Don Wei

Important person in my life does not understand me

16 posts in this topic

hi guys, I had an argument last week with my mom and sister. We were arguing about life purpose, money, along with other things. 

I felt like my mom was really trying hard to understand me and she understood me better than my older sister but not completely. My brother and sister have always lived in holland but I moved away with my parents when I was 8 and I just moved back a couple of months ago. So my siblings, especially my sister don't really know me that well. I know even less about her since she almost never talks about herself and she's a very private person. Today I was having a long deep conversation with my brother who knows me better. And at one point we were talking about the argument I had with my sister about life.

I am a very ambitious person, I have always wanted to improve myself in as many ways possible and one of the things we did not agree on is that most people do not know what their life purpose is and that most people aren't very conscious. And we also did not agree on the topic of money and other things. This might have been one of the most energy draining arguments ever because she did not understand what I was trying to say at all. It almost looked like she didn't even want to listen, although I could be wrong. She probably wasn't doing that on purpose. 

I told my brother the whole story and he told me my sister compared my way of thinking to the way of thinking of someone in the family who is a very low conscious person. Everybody in the family knows that so that really hurt me. I was screaming on the inside from rage and sadness that my own sister did not understand me at all and now i'm still very pissed of and disappointed that she thinks of me in such a low way because I know everything I have been through and how hard it was to get where I am now. I'm not some kind of sage but my entire view on everything has drastically improved over the last few years. 

What hurts even more is that I am aware that all the anger and disappointment I feel is not me but my ego just like the arrogant part I wrote about how hard it was to get where I am now and how my consciousness has gotten so much higher, I know that I shouldn't worry and that I shouldn't identify with the harsh past experiences or the fact that most people won't even acknowledge that I had it tough because people on the outside only see roses and sunshine when they look at me. I noticed that only being aware of all this doesn't help me actually control these emotions and solve my problems. I'm still angry right now.

Btw I just noticed: here I am asking for help on this forum but at the same time my ego is so big right now that i'm also trying to convince you guys that i'm a high conscious person. I always find it hard to admit I make mistakes when I see them as low conscious mistakes or when i'm aware of the mistake while making it. That must also be my ego too...

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10 minutes ago, Don Wei said:

This might have been one of the most energy draining arguments ever because she did not understand what I was trying to say at all.

Sounds so much like my relationship with my brother. 

My brother is convinced that he understands everything about life, and everything about me. This caused lots of tension, and exhausting arguments that just looped between  him: "I want you to change because I think the way you live is wrong", me: "No thanks, I've thought through my life decisions and want to see them through", and this would just go on and on.

 I eventually realized that people don't need to understand you, they can't really. Your mind and emotions are changing all the time, so the snippets you attempt to convey through language are not super accurate. Your family doesn't need to understand you, especially if you want to do something like start a business as an expression of your life purpose, do serious spiritual work, have a deep realization. Most people have never even considered such things, so don't expect them to be supportive of you, even if they're related to you.

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@Don Wei My guess is maybe  younger self has emotions and strategies towards your familial life that isn't compatible with your adult self.

I've experienced the same thing, that's all it is from my perspective. Statistically speaking (given social adaptation isn't most peoples strong suit, even and sometimes especially when its familial), the only way forward is for you to be the guy that truly seeks to understand your family from an objective perspective, study their patterns for as many nuances as possible so that you can learn to integrate them in the best way that serves your life relative to what's possible. All that's lacking from what I see is the capacity to adapt because something isn't feeling as it used to, you're going to have to get used to that feeling. Relationships change enormously over the developmental trajectory, our subconscious just isn't built for understanding that entirely which is why we have to use many of our higher and creative intelligences to teach our subconscious to see our relationships in a new way.

Misunderstanding this process is why many children and siblings establish unnecessary distance, they're unable to reconcile the experience of the relationships from the perspective of their childhood selves with their adult selves. This is especially the case if things were turbulent growing up, because now if you're a sane adult you'll want things to be moving consistently towards your progress which is much more difficult to do if a person either:
(1) has unresolved experiences in childhood-adolescence that they haven't processed enough even though they may now have a supportive family environment in their adulthood a part of them may be stuck in the past still there.
(2) they may have processed those experiences but their family hasn't so they're stuck in their old patterns in relation to how they treat one another including you --- especially here is where my above strategy would be most effective. You can't after-all force people to change and see you for what you are, sometimes you have to be the one to take responsibility and figure out what's going on and how to shape things effectively towards the best outcome for everyone relative to your abilities.
(3) variations 

Overall, overtime as stated, you'll need to get better and better as it concerns processing, learning from and adapting your emotions to suit the changing context of the social environment, which can change pretty rapidly sometimes for all kinds of reasons familial and otherwise. Moreover, come to terms with the fact that coping strategies you learned in earlier years are no longer serving you to adapt to present familial circumstances. For example, our emotional responses to a pattern a family member you grew up with is following may be completely different to a pattern a friend is following you didn't grow up with, simply because the brain is re-activating an old strategy that it found important to use in childhood but no longer serves its adult life. So, in this case, again, it comes back to that word, adaptation, which is what we do by studying the patterns of the social environment we're in.

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1 hour ago, Don Wei said:

one of the things we did not agree on is that most people do not know what their life purpose is and that most people aren't very conscious. 

my sister compared my way of thinking to the way of thinking of someone in the family who is a very low conscious person. 

If you know that people are at different levels of consciousness, why do you expect them to understand you?


Intrinsic joy is revealed in the marriage of meaning and being.

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@Carl-Richard It's not that I just expect people to understand me it's just that it's very painful to see that someone so close to me doesn't. I am the youngest one of my siblings and it feels like the older ones don't even want to listen just because they think i'm younger and because of that they automatically always know better. It feels very condescending. Even while I was arguing with her she was looking at my mom like she was thinking " look at this guy, just let him keep talking, do you see what this idiot is saying ". She and others close to me probably only want the best for me and have good intentions, but it's very hard for me to accept.

My father is an extremely high conscious person and he also told me I should not expect  people to understand me wanting to do self help (like what many people on this forum do) and find my real purpose. My brother also told me the same thing and I know that I should not care but I just do and it's hard to stop caring.

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@Mada_ that is true, sometimes it is hard to express myself completely. Explained everything I know and the way I look at the world is very difficult and most of the time when I do people resort to stupid ways to argue against it like black and white thinking or quickly judging me and then immediately comparing me to someone who they think is exactly like me but is actually the opposite.

I'm not gonna lie though, this path is extremely lonely. I honestly don't know anybody my age who also wants to do all this and even less people who are actually serious about it. So there is almost nobody I can talk to about it and that's too bad that I can only talk about this stuff with you guys on this forum or my dad who lives on another continent. That's why I tried to talk to people close to me and even friends about it but that didn't work out like I thought it would.

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@Origins that's probably it, it does feel strange sometimes to not be a kid. I turned 18 in july and the way people talk to me is very different compared to how it used to be so it is somtimes difficult to adapt to this. My environement changed drastically because I used to live in Suriname (country above brazil) and before I was 9 I lived in the netherlands. I moved back to the netherlands a couple of months ago. So that also plays a huge role I guess. I had to adapt a lot in my life and that's very energy draining.

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Btw guys i'm trying to change my account name and I went to account settings but it's not possible. Does anyone know how to change it ?

Edited by Don Wei

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If you can't care for your own family because of disagreements it is probably you who is not worth it, you are still young and I am not saying that they know better or anything like it, but they most likely  care for you and do not want you to make same mistakes they did , well at least what they think where their mistakes, but it is your life and everyone is different.

Just try to be openminded in conversations and see where concern is coming from , sometimes it is just  nonsense, but something it can be actually something worth considering , for most part you don't need their approval, they are just giving their opinion and trying to help. 

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@Claymoree I never said I didn't care for my family because of disagreements. That's the exact opposite of what i'm saying. If I really didn't care I would not have made this post in the first place. I also said that they probably have good intentions earlier so I already know that. The problem was not that I don't want to consider what they say or that we have different mindsets. It's that I was upset that they didn't understand me at all. I at first thought that they would understand me because they ate close to me, but I see now that that's not the way things work. 

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Just now, Don Wei said:

@Claymoree I never said I didn't care for my family because of disagreements. That's the exact opposite of what i'm saying. If I really didn't care I would not have made this post in the first place. I also said that they probably have good intentions earlier so I already know that. The problem was not that I don't want to consider what they say or that we have different mindsets. It's that I was upset that they didn't understand me at all. I at first thought that they would understand me because they ate close to me, but I see now that that's not the way things work. 

It was not for you, don't expect anyone to understand you , they might know what you are about, your behavior, but most likely they will not understand you, do you really understand your family members, you think you know what is going on in their heads?  

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5 hours ago, Don Wei said:

@Carl-Richard It's not that I just expect people to understand me it's just that it's very painful to see that someone so close to me doesn't.

I know exactly how it is. There isn't much to do about it.


Intrinsic joy is revealed in the marriage of meaning and being.

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21 hours ago, Don Wei said:

And we also did not agree on the topic of money and other things. This might have been one of the most energy draining arguments ever because she did not understand what I was trying to say at all.

What were you trying to say? 


one day this will all be memories

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23 hours ago, Don Wei said:

Btw guys i'm trying to change my account name and I went to account settings but it's not possible. Does anyone know how to change it ?

You can't unless you're an admin. 

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