Misattunement: The Pain of not being seen
When I first moved to the UK from America, I thought the biggest challenges would be the big things — new job, new marriage, new home. And while those were big, it was the little things that made me feel foreign: realising I didn’t know how to lock a back door (you lift the handle up), or tripping over words that meant something entirely different here. Those small differences piled up until I felt untethered.
I’d left behind a community, a career, and a country that had shaped me. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like myself anymore. I felt a bit out of sync. And I felt like I kept having to prove myself to people and show them who I was.
Even my then pre-teen daughter felt it. She told me that everyone knew her at her old school, and here she felt like Play-Doh that had been squished back into the can. She said she knew that she was made of the same stuff, but no one was seeing her right. She’d lost her shape. Her words landed deeply with me. Her sentiment was both heartbreaking and familiar to me. Because I knew how she felt. And hearing her put into words how I was feeling helped me feel less alone.
Sometimes therapy can help you find the words to feel less alone. When the therapist “sees” you, and gets it, it is a relief. Often I have therapy clients who come to their first session and tell me they don’t know why they feel the way they do. They say nothing “happened” to them to explain why they feel so bad. What they mean by that is there is no one big traumatic event in their lives to point to and say, “that’s why I feel this way.”
As we explore their childhood, with these clients, we can usually see early on that there was a significant period of misattunement in their early lives. For some reason, their primary caregivers were unable to attune to them properly. They did not reflect back to the child a reality that acknowledged how the child felt.
When I explain that to my clients, I talk to them about what happens to a child who experiences chronic misattunement. It feels a little like gaslighting, but it’s not as intentional on the part of those who misattune to us. But there is a mismatch in how you see yourself and experience the world, and what others are telling you is true about yourself or the world. And my clients get it. They see that something did happen to them. They were missed in significant ways. And that hurts. And they feel better just to know there is a word for it.
If you’ve experienced misattunement in childhood, or if you're feeling the pain now of feeling foreign and like people are not seeing you right in the present, therapy can give you a space to explore what’s happening. That doesn’t just mean hearing your pain, although that is part of it. Therapy can help you spot the reasons you might be feeling the way you do. And then once you know what was happening to make you feel unseen and how you were defending yourself, you can start to feel safe enough to show your true shape to the world.
If anything I’ve said resonates with you, I offer therapy in Manchester and online.
