The woman in the coaching session judges authority figures for not seeing her. But Joe reveals the symmetry: she’s so focused on wanting to be seen that she can’t see them as full people. When her boss says “great leadership potential,” she doesn’t see a human trying to connect — she sees a power move. Her wanting has made her blind to exactly what she craves from others.
Joe maps three things she loses simultaneously in the authority trigger: empowerment, wants, and being seen. All three are undermined by the same mechanism — her attention is organized around whether the authority figure sees her rather than around her own truth.
The pattern is self-reinforcing. The more desperately you want to be seen, the less you see others, which makes them less likely to see you in the way you want, which increases the desperation. The exit is not to try harder to be seen but to start seeing — to let yourself be seen from a place of empowerment rather than need.
Related Concepts
- We judge others for exactly what we’re doing ourselves
- Being interested not interesting
- Both people in a fight want to be seen
- Rebellion empowers the authority figure just as compliance does
- Work patterns mirror relationship patterns