The Cost of Being Misunderstood

By Jesse Kuhn · July 2026 · 8 minute read

One thing I have reflected on a lot over the past few years is how exhausting it is to be misunderstood while you’re grieving. I don’t think people are intentionally trying to misunderstand us. Usually it’s exactly the opposite. They’re trying very hard to understand, especially close friends and family. That’s what makes it so complicated. You can know someone loves you and still feel almost completely invisible to them.

Most of us don’t know what to do when someone we care about is hurting. There is very little education for this in the Western world. We are taught how to celebrate people, encourage them, solve problems, offer advice and look for whatever silver linings might still be available. We are not taught how to remain close to an experience we cannot repair. So we instinctively reach for our own lived experience. We compare stories. We try to find some common ground that says, I’ve been somewhere close to where you are. I think that is one of the most human qualities we have. It is also one of the places where we accidentally fall off the map and lose one another.

After my wife died, I noticed something happening inside me that I didn’t have words for at the time. Someone would compare my loss to theirs. Sometimes it was another death. Sometimes it was divorce. Sometimes it was something else entirely. I wasn’t scrutinizing their intentions. Frankly, I was too tired to. But my body had a noticeable energetic response each time, and almost immediately my attention shifted away from my own grief and toward correcting their understanding of it. Without realizing it, I became an editor. Well, that’s not really even close to the same. Yeah, but you still had... No, that’s different because... It was rare that those thoughts ever came out of my mouth. Most of the time I was simply too tired.

That is the part I don’t think I weighted heavily enough back then. Grief had already reduced everything. I wasn’t sleeping much. My attention was scattered. Things that used to take five minutes suddenly took thirty. There were days when making dinner for my daughters felt like I had been handed a task I wasn’t qualified to do. Everything cost more than it used to.

So every fumbled comparison created another uncomfortable crossroads. Do I spend the very limited energy I have explaining why this feels different, or do I let the misunderstanding stand? Either way, something was lost. If I explained it, I often left the conversation more tired than when I entered it. If I didn’t, I walked away feeling like we had missed each other and drifted a little farther apart.

I don’t know exactly when I realized I wasn’t avoiding people because I wanted to be alone. I think, out of self preservation, I began avoiding the one-sided work. The work of translating my experience into something another person could actually recognize so we could get closer to the witnessing I actually needed. When you’re grieving, that translation has a high cost. Your cognitive capacity is already reduced. Your emotional capacity is already reduced. Even ordinary life feels much heavier. Spending part of that limited energy helping other people understand your grief becomes one more thing your depleted nervous system has to carry.

The energy required to explain your grief becomes part of the grief itself. I don’t mean that every awkward comment causes some additional trauma, or that grieving people should never have to clarify what they need. I mean that misunderstanding creates labor. The person who is already exhausted is asked to become the guide, the translator and sometimes the caretaker of the other person’s discomfort. They have to decide how honest to be, how much correction the relationship can tolerate and whether saying what they really think will make the conversation even harder.

It took me a long time to figure out what I was actually looking for. For a while I thought it was validation. Then I thought maybe I just wanted people to stop trying to fix me and let me stay broken. Both were part of it, but neither explanation felt complete. The word I keep coming back to is resonance. I don’t know if it is the perfect word, but it is the closest one I have found.

There is something that happens when you meet another person who has walked enough of the same landscape that very little explanation is required. Before they have given you advice, reassured you or told you much of their own story, your body seems to recognize that less translation will be necessary here. I don’t know exactly what is happening in that moment, but I have felt it enough times to trust that it is real. There is a settling that happens when you realize you do not have to build the entire world for someone before they can enter it.

I experienced that most clearly with other young widowed parents. That doesn’t mean we all became close friends. We didn’t. We were different ages, different personalities, different political views and different careers. But we shared enough of the same terrain that we could begin the conversation where it actually mattered instead of spending an hour explaining the map. We knew what it felt like to make every parenting decision alone. We knew what it felt like to help our children survive the same loss we were trying to survive ourselves. We knew that grief didn’t politely arrive during counseling appointments. It interrupted grocery shopping, bedtime routines, permission slips, laundry, homework, trying to remember whether the electric bill had been paid, and staring blankly at a pile of mail filled with overdue notices

I have also had almost the opposite experience. I have sat in rooms full of widowed people and still walked away feeling completely alone. On paper, I had found exactly the community I was supposed to need. In reality, many of the conversations centered on a completely different stage of life. Some people had spent forty or fifty years with their spouse. Their children were grown. They were navigating retirement, grandchildren and the final chapter of life. I was trying to figure out how to raise very young daughters without their mother while rebuilding a future I had never imagined living. Neither experience deserved more compassion than the other. Neither grief was greater. But we were not asking the same questions, and because we were not asking the same questions, we could not always offer one another the kind of resonance we were each hoping to find during our deepest pain.

Resonance does not require an identical story. It does not mean that only widows can understand widows, or that people should be sorted into smaller and smaller groups until everyone is surrounded by exact replicas of themselves. It also does not require agreement. Two people can have very different beliefs, personalities and ways of grieving while still recognizing enough of each other’s terrain that the conversation does not become an argument over the map. The question is not whether another person has lived my exact life. The question is how much of my limited energy will be required before we are actually talking about something that is meaningfully supportive.

I have started wondering how often this happens in other kinds of loss too. Not because one grief is bigger than another. I honestly don’t find those conversations very useful anymore. The more interesting question to me is: What relationship existed before the grief? Because that is usually where the landscape begins. It shapes the questions people ask, the fears that keep them awake, the future they thought they were living toward and the parts of life that disappear after the loss but remain invisible to almost everyone else. A child, a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a close friend and an animal companion can all be deeply loved, but they do not occupy interchangeable places in a person’s life. When we flatten those relationships into the same generalized experience, we can unintentionally erase much of what the person is actually grieving.

I don’t know whether relationship-specific grief support is objectively better than generalized grief support. Maybe someday someone will answer that question with good research. I only know what I have repeatedly witnessed. People finally work up the courage to reach out. They attend the grief group, join the online community or have the difficult conversation, and afterward they quietly wonder why they somehow feel even more alone than before. I don’t think that is because grief groups are broken or because people are uncaring. I think it is because care and understanding are not the same thing. A person can care about us deeply and still not be able to see the inner landscape we are trying to describe.

When we are in acute grief, we do not have unlimited opportunities to reach toward another human being. Every attempt costs something. Every attempt requires energy that is already in short supply. If those attempts repeatedly leave us feeling misunderstood, even by people with the best intentions, many of us stop trying for a while. Not because we no longer want connection, but because connection itself has become exhausting. I sometimes wonder how many people who appear to be isolating are actually protecting themselves from the labor of being misunderstood or talked over again.

The first thing I learned about grief support was the importance of presence. I did not need someone to solve my grief. I needed someone willing to remain near it without trying to rush me toward meaning before I had even figured out how to survive it. Over time, I began to understand that presence alone does not always create connection. Someone can stay in the room and still leave the grieving person doing all the work. Presence matters, but resonance changes what that presence costs.

I still think reassurance matters. Kindness matters. General grief resources have helped millions of people, and I would not want to diminish that. I just think there is another layer underneath all of it. Sometimes the most helpful thing we can offer another grieving person is not advice or perspective, and it may not even be our insistence that we understand. It is curiosity without comparison. It is a willingness to learn the shape of that relationship and everything that disappeared with it—not just the person, but the parts of ourselves that could only exist because they did. It is recognizing enough of the terrain that the grieving person can stop translating for a little while. Not because we have lived their exact story, but because we have made enough room for their story to remain their own.