At a glance
Being liked by people who have never met the whole of you is its own kind of alone. Abroad you tell a shorter version of your life, and after a while the short version is the only one anybody here has. This article looks at the difference between being liked and being known, why the gap widens quietly, and what narrows it.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- It lands after the good evenings. Clients tell me the loneliest hour of the week is the one after a dinner that went perfectly well.
- The editing is small and constant. Clients describe trimming their own history until nothing in it needs explaining, and then feeling unrecognised in company.
- The old friendships thin at the same time. Clients find that the people who do know them have become people they update rather than talk to.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
What is missing when people here like you?
Being liked runs on the version of you that turns up. Being known requires the material you leave out. What makes somebody feel known is not more information. It is that another person holds the parts of you that are inconvenient: the thing you are ashamed of, the opinion you keep quiet, the way you were in the year everything went wrong. Here, people have the agreeable summary. You can be popular on that summary and still come home feeling unmet, which is confusing enough that most people decide something must be wrong with them.
The sense of being understood does measurable work. In a survey of 301 international university students, feeling understood by the people around them predicted better wellbeing even once social support, a sense of meaning and a sense of personal control were accounted for.1 Everyone was measured at a single point in time and students living abroad for a degree are not the same as adults who moved here for a job or a partner, so this cannot show which way the influence runs. What it does suggest is that being understood is not a softer version of having company. It is doing its own job, and nothing else stands in for it.
Why did the rest of me get left at the border?
Most of what makes you recognisable is carried by other people, and you arrived without them. At home, nobody needed the preamble. People knew your family, the job you walked away from, what that year cost you, why you flinch at a particular kind of joke. Here every one of those things requires an introduction, and introductions are tiring, so you start leaving them out. The edit is sensible each time you make it. After 3 years of sensible edits, the person everybody knows is considerably smaller than you are.
Language does a quieter version of the same thing. Humour, irony, tenderness and the half-finished sentence that still lands are the last things to arrive in a second language, and they are precisely the things that let somebody feel they have met you rather than your CV. Working in English with Danes who are excellent at it is not the same as being met in the language you argue and joke in, and the difference is easy to attribute to your personality rather than to your range.
Am I hiding, or has nobody asked?
Usually both, and the 2 keep each other going. Nobody asks, because you present as somebody who is fine. You present as somebody who is fine, because the one time you did not, it landed awkwardly in a culture that is careful about intrusion. Then the not-asking confirms that there is no appetite for the rest of you, and the hiding gets a little more automatic. I would not assume you are concealing anything deliberately. Most people in this position are simply being polite, efficient and good company, and are surprised to find where that ends up.
Where it ends up is worth taking seriously. Among 244 adults beginning talking therapy at publicly funded clinics in Canada, holding distress back from other people accounted for part of the link between having limited access to your own feelings and being lonely, and that pattern held only for men in young and middle adulthood, not for women or older men.2 It was one questionnaire at intake, with a single question standing in for loneliness, so it is a thin measure of a large experience and it describes people already seeking help. I read it as support for something ordinary: what you keep back does not stay in a separate compartment. It shows up as distance, including distance you cannot account for.
Why does staying unknown start to feel like a relief?
Because the edited version is lighter to carry, and for a while that is a genuine pleasure. Nobody here has an opinion about who you used to be. The family role you were cast in at 11 has no audience. A good deal of what people enjoy about moving abroad is exactly this, and it would be dishonest to tell you it is only a loss.
The cost arrives later and it arrives slowly. A self that nobody has seen stops feeling real to you, not only to other people. You begin to suspect that the warmth you receive is addressed to somebody slightly fictional, and warmth you cannot quite accept is tiring in a way that is hard to explain to anybody. There is also a question underneath this one that is worth separating out: whether you want to be known here, or whether you have decided that being known is something that happens where you came from and not in this life. That is not a decision to take by default, and belonging is the other half of it, which I have written about more fully in where do I belong now that I live abroad.
What helps, and when is this not enough?
Being known is not achieved by a big disclosure. It is built by letting slightly more of yourself into ordinary conversations than feels necessary. The useful moves are small, and they are easier to do than to want to do.
- Say the unedited sentence once an evening. The opinion you were going to soften, the thing you actually did at the weekend, the part of the story you normally cut. One is enough to change what somebody is holding of you.
- Tell one person here something from before you came. Not your history. One episode that explains why you are like this about something.
- Notice who you perform for. If it is everybody equally, that is worth examining. If it is specific people, that is information about them as much as about you.
- Keep one relationship where no explaining is needed. A regular call with somebody who knew you before, used for talking rather than reporting.
- Let somebody be mildly inconvenienced by you. Asking for help is the fastest way out of being pleasant company, and it is the step people skip for years.
There are times when this is not the right frame. If you have never felt known, in any country or language, if you were taught early that the real version of you was unwelcome, if being seen produces something closer to dread than to longing, or if the loneliness has settled into sleep, appetite and anything you used to enjoy, then adding more disclosure to your evenings will not touch it, and may confirm what you already suspect. That is the point at which working it through with somebody is more use than another resolution. How I work with people living away from where they started is set out on my expat psychotherapy page.
Questions people ask
Is feeling unknown enough of a reason to start therapy?
Yes, and it is a more common starting point than people expect. It usually turns out to be about something more specific than loneliness once there is room to describe it.
Is therapy not just another relationship where I perform?
It can be at first, and that is useful material rather than a problem. Noticing the point at which you start managing my impression of you is often where the work actually begins.
I am not in crisis. Does that make this too small to bring?
No, and the people who say this are frequently the ones carrying it longest. Nothing has to be severe before it is worth attending to.
Would it help to do this in my own language instead?
For some people it would, and it is worth saying so early. Where that is not available, naming what English flattens tends to recover some of it.
How long before I would feel any difference?
That depends mostly on whether this started with the move or long before it. The early sessions usually make clear which of the 2 you are working with.
If nobody here has met the person you really are, I hope loneliness therapy with me can be a safe first place to be known.
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Sources
- Du, X., Livingstone, A. G., and Adlam, A.-L. R. (2023). Felt understanding as a bridge between social identity and wellbeing among international university students. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology.
- Kealy, D., Seidler, Z. E., Rice, S. M., Cox, D. W., Oliffe, J. L., Ogrodniczuk, J. S., and Kim, D. (2021). Reduced emotional awareness and distress concealment: a pathway to loneliness for young men seeking mental health care. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 679639.
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
