I Wasn't Really Seeing Them—Are You?

The Lens You Don't Know You're Using

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For most of my life, I thought I was a truly considerate person.

I genuinely cared about the people around me. I wasn’t out to take advantage of anyone. I wasn’t plotting ways to get ahead at someone else’s expense. By any conventional measure of selfishness, I felt like I was in the clear.

And then I read a book that described being self-involved and I instantly became aware of just how often I saw the world entirely through the lens of what it meant for me (my early writing was even based on this lens).

Not maliciously. Not consciously. But consistently. A friend would share something difficult, and without realizing it, I was already filtering their experience through my own—what it reminded me of, how I related, what it brought up in me. I wasn’t absent. I was engaged. I just wasn’t fully registering them.

That’s when I recognized a distinction I think we rarely talk about—the difference between being selfish and being self-involved. And more importantly, how self-involvement in even the most well-intentioned people can limit their connection with others in a similar way that selfishness can.

Selfishness, as most of us understand it, involves some level of awareness. I am aware of you, and I’m choosing myself anyway. There’s a trade-off being made.

Self-involvement operates differently. It’s not that you’re choosing yourself over others—it’s that others aren’t fully landing in your awareness to begin with. You’re genuinely engaged, caring even, but through a filter: what does this mean for me emotionally?

That filter has a side effect that’s easy to miss: projection.

When you’re primarily processing someone else’s situation through your own emotional lens, you can start attributing your feelings to them without realizing it. A parent worries about their adult child’s decision—not because he has expressed distress, but because they find it distressing. So they treat their adult child as though he needs helping. The adult child, who was actually excited, now feels unseen, possibly worried, and maybe like they have to comfort the parent’s feelings.

And the unsettling part? The parent felt caring the entire time. That’s what makes self-involvement so hard to catch—it can look and feel exactly like connection.

Nobody flags the actions of a worried parent the way they might flag the actions of a dismissive parent who just talks about their own life. Similarly, someone immediately sharing their own experience in response to a friend sharing their struggles can come across as relatable, even empathetic. The behavior doesn’t just blend in. It gets mistaken for something good.

That’s what made it so hard for me to catch in myself. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was engaged, I was caring, I was there. I just wasn’t fully seeing the person in front of me on an emotional level.

And when the connection doesn’t deepen the way we feel it should—when the child pulls away, when the friend stops sharing—it’s disorienting. Not knowing what went wrong, or what to do differently, is its own quiet source of stress.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: when I was seeing the world primarily through the lens of what it meant for me, I was not seeing what it meant through someone else’s eyes. That gap isn’t neutral. It shapes the quality of every conversation, every relationship, every moment of potential connection.

The Antidote

The antidote isn’t trying harder to care. It’s listening differently.

Empathetic listening isn’t just being quiet while someone talks. It’s actively placing yourself inside their experience as they speak—imagining what their words would feel like from where they’re standing, not from yours. Not what their situation reminds you of. Not what you’d do in their place. What is this moment like for them.

When you start from that place, the filter shifts. You’re no longer processing their experience through yours—you’re following theirs. The parent steps into their adult child’s excitement instead of projecting their own worry. You follow your friend’s emotions instead of redirecting to your own story.

The brain naturally pulls attention back toward ourselves. That’s not a character flaw, it’s biology. But the lens can be moved. Empathetic listening is how you move it—one conversation at a time.

Self-involvement isn’t malicious. But when we’re unconscious of it, it quietly limits how fully we can see the people right in front of us—and can leave us with that disorienting feeling of not knowing what went wrong, or what to do differently. Empathetic listening is what to do differently. And seeing people—really seeing them—turns out to be one of the more meaningful things we can do.

Hope to hear your thoughts in the comments. This can be an uncomfortable one to think about, but I believe it is so important.

Take Care of Yourself,

Alex

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