Clinical Sophistication and Curiosity: Considering Another Lens

There are so many forms of clinical sophistication.

It can come from years of education and training, extensive knowledge of theory and research, strong intuition, lots of our own inner work, lived experience, cultural awareness, relational depth, or simply years spent sitting across from human beings and remaining curious about the complexity of their inner worlds.

Many of the clinicians I know are extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive, and psychologically sophisticated people.

And yet none of us — myself included — sees everything.

Clinical sophistication doesn’t require having every lens available to us at all times. In fact, part of sophistication may be remaining curious about the perspectives, experiences, and forms of knowledge that can continue expanding how we understand people.

Many skilled, sophisticated, and wonderful clinicians can still have areas to enhance and grow in. In fact, considering ourselves to be "lifelong learners" might be the most responsible way of practicing. Collaboration, dialogue, and feedback are part of what continues

to strengthen and advance our field, and I welcome respectful critique of these ideas for my continuous professional development as well.

Considering “Street Smarts” as Another Lens

Most people reading this likely already possess some degree of what we colloquially call “street smarts.” I’m not using the term to disparage anyone’s intelligence, clinical skill, or capacity, or to suggest that it is something some clinicians simply “have” while others don’t.

I’m interested in whether some of the knowledge we informally associate with being street smart might actually contain psychologically meaningful forms of interpersonal discernment — and whether becoming more intentional about that kind of discernment can add something valuable to an already sophisticated clinical lens.

For clinicians, this might mean remaining curious about dimensions of human behavior that don’t always fit neatly inside an empathic or attachment-based formulation: status, power, competition, self-interest, impression management, jealousy, rivalry, aggression, social hierarchy, and the possibility that people’s motivations are sometimes considerably more complicated than the explanations they consciously provide.

And I want to be clear that I don’t consider myself an “expert” on street smarts.

My family wasn’t perfect — as no family is — but I was fortunate to grow up in a family where love was the standard. I had a relatively cushy childhood in the suburbs. I didn’t grow up feeling that I constantly needed to survive instead of just exist, watch my back, anticipate danger in my neighborhood, or approach other people assuming that they might have harmful intentions.

My father probably carried more of what we traditionally think of as “street sense.” He grew up in Jersey City and developed a different kind of awareness of people and the world around him.

But during much of my childhood, my father worked a tremendous amount. My mother was therefore the parent whose influence and presence shaped much of my everyday emotional world.

She was soft-hearted, kind, classy, patient, loving, and deeply oriented toward manners and treating other people well. Those were some of the earliest values I absorbed:

Be kind. Have integrity. Treat people with respect. Care about how your behavior affects other people.

Those lessons gave me something invaluable.

But they didn’t necessarily prepare me for the reality that other people might not be operating from those same assumptions.

If anything, there was a time when I could be too empathetic, too caring, and too trusting too soon. And through lots of inner work and healing in adulthood, I’ve had opportunities to practice noticing when these natural tendencies are still arising, and acknowledging when they’re actually not benefitting me or my relationships.

But some of what I now think of as “street smarts” wasn’t something I was explicitly taught. It developed through experiences in which I learned that kindness, trust, and good intentions aren’t always reciprocated — and that sometimes they can even be taken advantage of.

One of my earliest memories of this happened when I was around 10.

I had a friend (who at the time I had considered as my “best friend”) from my neighborhood whom I had known since we were about four years old. One Christmas, I discovered that while I had been in another room, she had taken something from the Christmas gifts underneath our tree.

I remember being genuinely shocked.

More than angry, I think I was confused and frozen. At that age, stealing barely existed inside my understanding of how people close to me behaved. I hadn’t yet developed much of a framework for the possibility that someone I trusted could knowingly do something that violated what I understood to be the basic rules of friendship.

I remember going to her house sometime afterward and seeing the items I believed she had taken from me sitting in her room. I don’t know whether she had forgotten to hide them, assumed I wouldn’t notice, or simply wasn’t thinking about it at all.

What I remember much more clearly is my own response.

I froze.

Even with what felt like the evidence sitting directly in front of me, I couldn’t bring myself to ask her about it. I couldn’t say, “Did you take these from me?” I couldn’t assert myself or even acknowledge aloud what I believed I was seeing.

Looking back, that part of the memory may be just as important as the stealing itself.

I wasn’t only learning that someone I trusted could violate a boundary. I was learning something about my own tendency, at that age, to freeze in the presence of interpersonal conflict — particularly when another person’s behavior didn’t fit with the version of them I thought I knew.

I think that’s part of why the memory stayed with me.

Sometimes reality can be sitting directly in front of us, and we still need time to integrate what we’re seeing.

Looking back, it seems like such a small childhood event. But psychologically, I think it represented something much larger for me.

It was one of my earliest encounters with the realization that other people don’t necessarily operate according to the same assumptions, boundaries, values, or internal rules that I do.

And importantly, recognizing that doesn’t require deciding that I was morally superior to my friend or understanding why she did what she did. I couldn’t have known everything happening inside her or her family at ten years old.

The developmental lesson was simpler:

I couldn’t automatically use myself as the template for predicting someone else’s behavior.

In a small way, some innocence shifted there.

Over the years, much more complicated experiences would continue teaching me versions of that same lesson. Empathy remained enormously important to me, but I gradually learned that empathy without discernment can sometimes cause us to explain away information that deserves our attention.

In retrospect, I think part of growing up has been learning to integrate both forms of wisdom I encountered early in life: the “feminine” softness my mother gave me without losing the “masculine” discernment my father understood.

Maybe that’s part of what “street smarts” has come to mean for me — not becoming harder, colder, more suspicious, or less empathic, but learning how to let my natural orientation of kindness and softness, with the acquired skill of discernment to coexist.

So when I use the phrase “street smarts” here, I’m not positioning myself above anyone else or suggesting that I’ve mastered some form of human understanding that other clinicians haven’t.

Quite the opposite.

I’m describing a capacity I’ve had to develop myself — sometimes through experiences I wish hadn’t been necessary to learn it from.

And I’m still developing it.

I became increasingly interested in this clinically because many clinicians, myself included, can fall into the trap of becoming conflict avoidant, or validating and losing ourselves in empathy too soon — particularly when we feel a sense of attachment — when another person’s behavior may deserve considerable questioning and scrutiny first.

This doesn’t make someone an unskilled or unqualified clinician at all.

It may simply mean that intentionally enhancing another skill set can deepen our clinical understanding and strengthen our therapeutic work overall.

And sometimes we may also be too inside of a situation to see it clearly, and we don’t always consider all of the complex factors influencing what we’re observing.

What does “street smarts” mean?

It is often thought of as a “street” or cultural term. But to define it in a psychologically significant way, it can mean having an understanding of human nature that includes awareness of some of the darker, more antagonistic aspects of personality and human motivation when evaluating our relationships.

“Dark psychology” is sometimes used colloquially to refer to the darker aspects of human nature. More clinically precise concepts might include antagonism, narcissistic traits, Machiavellianism, impression management, aggression, social dominance, status-seeking, motivated reasoning, jealousy, rivalry, and the ways that power and ego needs can shape human behavior.

In the relational sense, this asks us to consider what motivations inside a person may be driving behavior, particularly when those motivations could go unchecked or become harmful. Incorporating these dimensions of personality and human motivation into our assessments and reality-testing of others can help us considerably when evaluating relationships and practicing differentiation.

Consider an example of an older person who may be unhappy or unsatisfied with their life, who is obsessively tracking other people's movement or relationships online, and coming up with posts on a daily basis to undermine someone else, devalue them, or place doubt in someone's mind about another person whom they've only interacted with maybe 2 times in person, and do not truly know. This person seems to have a particular vested interest in bringing down someone they have only interacted with once or twice, yet somehow have a lot of unsolicited opinions about.

This behavior or rigid interpretation of someone could warrant examination into why this person is so invested, and what feelings, such as jealousy, competition, resentment, or something else entirely, may be driving that behavior.

Another example: someone who is motivated by jealousy, competition, status, or winning might market themselves extremely well to strangers they don’t fully know, partly because there may be a deeper drive to win at something.

For a person with high levels of ego needs, low concern or capacity for morals and others’ suffering, attachment, even to a stranger, can even feel like genuine attraction to someone, when what is psychologically driving the attachment may also be influenced by traits like aggression, personality instability, competition, status-seeking, or the need to preserve a coherent internal narrative or outward image. Saying this truth doesn’t diminish the value or attractiveness of the person they might feel drawn to, it just introduces additional elements that should bring careful examination and scrutiny when deciding whether feelings of attachment are truly clean, genuine, or healthy, or whether or not there’s darker elements driving them.

What Contemporary Narcissism Research Can Add

Contemporary narcissism research gives us a useful framework for thinking about some of these dynamics without reducing them to simplistic labels.

One particularly relevant contemporary framework is the Status Pursuit in Narcissism (SPIN) model, developed by Stathis Grapsas, Eddie Brummelman, Mitja Back, and Jaap Denissen.

The model conceptualizes social status as an important motivational system in grandiose narcissism. Individuals higher in grandiose narcissism may be particularly vigilant to cues about their own and other people’s status and may regulate their behavior around opportunities to elevate themselves or reduce the status of others.

The model describes a sequence involving situation selection, vigilance to status cues, appraisal of status opportunities or threats, and behavioral responses. Depending upon those appraisals, status pursuit may take the form of self-promotion or other-derogation.

An earlier and related framework, the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept (NARC), distinguishes between two pathways through which narcissistic motivations can manifest.

Admiration involves assertive self-enhancement: presenting oneself as exceptional, impressive, desirable, competent, prestigious, or otherwise worthy of recognition.

Rivalry involves antagonistic self-protection: devaluing or derogating others, competing with them, and attempting to establish or protect one’s own superiority.

Research validating the NARC model has found that admiration and rivalry are related but distinct dimensions with different interpersonal consequences. (Back et al., 2013).

Empirical research has further connected both narcissistic admiration and rivalry with the desire for social status.

Zeigler-Hill and colleagues examined these relationships across three studies involving more than 2,000 participants. Both admiration and rivalry were connected with status motivation, although they differed in how status tended to be pursued: admiration was associated with a more agentic orientation toward status, while rivalry was associated with a more antagonistic orientation.

Importantly, this research does not mean that every person with narcissistic traits behaves identically, nor does it mean that we can infer narcissism simply because someone is competitive, status-conscious, jealous, or antagonistic.

But it does give us an empirically grounded reason to consider status, hierarchy, self-enhancement, rivalry, and perceived competition as possible psychological variables when trying to understand certain interpersonal patterns.

Current models of grandiose narcissism therefore conceptualize social status as an important motivational system. Research suggests that individuals higher in narcissistic traits may be particularly attentive to status hierarchies and may pursue status through self-enhancement or, under other circumstances, antagonistic rivalry and derogation of others.

Why Someone May Look Very Different Around Different People

Another particularly important implication of this research is that narcissistic behavior does not necessarily look identical across relationships or social contexts.

The SPIN model is useful here because it conceptualizes narcissistic status pursuit as a dynamic, moment-to-moment process. Individuals higher in grandiose narcissism attend to information about their own and other people’s positions and respond according to the status opportunities available within a particular interaction.

The researchers explicitly discuss how status pursuit can be context-sensitive. In other words, the behavioral expression of narcissistic traits can shift depending upon the situation rather than appearing identically everywhere.

This becomes particularly interesting when we look at organizational psychology.

Research examining narcissism in the workplace has described narcissistic individuals as having a heightened motivation to impress high-status others and ascend formal hierarchies.

Nevicka and colleagues examined narcissism and promotability across multiple studies involving employees and supervisors. Their theoretical analysis specifically considers how the desire to impress high-status people may motivate narcissistic employees to present themselves favorably to supervisors.

Relevant impression-management strategies include self-promotion — emphasizing competence, accomplishments, and performance — and ingratiation, or behaviors designed to increase another person’s favorable evaluation or liking.

This gives us a particularly important clinical consideration:

Someone’s capacity to appear controlled, warm, impressive, agreeable, "sophisticated", or highly regulated around one person does not necessarily tell us how that person functions across their other relationships.

If status is psychologically salient, someone higher in narcissistic traits may have particularly strong incentives to manage their presentation around someone they perceive as professionally influential, financially successful, socially prestigious, powerful, well-connected, desirable, or capable of giving them access to something they value.

They may appear extremely composed around someone they want to impress.

They may carefully manage what that person sees.

They may be superficially “charming”, "competent", agreeable, empathic, “flattering”, or unusually controlled.

Meanwhile, people around them whom they perceive as having less power — whether because of organizational position, professional status, social influence, financial status, age, or another personally meaningful hierarchy — may experience a dramatically different interpersonal presentation.

That could include greater antagonism, contempt, instability, emotional volatility, dismissiveness, coldness, exploitation, or chaotic interpersonal behavior.

However, the research does not establish that narcissistic people universally become dysregulated or cruel toward people they perceive as “lower status”.

The evidence supports status sensitivity, status pursuit, impression management, self-promotion, rivalry, and context-dependent interpersonal behavior. It does not support concluding from these constructs alone that someone’s composure around a high-status person is necessarily calculated deception or that their behavior elsewhere represents their hidden “true self.”

Still, the discrepancy itself can be clinically meaningful.

If someone appears exceptionally regulated and psychologically “sophisticated” around people they admire, want something from, are motivated to win, want to pursue the connection because it allows them to preserve an internal cohesive narrative, or perceive as possessing considerable status, while numerous people with less power in relation to them describe experiencing that same person as chaotic, exploitative, antagonistic, or emotionally cold, the clinically curious response shouldn’t necessarily be:

“Well, they have never acted that way with me.”

Instead, we might ask:

Under what conditions does this person behave differently?

Who receives which version of them?

What changes when the power differential changes?

What does this person gain or potentially lose within each relationship?

Does their interpersonal presentation reliably change according to perceived status, authority, admiration, competition, or access?

That moves us away from arguing about which version of someone represents their “true self” and toward examining their pattern across contexts.

And that is often much more psychologically informative.

Applying This to Real-World Relationships

An important note before we begin: This discussion is not intended to demean, diagnose, or establish that one person is “better” than another. It is meant to explore how self-presentation, impression management, status, attachment, cognitive bias, and incomplete information can shape the way we perceive people and relationships. Sometimes people present selectively, emphasize certain parts of themselves, or embellish aspects of identity or compatibility—-consciously or unconsciously. The goal here is not to shame that process, but to examine it with curiosity and discernment.

To make some of these concepts easier to see in context, I’ll use a few narrative examples throughout this discussion. These examples are intended as illustrations of relational patterns.

Consider an example of an ex-boss who has had difficult, tumultuous relationships with several seasoned clinicians, including over 12 people who were mature adults in positions of higher influence, such as program managers, clinical directors, and clinical supervisors, over a relatively short span of time.

This person is in a position of power.

A person who is not familiar with this individual— or with how they function in everyday relationships and positions of power— may understandably take public facing claims at face value: statements about being a “better fit,” sharing a similar “culture,” or operating on the same “level”.

Yet these claims may warrant greater curiosity rather than automatic acceptance. Marketed claims or social-media aesthetics are imperfect proxies for character, emotional maturity, cultural compatibility, or relational safety.

In some cases, a closer look at the broader context may reveal meaningful inconsistencies between the identity being marketed and the person’s actual background or interpersonal behavior. Further consideration is helpful when examining claims about shared “culture”, or being on the same “level” accurately reflect the person’s history— or whether aspects of that history are being selectively presented, embellished, or reframed in ways that support a particular interpersonal narrative. This becomes especially relevant when publically available information, firsthand knowledge, or other contextual information appears inconsistent with the identity being presented. A person may portray their family of origin as belonging to a particular social, educational, or cultural milieu while other information about their upbringing and family system suggests a substantially more complex, practically opposite picture.

This does not make one socioeconomic background, political orientation, or family culture inherently superior to another. Rather, the clinically relevant question is how status and identity claims are being used— particularly when they appear in competitive or antagonistic contexts to establish superiority, legitimacy, or greater compatibility while implicitly devaluing someone else.

The reverse can also be true. Someone whose social-media presence creates one impression may come from a substantially different socioeconomic, educational, or cultural background than an observer assumes, or an antagonistic person claims. Neither presentation tells us very much by itself.

Rather than accepting either presentation at face value, a more sophisticated formulation asks: What parts of the story are verifiable? What has been omitted or reframed? Are different versions of the person’s background being presented to different audiences? And what interpersonal function does that narrative serve?

Financial status, political affiliation, or the way a family carries themselves isn’t always a determinant of class or “fit”. A family with master’s degrees, whose close cousins have high paying executive jobs in NYC, 2nd summer homes down the shore, could very well be emotionally unwell, or have less character than another family. However, it could also be true that most people in their family may also be genuine, wholesome, healthy, supportive, loving people as well.

But if we judge them from their social media, protective responses under relational harm, or from the story that others who may have motives are trying to push before we give them a chance to be truly and fully known, we may assume a different lifestyle, “fit”, upbringing, or family dynamic based on another’s preferred narrative they’re trying to push.

Additionally, when we’re not questioning current behavior, such as sustained antagonist competition towards someone a person has previously harmed, disregard for another person’s suffering, or continued participation in a dynamic that is contributing to dysfunction, chaos, and conflict—- it seems fair to bring the claim of “classiness”, values, or appropriateness of that behavior into question as well. Narratives about “fit”, culture, family background, or grief should not automatically be treated as both truth or evidence of character. When those narratives conflict with observable patterns of behavior, clinical curiosity requires us to examine the discrepancy rather than simply accepting the preferred story.

If someone invokes an upbringing rooted in love, strong morals, and respect for others as evidence of character or “fit”, it’s reasonable to deduce these claims as less persuasive when a person’s current behavior repeatedly contradicts those values.

A distinction about class, background, and accuracy

Importantly, the relevant issue here is not whether one person comes from a “better,” wealthier, more educated or politically progressive, or more socially desirable background than another. Class and status markers do not determine psychological maturity, morality, relational capacity, or human worth.

What may be clinically relevant, however, are discrepancies between someone’s claimed background and their verifiable background, particularly when those claims appear to serve an interpersonal function.

If someone repeatedly emphasizes cultural similarity, socioeconomic similarity, shared identity, status, or belonging in ways that are inconsistent with other available information, it may be worth becoming curious about what function that particular self-presentation serves.

Making these distinctions is not about competing with another person or establishing that one person is somehow “better” than another. Rather, it is about recognizing how self-presentation can become embellished or distorted by motivations shaped by status, rivalry, impression management, and the desire to influence how others perceive us. In people higher in narcissistic traits, research suggests that self-enhancement and status pursuit can become particularly salient interpersonal motivations.

This distinction also matters for people who find themselves on the receiving end of inaccurate or highly curated narratives. When someone feels that important aspects of their identity, history, or behavior have been misrepresented by an antagonistic person, there can be an understandable desire to correct the record and make previously unseen information visible. Clarifying reality is not inherently the same thing as competing for status.

The more important question is whether the goal is to establish superiority over another person — or to restore accuracy where a distorted picture has taken hold.

We may also not consider that an ex-boss is developing an increasingly negative reputation in the mental health community in their region, as many people have had reported significantly negative experiences with this person and no longer invest or trust in them as a reputable practice owner, despite curated marketing claims. Additionally, receiving praise, awards, or other forms of public recognition does not necessarily tell us how someone behaves within private relationships or professional power dynamics. External recognition and interpersonal reputation can coexist in surprisingly contradictory ways. An award may tell us that someone was visible, well-marketed, liked enough on the surface by a particular audience, or successful according to the criteria being measured. It does not necessarily validate every claim they make about themselves, nor does it invalidate the experiences of people who have interacted with them more closely.

Receiving some praise or awards can be deceiving when you examine

They might be making claims like these to a person whom they perceive as powerful, influential, or financially or socially high-status.

This is where the narcissism and status literature adds important nuance.

Contemporary research gives us reason to take seriously that perceived status and hierarchy may substantially shape interpersonal behavior in people higher in narcissistic traits, and that there may be generally more respect shown to people more powerful than them.

The SPIN model suggests that people higher in grandiose narcissism may monitor their own and others’ status and regulate behavior around opportunities for status acquisition. The NARC framework similarly suggests that narcissistic dynamics can move between assertive self-enhancement and antagonistic rivalry.

And organizational research gives us another important piece: someone who is particularly motivated to impress a high-status person may have much more incentive to manage how they appear to that person.

That means the person encountering them in a socially valuable relationship may genuinely be experiencing a dramatically different version of them from the people encountering that person from underneath a power differential. It also means they may become antagonistic to others who were once perceived as “below” them in hierarchy or they once had control over, but then grew to achieve more independence or professional connections. In the workplace, they may struggle when several seasoned clinicians or adults who had closer access to them grow to “figure them out”, rather than blindly let them get away with harm or inappropriate behavior.

These discrepancies can become confusing for people who may perceive to have positive experiences with a controversial person from afar, vs. several people who’ve had direct negative experiences with someone.

Neither person’s experience necessarily invalidates the other person’s experience.

That raises an important relational question:

Could the same person present very differently depending upon where they perceive another person to sit within a social, professional, financial, or interpersonal hierarchy?

Someone may show a highly curated, admiring, affiliative, impressive, or controlled side of themselves toward someone whose approval, affiliation, resources, influence, status or reinforcement of their preferred narrative feels valuable.

Yet the people immediately around them — including seasoned adults they employ in positions underneath them — may experience a completely different interpersonal side of that person in everyday life. And when we start to notice a pattern of several mature adults leaving an organization on bad terms, and the organization being comprised of mainly entry level workers or interns that are more dependent, younger, or more easily influenced, that is another piece that presents as deeply concerning to several people close enough or in direct engagement with that person.

That discrepancy itself is information worth considering.

It does not establish a diagnosis, and it should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of narcissism.

But when evaluating a relationship, differences in behavior across power contexts, and observable patterns deserve curiosity rather than dismissal.

Age Is Not the Same Thing as Maturity

Another example that we sometimes may feel confused about is age.

But age doesn’t automatically make someone less influenced by unhealthy interpersonal dynamics, more spiritually, morally, psychologically evolved, or emotionally mature.

Someone younger who has suffered immense pain, has considerable life experience, has traveled the world, and has interacted with various types of people can actually be more experienced in certain areas than someone who has lived in the same area their entire life, or someone whose experiences have made them colder, not kinder.

Someone may also be more innately equipped with a different personality, different capacity, and higher levels of moral, psychological, spiritual, or emotional maturity.

Sometimes immense suffering makes someone more kind, more open, more spiritual, more resilient, and have more capacity rather than turning them colder.

Age shouldn’t be confused with maturation or capacity.

Age may also become one component of perceived hierarchy within some relationships, although age itself should never be assumed to determine status.

The Limits of How We Know Someone

We also need to consider that sometimes, when evaluating relationships, we may not actually be responding to the whole person in front of us. We may be responding to a dynamic, a protective response, a projection, an idealized representation, a marketed image, or somebody else’s interpretation of them.

Someone being wonderful to us, receiving praise, or marketing themselves in a certain way that leaves out important nuance and details doesn’t automatically prove that several other people’s negative experiences with them are false.

And other people’s negative experiences don’t automatically prove that our positive experience was fake.

Both can be data.

The more sophisticated task is examining the pattern — and becoming curious about the limits of our own conclusions.

Who experiences what? Under what circumstances?

Do I actually have enough evidence to accurately reality-test my conclusions about another person?

What makes it difficult for me to seriously examine this person’s behavior when multiple people are describing experiences that contradict my own?

Am I comparing people based on equivalent amounts and types of information — or comparing my experience of one person under difficult relational conditions with an impression of another person formed under entirely different ones?

Before we consider someone’s conclusions about another person, we also have to examine the premises those conclusions are built on.

Otherwise, we can become increasingly thoughtful and psychologically sophisticated about an interpretation that was never adequately reality-tested in the first place.

There are epistemic limits to how accurately we can evaluate people when we aren’t also examining the less comfortable psychological processes shaping our perceptions: projection, idealization, confirmation bias, triangulation, attachment activation, formulations made thru screens, selective attention, and our tendency to interpret new information through conclusions we have already reached.

You don’t have to take my word for it. In fact, you probably shouldn’t take anyone’s interpretation as fact simply because they sound convincing. What matters more for arriving at more clinically accurate conclusions is practicing staying in curiosity enough to notice patterns over time and remain willing to revise what we think we know.

Performative Grief and Weaponized Suicidality

Sometimes we may have encountered a person who weaponizes grief in a manner that attempts to elicit commonality, sympathy, or victimhood for a person they’re competing for.

Grief can be genuine and deeply felt while still existing alongside behavior that deserves examination. It’s also true that someone claiming to feel grief may not actually feel grief at all, especially when someone repeatedly invokes grief while continuing to participate in a dynamic they know is contributing to another person’s suffering, it may be worth becoming curious about that contradiction.

Rather than assuming that expressions of grief automatically reflect remorse, care, or moral sensitivity, we might ask: How is that grief being integrated into the person’s behavior? Are they becoming more reflective about their impact on others? Are they attempting to reduce harm? Are they demonstrating empathy for suffering beyond their own or a stranger they’re vying for? Or does the language of grief coexist with continued competition, antagonism, or disregard for another person’s pain?

This does not necessarily mean the grief itself is false. Human beings are capable of genuinely grieving one loss while behaving harmfully in another relationship. But grief should not function as evidence of character or victimhood, nor should it exempt someone’s present behavior from scrutiny. When there is significant discrepancy between the values communicated through a grief narrative and the way someone is currently treating other people, the discrepancy itself deserves attention.

Additionally, when personality pathology, narcissistic antagonism and relational competition are present, expressions of crisis may become part of a struggle for attention, allegiance, or support. Suicidal communication can exert a particularly powerful interpersonal pull that is not always genuinely routed in severe distress.

Disclaimer: It’s important to note that suicidality should always be taken seriously, and a professional could conduct a thorough crisis screening to determine the severity. If you or a loved one is in crisis, crisis resources are available. And you can find additional resources on this website, or reach out directly if more resources are needed.

When the Relationship Exists Through a Screen

In 2026, this topic becomes especially relevant and important when relationships are being understood primarily through screens.

Social media gives us information, but it gives us highly selected information. Posts, emails, indirect communication, and online interactions can tell us something about a person.

They cannot show us the full range of who that person is relationally.

We don’t experience ordinary life with them.

We don’t see what happens consistently over time.

We don’t necessarily know how they respond to disappointment, misunderstanding, boredom, boundaries, frustration, intimacy, accountability, conflict, or sustained closeness when they have time to respond and articulate themselves through a screen, or when they’re motivated by winning. 

And we don’t know how we would respond to each other once an imagined or anticipated relationship becomes an actual one.

This is one reason I believe boundaries around indirect communication can actually help protect relationships.

When two people begin trying to understand one another primarily through posts, subtext, interpretations, or communication routed through other people, the medium itself can become part of the problem.

Each person may increasingly respond not only to the other person, but to their interpretation of what the other person meant — which then produces another response to interpret.

Eventually, we can end up relating to interpretations of interpretations, and unrepaired defenses, rather than to each other.

Direct communication doesn’t guarantee understanding. Meeting someone in person doesn’t magically eliminate projection.

But sustained, direct relational experience gives us information that a screen simply cannot.

And if direct communication feels difficult to access, you’re not alone. Directness can feel vulnerable, especially when there has been conflict, hurt, fear, or uncertainty. Difficulty communicating doesn’t mean we’re incapable of relationship; sometimes it simply means we need more safety, time, or support to move toward one another directly.

Therapy Has Limits Here, Too

The same limitation matters in therapy.

A therapist can help someone examine their own experiences, assumptions, patterns, attractions, fears, interpretations, and relational history.

But a therapist cannot adequately assess the full personality or relational capacity of a person they have never met based solely on someone else’s description of them or what that person presents online.

A therapist can help us develop hypotheses.

A therapist can help us notice patterns.

A therapist can help us reality-test our interpretations.

But there is a meaningful difference between helping a client understand their experience of another person and claiming to know who that other person fundamentally is.

This is also why, when dating or trying to evaluate a complicated relationship, perspective from a qualified therapist outside of the relational system may sometimes be more useful than relying exclusively on people who already have emotional investments, loyalties, grievances, relationships, or preferred outcomes within it.

That doesn’t make an outside clinician automatically objective or correct.

It simply introduces another perspective with fewer vested interests in how the story resolves.

Sometimes an outside perspective can help us examine not only our conclusions, but the assumptions underneath them.

Context Is Data Too

Reality testing also means examining context. Even clinically sophisticated, seasoned clinicians can have moments where they’re stuck in “money mind”, a state of mind where nuance feels constricted, and context becomes harder to integrate.

We may judge someone primarily by protective responses they developed during a painful or destabilizing period without adequately considering the relational conditions surrounding those responses.

We may see anger without examining what preceded it.

We may see regression without asking what destabilized the person.

We may see defensiveness without asking what they believe they are defending themselves against.

We may see someone fighting intensely to have their experience recognized without considering what prolonged invalidation, ambiguity, betrayal, triangulation, or the introduction of someone they experienced as harmful did to the relational system.

None of this means every reaction becomes justified because someone was hurt.

Contextualizing behavior is not the same as excusing it. Accountability still matters.

But relational thinking asks a more sophisticated question than:

What does this reaction tell me about who this person is?

It also asks:

What happened between us that helped produce what I am seeing?

Because relationships are systems.

We influence one another.

Sometimes the behavior we are evaluating in another person developed partly in response to the relational environment we were participating in creating.

That doesn’t remove someone’s agency or responsibility for their behavior. But ignoring our own contribution to a relational system can leave us with an incomplete explanation of what happened inside it.

And sometimes we may be amazed — or pleasantly surprised — by what becomes possible when enough safety, clarity, consistency, directness, and appropriate boundaries exist for someone’s defenses to soften.

We may discover capacities that were difficult to see while the relationship was organized around threat, competition, ambiguity, invalidation, or self-protection.

That doesn’t mean the defended version of someone was fake, or that the safer version represents their one “true self.”

Both are part of the person.

But safety may reveal capacities that threat made much more difficult to access.

Compatibility Has to Be Lived

This matters when we talk about “fit,” too.

We can have hypotheses about compatibility.

But declaring someone a particularly good relational “fit” before enough actual relationship has occurred can confuse potential compatibility with demonstrated compatibility.

Early intensity can be seductive precisely because it feels like unusually strong evidence about someone’s capacity for love, empathy, or connection. But early relational behavior prior to actually truly knowing someone gives us limited information about how someone functions once novelty, admiration, idealization, or the desire to impress begins to fade.

Research has found an association between love-bombing behaviors and narcissistic tendencies, while broader research on narcissism suggests that some narcissistic characteristics may actually enhance romantic appeal during early relationship formation even as other narcissistic processes predict difficulties in longer-term relationships.

This doesn’t mean intense affection, enthusiasm, generosity, or rapid connection is inherently pathological. Nor does love bombing establish a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder.

The clinically meaningful information is often in what happens next once someone feels they’ve “got” you: 

What happens when you disagree?

What happens when you establish a boundary?

What happens when you stop giving their behavior a pass? 

What happens when your needs conflict with theirs?

What happens when you disappoint them?

And perhaps most importantly: does their capacity to value you survive your transition from an idealized person into an ordinary, complicated human being?

Comparisons become especially unreliable when we know one person through the messiness of actual relationship — including their defenses, wounds, anger, mistakes, vulnerabilities, and reactions under stress — while knowing another primarily through selective interactions, descriptions, or what they choose to present.

One person is being evaluated with the lights fully on.

The other may still be standing in flattering lighting.

That is not an equivalent comparison.

We may also inadvertently compare someone’s behavior during one of the most activated or destabilizing periods of a relationship with someone else’s behavior during novelty, admiration, distance, competition to win or be perceived as “good”, or relatively low relational stakes.

Those are different conditions.

Compatibility emerges through relationship.

Through proximity.

Reciprocity.

Boundaries.

Disappointment.

Difference.

Vulnerability.

Conflict.

Accountability.

Repair.

And time.

We can make educated guesses about compatibility.

But until a relationship is actually lived, some of what we call “fit” remains hypothesis.

When the Messenger Changes the Message

Another part of sophisticated clinicians enhancing their relational “street smarts” is practicing to separate the content of an idea from our feelings about the person delivering it.

Cognitive bias can alter our perception of intellectual or emotional depth.

When we idealize someone, feel drawn to them, identify with a perceived part of them, or already believe they understand us particularly well, relatively ordinary observations can feel unusually insightful or profound.

Conversely, when a relationship has become associated with conflict, disappointment, hurt, or defensiveness, we may discount sophisticated observations from that person simply because of who is delivering them.

Imagine, for example:

Person A: “Research suggests that self-care practices can support psychological wellbeing, particularly when they strengthen emotion regulation, stress recovery, and engagement with meaningful activities.”

Person B: “Did you know taking care of yourself is really important for your mental health?”

There is nothing wrong with Person B’s statement. It may be completely true and useful.

But imagine experiencing Person B’s observation as uniquely insightful while overlooking that Person A had already communicated the same underlying idea(s) — perhaps several times or years ago, with considerably more nuance, depth, or supporting evidence.

Sometimes it isn’t the profundity of the idea that has changed.

It’s our relationship to the person saying it.

Perhaps our relationship with the person who originally delivered the message became strained over time. Maybe their delivery became harsher. Maybe increasing pain, anger, fear, or urgency made the message easier to dismiss.

Both can be true.

Someone may be reacting protectively to a relational environment that contributed to their distress, while their resulting intensity understandably makes it harder for the other person to receive what they are trying to communicate.

The message can contain something important even when the delivery makes it difficult to hear.

It’s entirely conceivable how this happens. Someone can genuinely be trying to help, trying to preserve a relationship, or desperately trying to communicate something they believe matters while simultaneously becoming too caught in their own pain and attachment activation to recognize that their methods are no longer working.

At some point, what may actually be needed is less communication rather than more: stronger boundaries, disengagement from indirect forms of communication, space for nervous systems to settle, and—if both people eventually want repair—a healthier and more direct relational container in which that repair could occur.

Of course, creating that distance becomes considerably harder when the relational system itself remains active. If people continue communicating indirectly, monitoring one another, responding through public content, or repeatedly placing their personal pain and interpretations online where the other person is likely to encounter them, both people can remain activated even while believing they are trying to create clarity.

Again, two things can be true.

Someone’s anger and protective reactions can make sense in context while still landing as overwhelming, intense, or difficult for another person to receive.

And someone can reasonably need distance from that intensity while still potentially overlooking meaningful information contained underneath it.

Reality testing asks us to examine both.

Nonetheless, Someone we have become frustrated with may offer a genuinely thoughtful observation that we immediately dismiss, while nearly identical information from someone that feels safer from a distance lands as revelatory.

Neither response necessarily tells us much about the actual quality of the idea.

A useful reality-testing question becomes:

If someone else said exactly the same thing, would I experience it as equally profound?

We can ask similar questions about the qualities we assign to people.

Would I experience this behavior as compassionate, insightful, emotionally intelligent, sophisticated, compatible, or trustworthy if it came from someone I felt differently about?

Am I evaluating the behavior itself, or has my relationship to the person already influenced the meaning I assign to it?

This isn’t about becoming suspicious of everyone or endlessly second-guessing our instincts.

It’s about strengthening our ability to hold intuition alongside observation, context, evidence, and curiosity.

Building Relational Street Smarts

Enhancing our relational “street smarts” can help us in countless areas of life: dating, collegial and professional relationships, friendships, business relationships, and evaluating relationships overall.

Many therapists already have an enormous capacity for this.

We are trained to notice patterns, tolerate complexity, consider multiple perspectives, understand defenses, and distinguish behavior from the meaning we initially assign to it.

But having a skill and being able to access that skill under stress are not always the same thing.

Under stress, attachment activation, grief, relational confusion, idealization, fear, or prolonged uncertainty, even psychologically sophisticated people can temporarily lose access to capacities they use quite effectively everywhere else.

That isn’t hypocrisy.

It’s human.

Psychological knowledge does not make any of us immune to cognitive bias.

If anything, knowledge can sometimes make bias harder to recognize because we can become increasingly skilled at constructing sophisticated explanations for conclusions we already feel emotionally invested in.

The goal, then, isn’t to become impossible to fool or perfectly objective.

None of us will be.

The goal is to become a little more willing to ask:

What am I observing?

What am I assuming?

What information might I be missing?

Do I have enough information to make the conclusion I’m making?

What would I think about the same behavior if the person involved were different?

Am I applying the same standard of evidence and scrutiny to everyone involved?

And what might become visible if I became genuinely willing to discover that my first interpretation was incomplete?

A screen can give us data.

It cannot give us the whole person.

Psychological sophistication does not mean becoming increasingly skilled at explaining why our interpretation must be correct.

Sometimes sophistication means recognizing the limits of what we can actually know.

It means remaining curious about contradictory information rather than immediately explaining it away.

It means examining the relational system, including our own participation in it.

It means distinguishing observation from interpretation, possibility from certainty, and hypothesis from fact.

And sometimes the most responsible conclusion after reality testing is not:

I finally understand who this person really is.

It is simply:

I may not have enough information yet to know.

When Understanding More Doesn’t Make Attachment Disappear

Feeling an attachment to someone can also create blind spots. When we feel a pull toward someone, we may be less inclined to examine the behavior they are engaging in, or even consider it as harmful. We may find ourselves contextualizing the behavior we would question more readily if it came from someone else. Clinical curiosity asks us to gently examine that possibility too.

That’s why learning more about someone’s darker or more troubling relational patterns does not necessarily weaken our attachment to them.

Sometimes it can initially make us defend the attachment even more strongly.

Why?

Because seriously considering troubling information about someone we felt strongly drawn to may require us to confront something psychologically heavier than the information itself:

What would it mean for me if this were true?

If I felt a powerful connection to someone who has repeatedly harmed other people, what does that mean about my judgment?

If people tried to tell me something and I dismissed, minimized, or explained it away, what feelings would I have to face if I reconsidered?

If I defended this person, idealized them, aligned myself with them, or made meaningful decisions based on my perception of them, what happens to my understanding of myself if that perception changes?

Those can be painful questions.

And importantly, recognizing that we misjudged someone does not mean there is something fundamentally wrong with us.

Human beings are vulnerable to attachment, attraction, idealization, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and selective attention. Intelligence, education, and psychological sophistication do not make us immune.

Sometimes they can even give us more sophisticated language with which to defend conclusions we are emotionally invested in maintaining.

When contradictory information threatens both an attachment and our identity as someone who understands people well, defending the attachment may temporarily feel psychologically safer than reconsidering it.

We may scrutinize the messenger.

Minimize the behavior.

Search for exceptions.

Emphasize our own positive experience.

Develop increasingly elaborate explanations for why other people’s experiences don’t apply.

Or raise the standard of evidence required to reconsider the person far beyond the standard of evidence we originally required to trust them.

This doesn’t necessarily mean someone is consciously choosing denial.

It may mean that changing their mind now carries considerably more emotional weight than forming the original belief ever did.

There is another possibility worth holding, too: understanding someone’s harmful behavior can sometimes increase compassion for them. Learning about trauma, instability, or protective defenses may make their behavior feel more understandable.

But understanding why someone behaves harmfully, or only knowing them from our own internal representation of them before even truly knowing them, is different from determining whether the relationship is safe.

Explanation is not exoneration. Compassion is not evidence of compatibility. And understanding someone’s wounds does not require abandoning our ability to evaluate what they do with them.

Perhaps one of the more difficult forms of relational street smarts is being able to say:

I can understand why I was drawn to this person. I can understand why I felt care for them. And I can remain willing to examine information that complicates the story I wanted to believe.

Reality testing asks something harder:

Can I allow what I learn to update what I believe — even when the update might bring me internal discomfort, influence how I feel about my previous choices, or my understanding of myself?

And perhaps one of the most revealing questions we can ask ourselves is:

What standard of evidence did I require to idealize this person — and am I now requiring a dramatically higher standard of evidence to question that idealization?

At The Relational Space

At The Relational Space, I believe boundary work, attention to conflicts of interest, emotional safety, and seeking therapeutic support outside of complicated relational systems can be essential parts of healing.

That’s why I emphasize doing therapeutic work within an appropriate container — and recognizing when indirect methods of communication may actually be creating more confusion rather than clarity.

Although indirect communication can be challenging, and 2026 variables are real, trying to understand one another through screens, interpreting posts and subtext, repeatedly monitoring someone’s online behavior, or attempting to resolve something while remaining embedded in a dysfunctional relational system can make reality testing considerably harder. (If communication becomes challenging, a skilled and empathetic therapist can also assist with providing modifications. They also wont push too hard before safety and comfort is established)

Even psychologically sophisticated people — including clinicians — can fall into these traps.

There are limits to how much healing, clarity, and relational growth can occur when the container itself remains unhealthy, when harm or destabilizing behavior is actively continuing, or when adequate consideration for everyone’s emotional safety is missing.

Sometimes caring about someone and recognizing that we cannot currently have a healthy relationship with them, in the current form that the relationship is unfolding under, have to exist at the same time. That doesn’t mean the relationship can’t exist, it means the old container can no longer exist, and healthier conditions are needed.

We may need to care for someone from a distance until there is meaningful evidence of greater stability, consideration and respect for someone’s pain and feelings, and readiness to participate in a healthier relational process.

That may involve less social media checking.

Less interpretation of posts.

Less communication through screens.

Less responding to every perceived message or provocation.

And ultimately, less participation from a distance in the very dynamic we are trying to understand more clearly.

Boundaries do not necessarily mean someone stopped caring.

Sometimes it means they have recognized the limits of what an unhealthy relational container can provide.

Sometimes the boundary is part of the care.

It creates room for nervous systems to settle, for patterns to become more visible, for each person to take responsibility for their own work, and for reality to be examined without the constant pressure of reacting to one another.

And if repair ever becomes possible, the goal shouldn’t be to return to the same relational system that contributed to the injury.

It should be to create a different one.

One with clearer boundaries.

More direct communication and interactions.

Greater emotional safety.

Less triangulation.

More accountability.

And enough space for both people to encounter one another as they actually are — rather than continuing to relate primarily through projections, protective responses, online interpretations, or other people’s narratives.

Sometimes stepping away from an unhealthy dynamic isn’t abandoning the relationship.

It’s recognizing that continuing to participate in the same pattern cannot be the thing that heals it.

At The Relational Space, I’m not here to preach, position myself as more authoritative or psychologically sophisticated than anyone else, or tell you what to think.

I’m interested in helping people become more curious about how they think — particularly when attachment, pain, fear, or relational confusion make clear thinking harder.

The goal isn’t to tell you what reality is.

It’s to help you build the capacity to examine it for yourself — within a container safe enough to discover that the answer may not be what any of us initially expected.

My role also isn’t to hand someone the “correct” interpretation of another human being.

It’s to help create enough safety, curiosity, gentle challenge, and psychological flexibility for people to examine their own interpretations without shame, defensiveness, or pressure to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.

Sometimes it means slowing down a conclusion that feels absolutely certain and asking what evidence actually supports it.

Sometimes it means exploring how your own history, attachment system, fears, attractions, or biases may be influencing what feels unquestionably true.

And sometimes it means holding many seemingly contradictory realities long enough for something more nuanced to emerge.

Because enhancing relational street smart skills aren’t about becoming the smartest person in the room. It also isn’t about never being wrong, and it isn’t about me projecting superiority in any way

The goal isn’t to tell you what reality is. It’s to help you build enough safety to examine it for yourself.

No matter where you are on your mental health journey, I hope that fear doesn’t hold you back from finding the best suited, integrative, objective, and unbiased support. There are qualified therapists out there that can meet your needs. Reach out to schedule a free 15 minute consultation with a skilled therapist in Philadelphia. If there’s a conflict of interest, I’m happy to refer you to a qualified provider.

References

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McGrath, A. (2017). Dealing with dissonance: A review of cognitive dissonance reduction. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 11, e12362. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12362

Saucier, C., Walter, N., & Demetriades, S. Z. (2024). Thirty years since Kunda: Addressing critiques to reimagine a model of motivated reasoning. Annals of the International Communication Association. https://doi.org/10.1093/anncom/wlae001

Seidman, G., & Chopik, W. J. (2026). From spark to strain? Changes in relationship satisfaction as a function of narcissistic admiration and rivalry. Journal of Personality. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.70065

Simpson, J. A., & Rholes, W. S. (2017). Adult attachment, stress, and romantic relationships. Current Opinion in Psychology, 13, 19–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.04.006

Strutzenberg, C. C., Wiersma-Mosley, J. D., Jozkowski, K. N., & Becnel, J. N. (2017). Love-bombing: A narcissistic approach to relationship formation. Discovery, 18(1), 81–89. https://doi.org/10.54119/discovery.zxgc9960

Wurst, S. N., Gerlach, T. M., Dufner, M., Rauthmann, J. F., Grosz, M. P., Küfner, A. C. P., Denissen, J. J. A., & Back, M. D. (2017). Narcissism and romantic relationships: The differential impact of narcissistic admiration and rivalry. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112(2), 280–306. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000113