The terror and joy of being known

Everyone is born deeply known. Your caregivers, especially your mother, anticipated your needs. You didn’t need to talk to communicate what you needed and what would make you feel safe and warm. You were born worthy of being deeply known and you were deeply known.

Becoming verbal is both a huge advancement in your experience as a human and a process that makes you less understood. Once you were able to meet your own needs in some capacity and once you needed to use your words to convey what you wanted and needed, there developed a gap between being perfectly understand and your ability to convey it to others.

If you were lucky enough to be able to communicate well, if your emotional experience were manageable for you, and you had caregivers who worked to be attuned to your cues, you likely grew up feeling mostly understood, known, and worthy of being known. Whether it was because of difficulty in communicating, intense emotions that you were too young to manage, and/or a lack of emotional attunement with your caregivers, you may not have grown up feeling understood. Children believe that it’s their fault when they aren’t understood, when they don’t feel worthy or loved. That core belief is a painful consequence of overwhelming feelings and lack of attunement.

In adulthood, you can work to manage your emotions in a way that they don’t become overwhelming for you. Psychotherapy can also heal the parts of you that didn’t feel understood or worthy of being understood. Healing is painful because it will shed light on parts of your experience that are currently outside of your awareness. We naturally avoid dynamics that are painful and much of what is painful for us is outside of our conscious awareness. As you bring attention to these feelings, they will be painful to discuss at first. Experiencing feelings as feelings that peak and pass, rather than truths that haunt you, heals your pain and alleviates your suffering.

As you start to open up about what you think, feel, and hide from yourself and others, you may find that it starts as a terrifying experience. Many people fear that they will be judged, they will be abandoned, that psychotherapy won’t alleviate their distress or all of these fears. If you are able to relax into the process of being understood, you may find that you naturally start to experience curiosity and compassion towards yourself. These attitudes facilitate enjoyment of the process and of the relationship. In a safe relationship, your terror becomes joy.