This distinction is essential for anyone working in a relational profession, but it holds just as much in everyday life: socially, in the family, in the couple. It lies at the heart of the strategic resolutive method, and once you have it in mind, you recognise it everywhere.

Understanding: an accumulation of information

To understand is to grasp the meaning, to perceive the origin, the purpose, the reasons behind something. In practice, this very often works through an accumulation of data: the information we gather about a situation, a phenomenon, a person, their history. And the more we have, the more we feel we have understood.

We may thus feel we understand someone because we have spent a very long stretch of life beside them: a partner, a long-standing friend, a child. In relational professions the mechanism is the same: the more information we hold about the person we support, the more we believe we have understood them properly. Team meetings, clinical meetings, supervision and practice analysis amplify that feeling further: pooling what each person holds, formulating hypotheses, drawing conclusions, agreeing on a course of action — all of this produces a group feeling of having grasped something. And it is a very agreeable feeling.

But this understanding sits entirely on the side of the one who observes and questions. It resides in the mind of the practitioner, the therapist, the social worker, the parent looking at their child, the friend who listens. One can therefore perfectly well leave a meeting with a conclusion that is incompatible with the world view of the person concerned: the understanding took place outside of them, and independently of them.

It is the cliché of the therapist saying “I understand” while their client remains entirely unmoved by the statement: the other person saying it is not enough to make it felt. More broadly, as soon as someone feels the need to explain again, to add one more detail, to go over the situation one more time, we can hypothesise that what they are missing is precisely the feeling of having been understood.

Being understood: when the fog lifts

Being understood corresponds to the effect produced in a person when a hypothesis or an opinion, bearing on a state, a tension or an imbalance that concerns them, turns out to be accurate, congruent and relevant. This opinion is a comment carrying no judgement, no reproach, no condemnation: neither on the state of things, nor on the causes and consequences that produced it.

What happens then is that the other person receives that comment as a revelation about a reality that had remained confused in their mind. It is as though the fog disappeared to let the landscape be seen clearly, the mountains in the distance, allowing one to get one’s bearings in the obscurity of existence.

Being understood is an experience that takes place in the realm of the intimate, hard to display or summarise. When we feel it, it is as though the other person had named something we were not yet able to name ourselves, not having metabolised the situation. And that experience allows the one who lives it to see themselves differently — and therefore to tell their story differently. The properly therapeutic effect of the phenomenon then becomes obvious.

Time spent together changes nothing

One can share a very long stretch of life with someone without ever having felt actually understood by them. Conversely, a fleeting encounter can suddenly produce it. Temporality has nothing to do with the amount of time spent together: staying ten years with the same therapist will not make me feel any more understood.

In session, that kind of moment is visible to the naked eye: a visible relief, often accompanied by phrases such as “yes, that’s exactly it” or “you understood everything”. What seemed complex suddenly becomes simple.

The journey on the other person’s shoulders

To produce this phenomenon, the essential thing is to be able to decentre oneself: to take that journey on the other person’s shoulders, asking oneself what they are trying to say through what they say, and then giving it back to them with a great deal of benevolence and respect. It is an experience in which one has to step out entirely from one’s own world view, one’s own map, one’s own representations, in order to project oneself into theirs. And it is extremely difficult: this quality is directly linked to empathic competence, in its most mature form.

One must also avoid the trap of the obvious, of mere interpretation or reformulation. Producing this feeling is not about repeating what the person has just said in slightly different words, with our own vocabulary. It is about reaching far beyond the discourse: the unnameable, the unspeakable, the unavowable; what the other person does not yet say to themselves; what already exists within them but remains confused.

The key to the success of that journey rests on two things. The first is concentration, which makes thinking far more incisive. The second is the lowering of one’s own anxiety, which allows one to decentre from oneself and from one’s own performance in order to focus on the essential: the other person. This second condition is built in particular through the development of one’s authority, that is, of the credibility one grants oneself.

These two faculties are acquired over time: they call for patience and for kindness towards oneself. They eventually bring greater ease with interview techniques, and therefore a more strategic and more incisive intervention. Some people seem to possess this gift innately, this capacity to see into the other and to lend them their words. Either way, it remains a skill — and a skill can be worked on.