"OH, TO SEE OURSELVES AS OTHERS SEE US!" WHEN WE TRY TO KNOW WHO WE ARE THROUGH OTHERS' EYES

Robert Burns (1759–1796), widely regarded as Scotland’s national poet and known around the world as the author of Auld Lang Syne, he had a particular gift for turning ordinary moments into memorable observations about human nature. In 1786, he did precisely that in a poem about a woman sitting in church with a louse making its way through the gauze and lace of her elaborate bonnet—perfectly composed, perfectly unaware, a picture of dignified self-possession while her fellow congregants watched with barely concealed horror. "O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us," he wrote, in the Scots that loses something in translation but nothing in meaning: oh, if only some power would give us the gift of seeing ourselves as others see us. He meant it as comedy. As deflation. As a reminder that we walk through the world with blind spots the size of cathedrals, and that the gap between our self-image and the image we project is frequently larger and more interesting than we'd care to admit.

That gap turns out to be not just comic but clinically significant — and it runs, in one form or another, through an enormous amount of the work that brings people into therapy.

There are few subjects, when it comes down to it, more fascinating to us than ourselves. The first time we look at a freshly taken photograph, we find our own image before anything else. We may pretend otherwise. We discuss politics, work, films, philosophy, the alarming price of coffee. Yet underneath many of our conversations lies a quieter question: What do people think of me? Do they find me intelligent? Difficult? Kind? Boring? Too much? Not enough? None of the above?

Most of us would like to believe we have a reasonably accurate picture of who we are. After all, some of us have been living with ourselves for decades. We know our intentions, our private struggles, the reasons behind our choices, and the thoughts we decided not to say aloud. Surely, if anyone is qualified to describe us, it should be ourselves.

And yet we are, in some respects, the people least equipped to see ourselves clearly. We watch the world through our own eyes, but we cannot turn those eyes around and observe from the perspective of the person doing the watching. We experience ourselves from the inside, where motives, doubts, and good intentions are visible. Other people experience us from the outside, where only our words, expressions, gestures, silences, and actions can be seen. Between those two points of view, an entire psychological continent may exist.

The person I intend to be and the person you experience

Suppose I interrupt you repeatedly during a conversation. From inside my own mind, I may experience enthusiasm — I'm interested in what you're saying, ideas are arriving too quickly, I want to show that I understand. From your side of the table, I may simply appear rude. Suppose I rarely ask for help: in my internal narrative, I'm independent and unwilling to burden others; to those around me, I may seem distant or incapable of trust. Or consider you're someone who offers advice most of the time — not that this doesn't happen to be exactly me, though I swear I keep trying to correct it —  I might see myself as caring and helpful; the other person may experience someone who never truly listens, because they're too busy preparing a solution.

Our intentions matter. They reveal something important about us. But they are not the whole story. The effect we have on others also matters — even when that effect differs from what we meant to produce. This is one of the most difficult truths of adult life: being misunderstood is not always entirely the other person's fault. Sometimes our habitual way of relating sends a message we never consciously chose. Sometimes the person we believe ourselves to be is not fully consistent with the person who repeatedly appears in our relationships. That doesn't make us fraudulent. It makes us human.

Blind spots

A blind spot is not necessarily a terrible secret or a hidden defect. It may simply be something obvious to everyone except the person displaying it. The colleague who describes herself as "very direct" may be unaware that the rest of the office experiences her as hostile. The man who proudly says he avoids conflict may not notice that he punishes people through silence. The person who believes they are constantly overlooked may fail to see how seldom they allow anyone else to occupy the center of attention.

Blind spots survive because the mind is not a neutral observer of itself. We interpret our behavior in ways that preserve a coherent and tolerable identity. When we arrive late, there was traffic; when someone else arrives late, they are inconsiderate. When we lose our temper, we were under enormous pressure; when another person loses theirs, they have an anger problem. When we withdraw, we need space; when someone withdraws from us, they are cold or cruel. This is not solely hypocrisy — much of it happens automatically. We have access to the complexity of our own circumstances but usually see only the visible portion of someone else's behavior. This is why, when we are not in the grip of self-recrimination, we tend to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt —  and extend considerably less of it to everyone else. Unfortunately, other people may be doing exactly the same thing in reverse. 

There's something more structural underneath this, though. The self we carry around in our heads is assembled from a peculiar mix of sources: things we were told about ourselves early and often enough that they became fact; things we decided about ourselves in the aftermath of experiences that may or may not have been representative; things we've inferred from how people have treated us, which reflects their own histories as much as our own. The result is a self-portrait that is partly accurate, partly idealized and defensive, and partly just outdated — painted under conditions that no longer exist, by a person who is no longer quite the same, and never updated, like a photograph that slowly loses its color and definition with the passage of time. We keep the old portrait on the wall and forget to notice that the person in it is decades younger, and made of a completely different set of circumstances. Meanwhile, other people are watching something else. Something live and constantly changing.

Other people are not perfect mirrors

It is tempting to conclude that if we cannot see ourselves objectively, we should simply trust other people's opinions. That would be a mistake. Other people don't see us as we truly are — they see us through their own histories, fears, expectations, insecurities, and projections. One person may describe you as confident; another may call you arrogant. Someone who values emotional restraint may find you dramatic, while someone else admires your openness. A controlling person may accuse you of selfishness when you establish a boundary.

People are mirrors, but every mirror has its own shape. Some magnify. Some distort. Some are cracked. This is why no single opinion should become a final verdict on your identity. If one person tells you that you are selfish, it may say something about you, something about them, or something about the particular interaction between you. If five unrelated people, across different contexts and at different times, tell you that you tend to dismiss their feelings, the pattern deserves more serious attention. Repeated feedback is data. It is not necessarily the truth — but it is information.

Why feedback often hurts

Most of us claim to appreciate honesty, provided it arrives in a form that confirms what we already believe. We enjoy hearing that we are generous, perceptive, or stronger than we realize. We are less enthusiastic when honesty suggests that we dominate conversations, become defensive, or avoid responsibility.

Negative feedback can feel threatening because it doesn't merely comment on a behavior — we often experience it as an attack on the self. "You hurt me" becomes "You are a bad person." "You were dismissive" becomes "Everything you believe about yourself is false." The criticism may be limited, but shame expands it. Once shame takes over, we usually defend ourselves in one of two ways: we attack the messenger, searching for flaws that disqualify their opinion; or we collapse into self-condemnation and conclude that the criticism reveals our entire character. Neither response helps us see more clearly.

The healthiest position lies somewhere between defensiveness and self-destruction: Perhaps there is something here I need to understand. That sentence requires real strength.

Receiving feedback well doesn't mean accepting every accusation or apologizing for things you didn't do. It means becoming curious before becoming defensive. What exactly did the person experience? Was this an isolated event or part of a pattern? Have others said something similar? What was I trying to communicate, and what did my behavior actually communicate? A useful response to criticism is not "You are right about me" or "You are wrong about me." It is: "Let me look."

Living entirely through other people's eyes

There is, however, another side to this. Some people are not insufficiently concerned with how others see them. They are imprisoned by it. They monitor every expression, pause, and change of tone. They replay conversations for hours. A delayed reply becomes rejection; a neutral expression becomes disapproval; a short message becomes evidence that the relationship has changed permanently.

For someone organized around approval, seeing ourselves as others see us can become an exhausting full-time occupation. The person no longer asks, "Was I fair?" or "Did I act according to my values?" They ask only, "Did they like me?" — and these are very different questions. A life governed entirely by reputation is not necessarily an ethical life. It may simply be an anxious one.

Social media offers a vivid contemporary example of how far this concern can go. People may deliberately curate their own image — literally filtering their appearance, crafting narratives that don't quite correspond to the life they actually live, projecting the person they would like to be regardless of how distant that persona is from who they really are. The gap between self and performance widens, and the performances, over time, can begin to feel more real than the person behind it.

Sometimes doing the right thing disappoints people. Establishing a boundary may make you seem selfish to someone who benefited from your lack of boundaries. Speaking honestly may make you less pleasant to someone who preferred your silence. The goal, then, should not be to become whatever others want us to be, but to understand how we affect people without surrendering our identity to their approval — while still keeping our relationships safe enough to sustain.

Therapy as a different kind of mirror

In the consulting room, the distance between what we think of ourselves, what others think of us, and what we think others think of us is striking. There is the person who experiences themselves as fundamentally inadequate, who has constructed an elaborate internal case for their own insufficiency and curates evidence with the diligence of a prosecutor — while from the outside what's visible is someone thoughtful, capable, and genuinely valued, running on a private narrative that the people who care about them would find almost unrecognizable. And there is the person who is simply not sure who they are, who has spent so long calibrating themselves to what various rooms required that they've lost the thread back to something that feels authentically their own. Three very different presentations of the same underlying gap — and all three, in their different ways, costly. 

Psychotherapy can offer an unusual form of reflection. A therapist is not an objective machine — therapists are human and bring their own perceptions into the room. But the therapeutic relationship is designed, at its best, to help examine, with the right techniques, patterns that may be difficult to recognize elsewhere. 

These patterns are not exposed so that you can be judged. They are explored because what happens between you and other people may also begin to happen between you and the therapist — and in that smaller, more observed space, it becomes possible to look at them together. The consulting room becomes a small laboratory of human relationships. The point is not to deliver a final description of your personality. It is to offer another perspective — one you can examine rather than obey.

The self-portrait, it turns out, isn't just a belief. It's a framework. And frameworks organize how new information is processed, which means that contradictory evidence tends to be reinterpreted or absorbed into the existing picture rather than allowed to challenge it. The person who believes themselves fundamentally unlovable doesn't simply update that belief when someone loves them — they find a way to make the love consistent with the framework. Changing the portrait requires something more than information. It requires creating enough safety to look at it honestly, enough curiosity to ask when it was painted and under what conditions, and enough flexibility to entertain the possibility that the person looking out from it might not be the person you are now.

Aren't we also a different person in each encounter?

There will always be parts of us visible only from the inside and others visible mainly from the outside. We are partly what we feel, partly what we intend, partly what we repeatedly do, and, and most importantly, partly what emerges from our interactions with those around us.

This is probably why, taken one by one, people's sincere opinions of us can vary so much. We can come across as entirely different people depending on who we interact with — and so can they. Of course, there’s always the bandwagon effect, through which one person's influential view of someone can shape how others perceive them. But set that aside and consider each relationship individually: from every significant connection we have throughout life, a totally new version of "you" and "them" may emerge. And there is something right about things going this way. No one is an island, and when two different personal narratives meet, they have the power to transform each other into someone else, completely unique, because we are also — maybe in a greater part — defined by encounter.

Which means that anyone trying to find out how they come across should also ask themselves: whose mirror are they looking into? No matter how much we try to see ourselves through other people’s eyes, there may be as many versions of “us” as there are people we are lucky enough to interact with. There is no single, fixed, universally consistent image we project onto others. That is something we build and rebuild in every encounter, shaped by the time we invest, and the particular quality of each relationship we choose to sustain.

Perhaps the real gift

Self-knowledge requires several sources of information — introspection, behavior, consequences, trusted feedback, and the patterns that repeat across time. It also requires compassion. Without it, self-examination becomes prosecution. With it, we can acknowledge that we have hurt people without deciding that we are irredeemable. We can recognize a flaw without concluding it is all we are.

To see ourselves as others see us would indeed be a remarkable gift. But the greater gift might be to see ourselves from several angles at once: through our own eyes, through the eyes of those who love us, through the eyes of those we have hurt, and through the eyes of those who have misunderstood us. We might discover that we are kinder than we thought, but not always as attentive. Stronger than we imagined, but sometimes harder to approach. Less strange than we feared, yet more predictable than we'd like to admit.

Burns thought the gift would cure vanity and pretension. He wasn't wrong. But it might also — perhaps more importantly — cure a certain kind of unnecessary diminishment. There are people walking around unable to see the warmth that others direct toward them, the competence others recognize in them, the presence others value — because the portrait they're working from was painted by someone who didn't see them clearly either. And so they conduct themselves according to a version of others' opinions that may never have been accurate to begin with.

The purpose is not to like ourselves more efficiently — nor to perform a version of ourselves we don't actually recognize. It is to become freer to change: to recognize that the person we are trying to be and the person others encounter have drifted slightly apart, and to begin the quiet work of bringing them closer together.

The louse in Burns's poem is oblivious. But sometimes obliviousness is the thing standing between a person and a more honest, more livable account of who they really are.

And that gap between the portrait on the wall and the person standing in front of it is often exactly where the real work begins.

Shall we?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image generated by AI in accordance with the author's view of Robert Burns's poem entitled "To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church" (1786).