I’ve recently become increasingly aware of how different everyone’s experience of life is.

What stirred this reflection was hearing two accounts of the same event from two friends I know well. I understand their contexts – as much as I can, given I also live within my own – and each shared perspectives that made complete sense within their respective worlds. But hearing them side by side left me rattled. Perhaps rattled isn’t quite right – there was a kind of inner shaking, a felt disorientation. Language fails me here, but what remained was a quiet discomfort, a sense of existential unease.

Training as a psychotherapist for some years, and having read countless great psychoanalysts, philosophers, and psychologists, I’ve also been struck by how they too can only ever speak from within their contexts. Often, I’ve concluded that many of the great theorists are saying something similar at their core, but through sentiments shaped by their own inner worlds.

There’s no real objective reality, no single truth- at least not one us humans can access. It’s an obvious idea – one I’ve been digesting for years – but lately it feels as though it has fully downloaded. And that realisation unsettles me.

For whatever reason, I’ve always sought out truth, and understanding there is no objective truth jars me. I recall speaking to a colleague about this, and they shared they found this encouraging, positive even- that it’s nice to all have different experiences of reality. In theory, perhaps it is, but in practice, this striking difference in perspective has been the cause of much rupture and discourse, on large scales (wars) and smaller scales (relationships).

In my personal relationships, this has been especially poignant. Too often I’ve entered conflict with former partners simply because we could not experience each other’s experience. In my most recent partnership, we made real progress in being able to hold each other’s worlds in regard. Yet even now, that remains hard for me – not intellectually (that part comes easily), but in an embodied, integrated way. Accepting and acknowledging my partner’s contrasting experience can feel threatening to my own.

…And if we are constantly separate, experiencing life through different lenses and contexts, then perhaps we are all, in some fundamental way, alone (existentially).

You see how I’ve arrived here, yes?

There are those brief moments with people, where your experiences overlap, you find common ground, or you’re quite similar and naturally align- and those moments are special, they make me feel less alone..

Perhaps my difficulty with this stems from a lack of mirroring growing up. In Winnicottian terms, mirroring refers to the way a caregiver reflects a child’s emotional reality back to them, helping the child come to know themselves through the other’s gaze. Without this, one’s sense of self- and of reality, can feel uncertain, unreflected, or unseen.

So, maybe that’s what’s at play here. Having rarely had my inner world mirrored back to me, something in me still searches for that sameness – for someone who sees what I see.

Yet paradoxically, I also deeply struggle with people who can’t see outside their own contexts. One of my parents is like this- quick to protest, to villainise anyone who dares to offer a different view. It makes sense, of course; they too were never truly seen. But in their effort to defend their reality, they’ve replicated that same absence of seeing with me.

What is true? Everything? Nothing?

There’s no conclusion to this blog entry- just more questions.

And a quiet wondering: does anyone else feel this too?

Further reading

Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. International Universities Press.

*See especially the chapters on mirroring and the facilitating environment. Winnicott explores how caregivers reflecting a child’s emotional reality back to them supports the development of a coherent sense of self.

Klein, M. (1997). Envy and gratitude and other works 1946–1963. Vintage. (Original work published 1957)

Explores early relational experiences and how internalized relationships shape perception, emotion, and interactions.

Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.

Introduces empathy and the importance of understanding another’s subjective experience.