In Why Don’t You Understand Me? behavioral scientist and clinical psychologist Yael Schonbrun draws upon her decades of research as well as tales from the therapy room to give us a new model for understanding misunderstandings.

While laying out the foundation for how we understand, Yael Schonbrun offers

• Simple tools to improve our daily relationships
• Tactics for achieving deeper understanding with those we battle with most often
• Strategies for healing discord and division on a societal level
• Four great strategies for being better understood by those around us. 

• Even when we recognize our blind spots, we continue to be overconfident in our ability to perceive.
• We often fail to recognize how lacking calories, sleep, or health sets the stage for misunderstanding, and we easily misinterpret other people based on our own assumptions of how we would feel in their shoes.
• Our filtering ability is an absolute necessity. But it’s also a regular culprit of misunderstanding.
• By devoting attention to a belief you disagree with, you can deliberately interpret and decode it. Often, you’ll discover the underlying hopes and fears of a person you previously thought could not be understood
• It’s more costly to disregard supposedly toxic or delusional information than to try to understand it. 
• The fundamental attribution error reveals our inclination to view others’ faults as innate character flaws while attributing our own faults to external causes.
• Tribalistic thinking evolved in humans because united tribes were more likely to protect their own, conferring a survival advantage…modern tribalism stances lead to worse outcomes for everyone. 

About The Author

Yael Schonbrun, PhD, is a practicing clinical psychologist, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, and the author of Work, Parent, Thrive (Shambhala, 2022). Her research has appeared in dozens of academic journals, but her focus these days is on her private practice where she has treated individuals and couples for fifteen years. She is a co-host of "Psychologists Off the Clock" and a frequent contributor to the Washington Post. She has also appeared in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and on dozens of podcasts, including "Deep Questions with Cal Newport" and "The Art of Charm."