STRANGERS IN THE MIRROR: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NOT KNOWING OTHERS — OR OURSELVES

Let me begin with an imaginary consultation, if only to illustrate something that happens surprisingly often in clinical practice—or perhaps it only happens to me.

A patient comes to see me because he would like to lose weight. He says he has been gaining it. Doing my doctorly duty, I naturally ask how much weight he has gained and over what period. He cannot tell me.

And I do not mean that he cannot remember whether it was seven or eight kilos. That degree of precision, I admit, sometimes exists only on the scale and in the doctor’s mind. He does not know whether the change began recently, developed gradually over the past few years or dates all the way back to early adulthood. Nor can he remember his lowest or highest weight during that period. The concern is genuine and the wish to change is clear, but there is remarkably little real awareness of what has been happening in his own body.

Of course, I am not condemning this dear hypothetical patient of mine. I am merely using him to illustrate something that may happen, to varying degrees, to any of us. After all, someone in their thirties or forties who had maintained a daily spreadsheet of their weight since the age of eighteen might raise a few additional clinical questions—if you know what I mean.

The point is that encounters like this make me wonder about something broader: how often do we know that something within us is not quite right, yet remain unable to say exactly what it is, when it began or why it happened? There is discomfort, but no history. There is a desire to change, but little understanding of the road that brought us here.

And this is hardly limited to weight. Someone may feel unbearably restless whenever they have nothing to do. Is it anxiety? Boredom? Guilt about resting? Fear of being alone with their own thoughts? The feeling that valuable time is being wasted? Or a little of each? It may sound as though I am making light of the matter, but I sometimes ask patients with this kind of vague complaint whether they are suffering from anxiety—or from idleness.

Parents seek help because their child is restless, sleeps poorly, cannot concentrate and refuses to obey. There may, of course, be a condition affecting the child. But is the problem always located entirely within them? What are the household routines like? How much time does everyone spend in front of a screen? How do the adults deal with frustration, limits and exhaustion? And how often do we wish the world, our circumstances and the people around us would change without noticing that part of our discomfort may also be asking for a change within ourselves?

This is not about blaming individuals for everything that happens to them. Nor is it about pretending that every form of suffering can be resolved through self-knowledge, positive thinking and half an hour of meditation at sunrise. Not that these things cannot help, but illnesses, injustices, losses, inequalities and objective circumstances do not simply disappear because we have looked within. Besides, to what extent do we ever see ourselves as we really are?

The word alienation comes from the Latin alienus: that which belongs to another, or has become strange, distant or unfamiliar. Throughout history, philosophers such as Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx used the concept in different ways. Later, thinkers associated with what became known as the critical tradition also reflected on the separation between human beings and their labour, their desires, the society in which they live and what they might one day become.

I have no intention of turning this into a philosophy lecture—which I am hardly qualified to give and which would be an excellent way of alienating half my readers before the fourth paragraph. What interests me here is exchanging impressions with you about a broader and more ordinary phenomenon: the process through which something that should be intimate and familiar becomes distant from us—our own body and appearance, our feelings, the story we tell about who we are, the people who live beside us and the consequences of a life that is sometimes lived largely on autopilot.

We live in curious times. Our watches count our steps, monitor our sleep and warn us when we have been sitting for too long. Our phones know where we have been, what we have bought and what we have searched for, and probably suspect what we will want before we have decided ourselves.

And yet, we may have no idea when we began to lose our enthusiasm for work. We know how many times we woke during the night, but not necessarily what has been keeping us awake. We follow the lives of people we have never met in real time, while sometimes knowing remarkably little about the fears, dreams and sorrows of the person with whom we share a home.

Perhaps this is a particularly contemporary form of estrangement: we possess information about almost everything and still know very little about ourselves.

The Body We Live In

Our relationship with the body reveals this paradox particularly well. There is nothing inherently alienating about wanting to lose weight, dye one’s hair, take care of one’s skin, undergo an aesthetic procedure or alter a feature that causes discomfort. Caring about appearance can be a legitimate form of self-care, expression, pleasure and reconciliation with oneself.

The problem may begin when we can no longer tell whether we are changing our body so that we may recognise ourselves more fully within it, or so that we may look less like ourselves and more like an image we have been taught to desire. Real bodies have asymmetries, marks, hair in inconvenient places, angles that refuse to cooperate and a troubling resistance to camera filters. I speak from experience. They also grow older—an act of biological rudeness that the beauty industry has yet to overcome.

We can care for our bodies. We can transform them. We can wish they were different. But do we truly know them? I mean noticing hunger before consulting an app, recognising tiredness before it becomes exhaustion and experiencing tension, pleasure, fear, desire and discomfort not merely as faults to be corrected, but as messages that may deserve to be heard.

There is a vast difference between caring for the body and keeping it under permanent surveillance; between wanting to make a change and declaring war on oneself; between presenting yourself to the world as you are and spending your life trying to become somebody else.

At that point, a more important question than “What would I like to change?” might be: “What do I believe would truly change if I managed to become different from who I am?”

That Vague Sense of Unease—and the Discomfort We Cannot Quite Name

Alienation may also appear in the way we deal with psychological suffering. It is entirely understandable that someone in pain should simply want the pain to end. When the house is on fire, nobody begins by debating its engineering flaws. The flames must be brought under control first.

Medication may serve precisely that purpose: reducing distress, improving sleep, containing severe symptoms and restoring the minimum conditions a person needs to think, work, relate to others and care for themselves. The problem is not the desire for relief. It begins when we mistake putting out the fire for rebuilding the house.

It is not unusual for someone to arrive at my office and say, “Doctor, I don’t want to waste time finding out what might have caused this. I just want something that will make it go away.”

There are moments when this statement expresses exhaustion, desperation and a lack of emotional resources. It deserves compassion, not judgement. Yet it may also reveal an expectation that is very characteristic of our time: that every form of discomfort should have a rapid, objective solution—preferably one that does not require exhausting and “inconvenient” internal changes.

We want to sleep, but may be unwilling to reconsider the routine that keeps us permanently overstimulated. We want to feel less anxious, but without loosening our grip on the idea that everything must remain predictable and under control. We want better relationships, provided the other person changes first—or, ideally, is the only one required to adapt.

Psychotherapy, reflection and the construction of new meanings require something we experience as scarce: time. They also ask us to tolerate uncertainty, to face the fear of what we may discover when we open Pandora’s box and to recognise that not everything we feel can be eliminated immediately. Temporarily silencing a symptom and holding it up to the light so that we may understand what it represents are very different undertakings, both in difficulty and in lasting effectiveness.

So Close, Yet So Far Apart

I am going to speak about family now, but you may understand the word broadly: biological family, a romantic relationship, your relationship with yourself, close friends or the network of bonds you have chosen to build.

We often idealise the family—at least the supposedly “typical” one—as a natural place of care, listening and belonging. In practice, we know that it can also be the setting for conflict, silence, misunderstanding and profound wounds.

Nor does there have to be a great tragedy for people to drift apart. Sometimes distance grows through the accumulation of small absences. A child is handed a tablet because the adults need fifteen minutes of silence—and anyone who has never needed those fifteen minutes may have a somewhat selective memory.

It is not universally true, but it is very common for a couple to reach the end of the day exhausted. Each picks up a screen and they remain side by side on the sofa. There has been no argument, abandonment or absence of love. There has simply been exhaustion. Tomorrow, perhaps, the same thing will happen again. After a while, they begin to separate not only the bills and the streaming password, but more and more of their inner lives.

Children often spend too little meaningful time with their parents to understand their frustrations. Parents watch their children grow, but cannot always reach the world in which they live. We ask, “Is everything all right?” The other person replies, “Fine.” And everyone politely conspires to keep the fiction alive.

This does not mean, for example, that older relatives should never, under any circumstances, live in residential care; that marriages must be preserved at any cost; or that families should be forced to gather happily around a table straight out of a butter commercial. Some separations are necessary. Some older people genuinely receive much better care in specialised facilities. Some routines are incompatible, and some families discover less traditional but perfectly legitimate ways of remaining close.

The issue is not conformity to an ideal model of family. It is noticing when physical proximity has ceased to mean emotional presence, whatever your own idea of “family” may be. When the other person is reduced to a function—the problem child, the demanding father, the anxious mother, the difficult partner—we may begin to suspect that a complex human being is no longer being fully seen.

The Other Person as a Category Rather Than a Person

At the social level, this distancing takes on another dimension. I suspect that we have come to rely heavily on categories in order to interact with the world. Categories organise reality and help us make decisions with relative ease. The problem begins when the category completely replaces the person: someone becomes the conservative, the progressive, the believer, the atheist, the privileged one, the resentful one, the activist, the oblivious one, the upstanding citizen, the complacent one or the virtue-signaller. And there are many more.

Within seconds, a label allows us to believe that we know everything there is to know about someone. We no longer need to listen to them because we already know what to expect. Social media—those perennial villains blamed for almost everything—have intensified this tendency. To be fair, they have also brought us into contact with people and ideas we might otherwise never have encountered, which is extraordinary. At the same time, they have encouraged the creation of spaces in which we meet almost nothing but variations of what we already believe or, worse, are handed an easily understood and readily applicable template for what we ought to think.

There is no question that violent ideas, dehumanising rhetoric and harmful behaviour must be firmly challenged. Openness to dialogue does not demand moral neutrality in the face of cruelty. Yet even necessary opposition may lose its meaning when the aim is no longer to protect people, uphold ethically defensible principles or transform reality into something we genuinely believe would be better for everyone, but merely to humiliate, reject and exclude the “enemy”.

The world was not made for only one kind of person, behaviour or thought. But neither is it a battlefield on which every difference must remain locked in perpetual conflict.

The uncomfortable question may be whether we still wish to understand why someone thinks as they do, or whether we merely want to determine as quickly as possible which side they are on. Understanding does not mean agreeing. Sometimes, it is precisely what enables us to disagree more accurately, more firmly and less destructively—and perhaps even begin to see solutions that had not occurred to us before.

The Pain of Others That Does Not Really Hurt Me

We can see this in the great natural disasters and human-made catastrophes that periodically dominate the news. People are often genuinely distressed, compassionate and eager to help the victims, sometimes mobilising in rapid campaigns to reduce the consequences of what has happened. Yet we also hear people responding to individual tragedies with comments such as, “What were they doing in a place like that?”, “Living that way, what did they expect?” or “They must have done something to bring it upon themselves.”

Ideas like these are not always born solely of cruelty. Psychologically, they may serve as attempts to place some distance between ourselves and what happened. If the victim made some identifiable “mistake”, we may reassure ourselves that we are safe because we would have acted differently. If a person became ill for a specific reason, we can imagine that the same thing will not happen to us because we will give it no reason to. If someone lost everything because they made poor decisions, we can preserve the fantasy that the world remains reasonably fair to people who behave correctly—as we believe we do.

It is an understandable defence, but one that comes at a high price. To make ourselves feel safe, we strip the other person of their complexity. We reduce an entire life to a simple explanation and distance ourselves from what we share with them: vulnerability, unpredictability, limitation and the finitude that makes us equally human.

Not all suffering can be prevented. Not every tragedy conceals a punishment. Not every victim must be turned into a defendant so that the rest of us can carry on with our day.

And no human suffering should deserve our solidarity only while it is trending.

The World Is Larger Than the View Framed by Our Window

I believe there is an even broader dimension to alienation: our difficulty in perceiving what happens far away from us, whether geographically, socially or emotionally. We possess an impressive ability to ignore whatever remains outside our field of vision. Poverty is easier to forget once it has been pushed away from our daily route. A war becomes easier to overlook when its deaths and bombings disappear from the headlines. The environmental crisis is easier to treat as an abstraction when the weather happens to be pleasant in our own city.

I am not waving any particular flag here, although I recognise that genuine neutrality does not exist. Still, because these matters affect all of us, I feel entitled to say that it is easier to ignore than to confront the finite supply of drinkable water on this planet, the origins of the products we consume, the destination of the waste we produce or the living conditions of those whose labour makes our comfort possible. Not necessarily because we are monsters, but because we feel we must get on with our own daily lives and their many challenges, while concern for everything else, regrettably, slips into the background.

Perhaps this happens precisely because we are human: limited, busy, tired and highly skilled at shrinking the world to the size of what we can bear. None of us can remain emotionally connected to every other person’s suffering at all times. The problem may begin when this necessary limit to our attention hardens into permanent indifference; when suffering we do not see ceases to count; when distant people become numbers, statistics, migration flows, collateral damage or problems that somebody, somewhere, ought to solve.

We may not be able to hold the entire world in our arms. But we can become suspicious of the ease with which certain lives disappear from our horizon.

There Are No Alienated People on One Side and Enlightened People on the Other

It is tempting to end a reflection like this by dividing humanity into two groups: the alienated on one side, and on the other those who have awakened, seen the light and now observe the remainder of the species with a mixture of pity and irritation.

But none of us stands outside the phenomenon we are trying to understand. We may be remarkably aware in one area and completely blind in another. We may publicly champion empathy while failing to listen to the person who lives with us. We may criticise consumerism while buying something useless to soothe a miserable afternoon. We may condemn the intolerance of others with a particularly imaginative intolerance of our own. We may understand other people’s suffering in great depth and continue to avoid our own. Who among us has never cast the first stone?

Failures do not invalidate principles. Contradictions do not turn every attempt at change into hypocrisy. They merely remind us that self-knowledge is not a diploma we receive one day, frame and hang on the wall. It is an unfinished process—sometimes uncomfortable and even a little humiliating—because it invariably reveals that the problem is not located entirely outside ourselves.

Encounter as an Antidote to Alienation

If alienation is the distancing of something that should feel familiar, perhaps its opposite is not a perfect state of lucidity, but encounter.

An encounter with our body, not as an object requiring constant correction, but as the place in which our existence unfolds. An encounter with our feelings before they are forced to shout through symptoms. An encounter with those closest to us beyond the functions and roles we have assigned them. An encounter with those who are different—not necessarily as allies, but as people whose humanity does not vanish because they look different or think differently. An encounter, finally, with the world extending far beyond the small portion of it that fits onto our screens.

This may happen in psychotherapy, during an honest conversation, through something we read, in the experience of loss, in silence or in that rare moment when we stop preparing our response and genuinely listen. It does not require abandoning technology, refusing medication, demonising aesthetic procedures, moving into a vast communal household or agreeing about politics over Christmas dinner. That would be asking far too much of anyone’s mental health.

Perhaps we need only recover some capacity for presence: to ask questions with sincere curiosity, offer fewer automatic answers, tolerate for a moment the possibility that we may be wrong, recognise that the other person possesses an inner life that cannot be contained within the category to which we have assigned them, and admit that we remain partly unknown even to ourselves.

One of the great challenges of our time may be to resist the ease with which everything can be transformed into an object, a label, a performance or an opinion—and, in its place, cultivate genuine encounters with ourselves, with those who are near, with those who are far away and with the world we inhabit.

May the mirror, rather than hiding us from ourselves, help us become wiser.

AI-generated image based on a prompt by the author.