Have you ever felt unseen or misread by the people around you?
All of us rely on feedback from others to form a sense of who we are. But when that feedback doesn’t match our internal experience, it can leave us feeling isolated, misunderstood, or even alienated from ourselves. In this piece, I explore how inaccurate mirroring shapes our inner world—and how, even after years of living with distorted reflections, we can begin to reclaim a deeper, truer connection to ourselves and others.
As humans, we all need mirroring or feedback from others to know who we are, to feel we exist, and to create a picture in our minds of our inner states.
We come to know ourselves symbolically through our reflection in the eyes of another.
Yet what happens when the feedback we receive doesn’t align with the way we experience ourselves on the inside?
For example, when we’re told we’re not hungry even though we feel we are, or when someone takes something we’ve said or done personally when we meant nothing by it?
Experiences like these are jarring when they happen occasionally, often prompting us to correct a misunderstanding, clarify an intention, or bear a moment of frustrating misattunement.
But when such experiences are chronic, something different happens.
Rather than trying to close the gap between oneself and others, ongoing experiences of inaccurate or distorted mirroring can lead to a deeper sense of alienation—either from ourselves or from the people around us.
Some of us may choose to sacrifice our inner reality in order to accommodate how others seem to perceive us.
Others may choose to hold onto their inner experience but at the cost of sharing it—turning their inner world into a protected, but isolated, space.
As human beings, we all have innate needs both for self-definition and for being loved and accepted.
When we are forced to choose between hiding parts of ourselves in order to belong, or being true to ourselves at the cost of connection, it creates profound pain.
Yet often, we don’t admit to ourselves what we are giving up.
If we were fully aware, our adaptations might not “work” as well.
People-pleasing or putting on a mask might not feel so good when we realize it’s happening at the expense of being truly known.
Isolating our inner selves doesn’t feel much better when we focus on how lonely it leaves us.
Once we start to realize what’s missing, our defense mechanisms leave a void that’s hard to ignore.
Choosing to enter this void is a risk many only take when they can no longer restore their old illusions.
But it’s difficult to feel fully alive when we are out of sync with those around us—when the feedback we receive isn’t aligned with what we are putting out, or isn’t there at all.
Knowing what we feel, accurately signaling what we feel to others (through facial expressions, body language, and words), and risking misattunements or misunderstandings are necessary ingredients for creating flow between our inner and outer selves.
This flow connects us to an experience we all deeply need:
the sense of being known, understood, and belonging—not as a compromise of self, but as an affirmation of it.
For those who haven’t been mirrored accurately, it may be because your caregivers needed to see you in a way that served their own narcissistic needs.
Or it may be that your personality was simply so different from those around you that you suffered from unintentional misrecognition.
Or perhaps those you depended on were too preoccupied with their own pain to see you at all.
In any case, if you grew up without accurate mirroring, you had little choice but to survive with an alienated sense of self.
But now, you do have a choice.
You can begin to create a new mirror to look through—whether through therapy, relationships, or communities that truly see you.
You can find, or build, the recognition you have always needed.