Why Don’t You Understand Me?:The Surprising Science Behind Connecting in a World of Missed Signals

In Why Don’t You Understand Me? behavioral scientist and clinical psychologist Yael Schonbrun shows that misunderstanding is a problem of perception, not of communication. Solving it means looking in places most of us never think to look.

In an increasingly “connected” world, misunderstanding is disconnecting us more than ever. Too often, we solve for the wrong problem. Understanding happens inside people, in how we filter, interpret, and make meaning of what we hear, not between people in the exchange of words.

In Why Don't You Understand Me?, you’ll sit beside the Exalted Cyclops of Durham’s Ku Klux Klan and the city’s prominent Black civil rights leader as understanding transforms their lifelong hatred into friendship. You’ll join a detective, sitting alone in a room with a serial killer, and watch generous understanding extract a confession. You’ll visit a therapy room where two people who love each other can’t understand why they remember the same fight so differently, then discover why they’re both right. And you’ll discover how understanding and being understood by an octopus reveals something unexpected about connection itself.

Drawing on two decades in the therapy room and powerful relationship science, Dr. Schonbrun traces the hidden forces that distort what we perceive, how we interpret it, and why we defend our version of events even when we’re wrong—then shows what to do about it. Readers will come away with practical strategies for the moments that matter most, from the personal fight that keeps happening to the socio-political divides that feel unbridgeable. 

The glitches that cause misunderstanding reside in each of us. But so do the tools for understanding better and healing our most painful disconnections. | 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."