Asymmetric insight

I'm finding these things increasingly fascinating because they seem for me to connect with other things I know from other parts of my life. So, it starts with an intriguing title like this one:
Why You Can't Truly Know Other People (and What You Can Do About It), and what then catches my attention is this:

This phenomeon—what psychologists call the illusion of asymmetric insight—creates a lot of problems. For instance, it allows you to completely reject what others believe because you think you understand it, and remain convinced that they'd agree with you if only they understood your point of view. Basically, you think you can understand everyone else and nobody can understand you

Which seems to be related strongly to that crucial and basic counselling insight; active listening is important because it actually helps people get beyond the isolation that can be brought about by asymmetric insight (no-body understands me) and it also helps get past the first-foot attitude we all tend to start with; that others don't understand us. Active listening helps overcome both those related things.

Note too the importance of this insight for everyday peace-making (and remember 'blessed are the peacemakers ...'); we have to make sure that we do both learn to understand and empathise with others and also demonstrate to them that we really do and that perhaps we understand their point of view. This requires a great deal of humility: the insight that we all think we understand ourselves but no-one else does. It is also part of the 'deal' that if we start from a perspective that others would agree with us if they understood our point of view, then we can't really properly consider changing or moving from our pov until we grasp that the someone else really does understand it. After all, if it's not understood, how can we consider dropping it or modifying it in favour of someone else's unknown perspective? When we truly grasp that our pov is properly understood (in a way that we could recognise it as our own) and yet not necessarily agreed with, then it is that we can move on. This, of course, is the reason why real reconciliation and peace-building is so hard: getting people to listen and to feel heard when the situation is a clash of stereotyping, miscomprehension and dismissal.

The other thing it reminded me of, though, is the acute inner embarrassment (I can't think of a better term just now) as I catch a glimpse of how I might be perceived by others and that they may understand something about me that I hadn't really got hold of. The asymmetry doesn't grant us unique and wholly accurate insight into ourselves. How could it? We are because others are; some of who we are is 'out there' in our social world.