There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from saying what happened to you and then having to defend the meaning of what you just said.
You explain an experience. The other person recognizes part of it, maps it onto something familiar, and responds to that version. You clarify. Now the clarification is treated as resistance. You add detail. The detail becomes overexplaining. You say, “That is not what I meant,” and suddenly the conversation is no longer about the original experience. It is about whether you are allowed to correct someone else’s interpretation of it.
At first, this looks like a communication problem.
Repeated often enough, it can become something deeper: authority over the meaning of your own lived experience begins to move away from you.
That is where misunderstanding becomes an epistemic problem.
Being heard is not the same as being received
In Just Sit With Me, I distinguish between testimony and what a listener constructs from it.
Testimony is the account a person is trying to give from inside an experience. Interpretation is what the listener builds from that account: the category they recognize, the analogy they reach for, the explanation that makes sense from where they are standing.
We all use prior experience to understand unfamiliar things. The problem begins when the interpretation is treated as more authoritative than the testimony that produced it.
A listener recognizes a pattern and decides they understand. The speaker feels that something essential is missing and clarifies. But once the listener has treated their interpretation as complete, the correction may no longer register as information. It can look like defensiveness, confusion, or refusal to accept help.
The speaker is still trying to make the account more accurate. The listener thinks the account has already been settled.
That is the injury: partial interpretation treated as complete understanding.
“I am trying to keep the thing true”
One line in the book carries the whole problem for me:
I am trying to keep the thing true.
That is what clarification often is. It is not automatically an argument or a demand for agreement. It is an attempt to preserve the shape of an experience before someone else’s interpretation hardens into the official version.
That does not mean the speaker is infallible.
If I tell you that a conversation frightened me, I have special access to the fact that I experienced fear. You can disagree with my explanation for why the other person acted as they did. You can challenge factual claims. You can bring evidence I did not have.
None of that requires replacing my account of my own internal experience with yours.
That boundary is what I mean by Epistemic Sovereignty: retaining meaningful authority over the interpretation of one’s own lived experience without turning subjectivity into immunity from evidence, correction, or disagreement.
It is interpretive ownership, not infallibility.
How repeated misreception changes the speaker
A single misunderstanding can be repaired. Repeated misreception can change how a person relates to their own knowledge.
When your account is repeatedly minimized, reframed, pathologized, or overwritten, you may begin preparing ordinary statements as though you are giving legal testimony before a jury. You add context before anyone asks. You search for wording that cannot be misread. You collect evidence for feelings. You anticipate objections before you finish the sentence.
Eventually the pressure can turn inward.
Maybe I did not explain it correctly.
Maybe I am remembering it wrong.
Maybe their version makes more sense than mine.
This is why chronic misunderstanding can do more than make someone lonely. It can weaken epistemic confidence: the ability to stand inside one’s own experience and recognize that it counts as knowledge.
For neurodivergent people, trauma survivors, and others whose communication style is regularly treated as unfamiliar or excessive, the cost can be especially high. If hesitation is treated as uncertainty, later clarification as inconsistency, and precision as hostility, the very process used to become clearer can be used against credibility.
The result is cruelly circular: the more carefully someone tries to preserve accuracy, the less trustworthy they may appear to a listener who expects fluency to arrive instantly.
Reception protects more than feelings
Reception is not passive agreement. It does not mean believing every claim without examination or surrendering judgment.
It means allowing testimony to remain testimony long enough to understand what is actually being claimed.
It leaves room for “I do not understand yet.” It treats clarification as additional data rather than immediate opposition. It distinguishes “I see this differently” from “therefore your account of your own experience is invalid.”
And sometimes it means resisting the urge to fix the problem before the person has finished showing you what the problem is.
A listener can still bring perspective, notice contradictions, disagree, or offer another frame. The difference is that they do so without replacing the speaker as the primary witness to the speaker’s own lived experience.
That difference sounds small until you have spent years on the other side of it.
Understanding can remain incomplete
One of the hardest things for people to tolerate is incomplete understanding.
We want closure. We want a category. We want to know what happened and what to do next. But sometimes care requires staying in the unfinished space a little longer.
“I think I understand part of this, but I may not have the whole thing” protects more truth than a confident interpretation built too quickly.
So does a question.
So does a pause.
So does letting a person come back later with words they could not access under pressure.
Just Sit With Me is, in part, an argument for that slower form of reception. Not because every interpretation is equally correct, and not because lived experience is beyond scrutiny, but because understanding another person requires enough humility to know when the map in your head is not yet the territory they are trying to describe.
Epistemic sovereignty gives me language for what is at stake when that humility disappears.
The injury is no longer only, “You misunderstood me.”
It becomes, “Your misunderstanding has been granted more authority than my attempt to tell you what happened to me.”
Those are different injuries, and if we want relationships in which people can remain real to one another, we have to learn the difference.
When someone tells you what their experience meant, do you make room for their correction, or do you defend the version you already understood?