We are not mind readers
The people in your life don't have a crystal ball.
I’ve never been to a fortune teller, although I’ve seen plenty on television, gypsy characters in a headscarf huddled over a crystal ball, riffing on themes until they find one that lands with the customer. The reality is nobody can predict our futures nor read our minds. Mentalism is an art form, verbal gymnastics wrapped in mystical smoke and mirrors for entertainment.
Given that we all know this, why do we think our friends, family, and people in our world are also mind readers? Yet internally, we can experience flare-ups because someone misses a cue, maybe doesn’t recognise that we are overwhelmed or troubled? Maybe they ask the wrong question at the wrong time, but carry on not understanding that they have triggered something inside us? “How dare they not know?” is our reaction - yet that’s completely unreasonable and irrational.
Kathleen Smith, writing in The Anxious Overachiever, calls this a “How Dare You” moment: the specific frustration we feel when someone fails to read our minds. It’s a pattern that’s more common than most of us would like to admit. The frustration isn’t really about what the other person did. It’s about what they failed to read.
Some people genuinely are very empathetic and great at reading faces and vibes. I remember doing an executive EQ review once, where I was shown a series of faces, and asked to name the emotion each was experiencing. It’s an interesting exercise, some are obvious - sad, happy - but so many facial expressions are subtle and difficult to discern. I know I found it challenging, although interestingly, I scored reasonably well.
Psychologists call this the Illusion of Transparency. In a 1998 study, Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky, and Victoria Husted Medvec found that people consistently overestimate how visible their internal states are to others. We feel our distress or frustration so acutely that it seems impossible those around us wouldn’t notice, and yet they usually don’t, because they aren’t inside our heads - they don’t have a crystal ball, and not everyone scores perfectly on an EQ test.
A vicious circle forms, and we can develop a martyr complex: we don’t ask for what we need, our friends can’t read our emotions, we absorb the disappointment silently, our emotions rise further, yet nobody notices, leading to resentment. How the heck haven’t they noticed!
There’s a kind of righteous suffering born of resentment. I’m carrying all this load, and nobody notices or cares. Which is true insofar as that goes, but the real problem is we didn’t tell them. How can we expect someone to meet a need we have without asking them? Without sinking into vulnerability.
I’ve written previously in Building Authentic Connections about how we create a mask:
“We curate our lives like museum exhibitions, showing only the polished pieces whilst hiding anything that might be considered flawed or messy.”
“To connect, we need to feel safe enough to be seen.”
We expect someone to meet a need we never articulate, and we want to be known without the vulnerability of being known. That tension sits at the heart of so much adult loneliness. As I’ve written in both Building Authentic Connections and Why Is It So Hard to Make Friends as an Adult?, vulnerability is the entry price for being genuinely seen, and most of us would rather wait to be found than risk paying it.
Explicit communication might feel unromantic - and let’s be blunt, downright scary - but the alternative is the slow accumulation of resentment toward people who, in most cases, simply didn’t know.
Next time you feel indignation rising, try reframing your thoughts. Instead of ‘how dare they not know?’, ask ‘what do I need here, and have I actually said it?’