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Imagine you’re having a conversation with someone. You’ve been exchanging intimate details about your lives, and you feel safe enough to share something deeply vulnerable, like:

“My mother died of cancer when I was ten. I still feel an emptiness when thinking about it.”

But to your astonishment, the other person replies:

“Still? After all these years? Come on, you gotta move on!”

I bet you’d feel hurt, confused, and would react with the typical fight, flight, or freeze response. You might take it personally and decide never to share anything with that person again. Correct?

When we open up to others, we must accept that vulnerability comes with risk—of criticism, misinterpretation, unsolicited advice, or outright dismissal. A conscious approach, though, isn’t always possible; sometimes we’re just flowing through a conversation. But ideally, we should learn to protect ourselves in any circumstance.

In a perfect world, this vulnerability would be met with empathy, compassion, maturity, and intuition—elements that create a safe space for intimate connection. But as we know, the world is far from ideal.

That said, no meaningful relationship—of any kind—exists without occasional disappointment. We tend to expect more from those we allow close to us, but expectations often undermine relationships, just like comparison robs us of happiness. We must remain rooted in ourselves, closer to our inner compass than to the urge to close gaps with the people around us. And it’s our responsibility to shape communication in ways that feel safe and respectful for all parties—through honest expression, clear boundaries, and mutual understanding.

The ability to shape a relationship should go hand-in-hand with choosing them wisely: developing the sensitivity to recognize early on which people will require the least emotional effort to maintain healthy communication.

Still, we may go through periods where solitude feels like the better choice. Not because we reject connection, but because we’re exhausted—tired of investing in yet another relationship or friendship that drains us. Even then, we must sit with our inner demons—grappling with thoughts of the past, present, and future, and confronting the psychological obstacles our mind constantly elaborates.

There are also those moments when life seems to place only annoying or immature people in our path. And let me be clear: I’m not here to criticize such people. I’ve been that person. You’ve probably been that person. Humility and the awareness that we’re all works in progress can help not just us, but others too.

One small, recurring thing I try to do when I feel hurt, misunderstood, dismissed, or belittled in a conversation is to take responsibility for my feelings. First, I examine where they come from. Then I try to empathize with the other person—to understand what might have triggered their reaction. Sometimes, for example, people simply feel like shit and alone, and they want to drag others into their misery. It may be unconscious, but it’s still a mechanism—a pattern they’ve been repeating for a long time.

So the next time we find ourselves opening up, revealing intimate details, and receiving an offhand comment or a dismissive silence in return, we can try a simple practice: pause and identify the feeling the other person’s behavior triggered in us, then express it. A sentence like:

“When you dismissed what I said about how my mother’s death still makes me feel, I felt sad.”

is already a meaningful first step. It sounds simple, but it’s one of the hardest things to do in relationships—because most of us react to feelings instead of sitting with them, and finding the courage to acknowledge them to ourselves and share them with others.

If this sparked your curiosity, I encourage you to read Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. These were two fundamental books for my development and growth over the last years.