The Importance of Feeling Known and Understood, Hinting, and Boundaries Aren't Just for Emergencies, and Oh-Hell-No Thoughts
Food for thought on knowing yourself.
Hello! Welcome to another edition of Food for Thought, where, every couple of weeks, I share some of the many nuggets of inspiration that prompt me to think about knowing ourselves, including knowing our yeses and nos. This weeks’s selection includes themes around the need to feel known and understood through genuine connection and intimacy, why cutting back on hinting makes you more emotionally available, I hope within what I share, you might find permission, peace, and more insight into yourself.
‘When you broadly know who you are, the surest source of change is found through close relationships. And the right romantic partner – someone who accepts you not simply for who you are, but where you want to go – offers the potential for this new chapter, one characterised by novelty and forward momentum. We know who we are apart; what can we do together?’—
talking about meeting a partner in your thirties and beyond.Our interpersonal relationships are vehicles for healing, growth and learning. We can’t help but get to know ourselves more because interacting causes us to vote for or against our values and face ourselves. In fact, our relationships cause old pain, fear and guilt to surface—emotional baggage—so that we get to confront it and open up to being more of who we really are. That’s why, when we’re emotionally unavailable and, consciously or not, dodging intimacy, relationships where we don’t get to truly be ourselves feel safer and familiar. They don’t challenge our narratives. When we’re willing to get to know and own ourselves in and out of relationships, we get to thrive.
As humans, we all want to be accepted, and we all fear rejection. When we truly know and understand a person and are open to getting to know and understand them further, we accept that person. It's not just for who they've been and are right now but also for who they might become. Conversely, when we're willing to know and understand ourselves and to allow ourselves to be seen and heard as part of that process, we accept who we are right now and our past and future selves. — Me talking about loving yourself first. This leads neatly to…
‘I feel very understood by him in general and sometimes we’ll be in conversation and I’ll need to write down something that he’s said. He’ll come out with phrases that feel so clear and poignant — things that a therapist might take years to chisel away at. I remember talking to him about something that happened years ago that continued to eat away at me — and he said something that got so deeply to the core of what I was feeling that I said “yes, that's exactly it” and never felt the need to speak of it again. Being heard and reflected back is deeply healing.’ —
I loved this portion of Emma’s piece because it reflects experiences I’ve had with my husband and other close people in my life. I remember having dinner with my husband Em on my fortieth birthday in Paris and letting out some of what I’d been grappling with in the midst of grieving the loss of my father and things I’d been hard on myself about work. He then said something in the space of like a minute that was so infuriately right on and nourishing and healing that it then seemed absurd that I’d brooded on some of this stuff for ages.
We can’t do it all alone. Part of the journey of knowing ourselves is the intimacy of being witnessed. This can only happen when we foster mutually fulfilling relationships with love, care, trust and respect because then we allow ourselves to be seen and heard.