? Experts have only begun to assess these questions and to make recommendations.
And I wonder: Will societies have the will to take their advice, try to address the problem, rise to the challenge?