I recently watched the video “How Life Looks Through My Whale Eyes.”  It is a very short documentary made by James Robinson, a young man from Maine, to show his family what it is like to live with several disabling eye conditions that have not responded to treatments.  With humor and authenticity he reveals the sense of humiliation he has endured throughout his life in not being understood.  Bravely his family is put through a series of optical tests and is candid about their lack of awareness regarding his experience.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/opinion/strabismus-vision-disability-relationships.html

What touches me the most is how his parents and brother, who obviously love him very much, are so open about how ignorant they are.  We can only imagine how these parents navigated a private journey of how to best support their beautiful son who they wanted to have all of life’s opportunities despite his disability.  But in doing so, James ends up feeling isolated and unseen.  In follow up to my last post, regarding needing to be more aware of what we don’t know, this really hit home for me in a deep manner regarding our ignorances.  Sometimes what we don’t know is because we are too afraid to ask.  This directly relates to our capacity to be vulnerable with the very people we want and need to be closest to.

One of the things that you learn as a therapist is how hard it is for people to share their most sensitive selves with the people most important to them.  Our work in therapy is often to peel back layers of shame and fear that serve as barriers between people. These walls most often create a deep sense of loneliness and disconnection as well as serve as a breeding ground for misunderstandings.  For example, just this past week, a woman who I work with who had gained weight during the pandemic shared about her self hatred in how she “disgusted” her husband.  Her conclusion was based on the fact that he hadn’t been as affectionate with her.  She battled herself and chided herself, and underneath became resentful of him which led to her withdrawal.  In sessions, we worked on her approaching her husband with her concern and desire to be close to him.  For her, the fear of rejection and the possibility of having her beliefs validated, was excruciating.  But when she finally did get up the courage, she learned he had his own demons lurking, feeling stressed about his cut in work hours during the pandemic and feeling like a poor partner who wasn’t “pulling his weight.”  The two were literally able to laugh at their own versions of self-inflicted “weight issues” and she reported feeling closer to him than she had in a long time.

I know, despite my awareness of these barriers with the people I work with, that I am guilty of it as well.  I will sometimes avoid asking questions to people in my own family because I am uncomfortable asking.  I worry that I’ll offend them or embarrass them and the last thing I want to do is cause them more pain.  But if I’m honest with myself, and this video brought this home to me, maybe it’s less about them and perhaps more about me that I am protecting.  I’m afraid of being uncomfortable and worst of all, the possibility that I will say the wrong thing which will make me feel like an insensitive fool, and worst of all, a bad mother.

“How Life Looks Through My Whale Eyes” teaches me that, most often, not asking is more hurtful than an awkward ask.  With silence and ignorance we send a message of disinterest, judgement, and fear.  We perpetuate misunderstanding and exclusion.  As Mr. Robinson says regarding his experience with others regarding his disability, “I don’t have a problem with the way that I see.  My only problem is the way that I’m seen.”

My daughter sent me an article about something she was learning in one of her classes in college.  During the Carboniferous period, 300 million years ago, giant insects roamed the Earth. There were predatory dragonflies with two-foot long wingspans and scorpions the size of skateboards!  Besides “eeeewwww,” we both had the same reaction.  Giant insects roamed the Earth?  How the heck did we not know this before?  This got me thinking about how very, very much we don’t know.  

In graduate school, one of my professor’s would repeatedly remind us:  “When thinking about your clients, you always don’t know more than you know.”  In other words, we see our clients for an hour a week out of 168 hours.  They tell us about only a fraction of what their experience is and this is filtered through what they want us to know and what they themselves allow themselves to know.  With so much unknown, it is natural to fill in the rest with our own perceptions and ideas.  To be a good and helpful clinician, you have to be careful about the assumptions you make and the biases you bring.

This is true of every interaction we have.  In fact, when you talk to a neuroscientist, such as Michael Taft, he will explain to you that “no human being has ever experienced the actual world.  Your experience of the world comes to you through the signals of a group of peripheral devices, called “senses.”  Your brain takes all of the information gathered through your senses and interprets them into experiences.  The more experiences you have, the more data your brain has to interpret any new experience.  In other words, the older we are, the more we may think we know.  

The assumptions we make in thinking we know about others is based on the projections of our own hopes, fears, and worries.  Often they cause us to interpret what other people say in ways they may, in fact, not have intended. And often, the more history you have with someone, the more you think you know who they are and what they would think or feel.   When in reality, this may only be the result of a deeply entrenched dynamic based on a history of layer upon layer of perceptions that seem to confirm themselves.

So given that we can’t possibly know everything there is to know, or even know what we don’t know, we have to be careful with our interpretations.  In order to do so we have to be open to both what we may be assuming and what we may be missing in our relationships.  It’s good to stay curious and ask questions.  While it may feel comfortable to think we know how our loved ones feel or what their opinion might be, be open to change.  We all do it, and it could be exciting to learn something new about someone or understand how they have grown.  You might just be surprised at what you find.  Hopefully, nothing as creepy as a  four foot long millipede!