Growing up loved and protected gave me confidence, security, and a deep sense of being safe in the world. What I didn’t see until much later was how easily that kind of comfort can leave you unprepared for lives shaped by struggle, instability, and pain.
Two loving parents. A stable home in Australia. Encouragement at every turn. When I got into trouble, I was held accountable without anyone questioning whether I was loved. When I tried something new, someone showed up to watch. When I doubted myself, my parents had a long supply of steady words that meant, in effect, you are fine, you will be fine, we've got you.
I don't take any of that for granted. I know how rare it is. And I know that most of the person I've become was built on that foundation, directly or indirectly.
But it's taken me a long time to notice something I think is important to say out loud. That kind of foundation creates a specific blind spot. And if you don't work hard to see around it, you'll spend your whole life quietly misreading the people who weren't given the same start.
The particular shape of the blind spot
Here's how it showed up for me, slowly, over years.
When a friend couldn't "just decide" to be confident, I didn't understand it. When someone I cared about flinched at kindness, I was confused. When a colleague kept sabotaging their own good opportunities, I found it baffling in a way that had judgment in it, even when I tried to hide the judgment from myself.
I kept thinking, quietly, why don't they just do the thing? Why do they keep choosing the path that hurts them? Why do they talk themselves out of the job they clearly want, or the relationship that's clearly good for them, or the help that's being openly offered?
It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand the answer. Because the baseline the question assumes, that a person can simply decide to trust, simply decide to feel worthy, simply decide to accept help, is a baseline that secure childhoods quietly install by age seven and insecure ones often don't install at all.
I had the baseline. I assumed everyone did. They didn't. And every interaction where I didn't see that was a small failure on my part that I never saw at the time.
Where I first noticed it
The first time I really saw the shape of the blind spot was with my wife, early in our relationship. She's Vietnamese, she grew up in a culture and a family with a very different texture than mine, and in our first year I kept noticing small moments where my instincts were wrong.
I'd reassure her about something and watch it not land the way the same words would have landed with me. I'd offer help and see her hesitate in a way I couldn't parse. I'd say something my parents would have said to me, the Australian version of "you've got this", and it would fall into the room and die there because the whole frame I'd been trained on didn't translate to the life she'd actually lived.
She didn't need fewer words. She needed different ones. She needed me to understand that the things I treated as obvious, like parental love being unconditional, or support being offered without a price tag, or encouragement being sincere, were not universal default settings. They were gifts I'd been given so early that I'd mistaken them for the structure of reality.
What the research actually shows about this
I'm not the first person to notice this pattern. Researchers have written about what some call the blind spot of the privileged, where people who grew up with stable advantages systematically misjudge the lived experience of people who didn't. A 2022 paper in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology by Demis Glasford argues that this blind spot shows up even in people who hold all the right principles, because principles held from a stable foundation don't automatically translate into accurate perception of people outside it.
The research isn't a moral indictment. It's a description. But I want to be careful not to flatten it into easy symmetry. If your nervous system learned, at age four, that the adults in your life were safe, you will read other adults as probably safe by default for the rest of your life. If someone else's nervous system learned the opposite lesson at the same age, they will read the same adults very differently. Both people are working with real data about their own lives. The asymmetry, though, is that the person with the stable start gets to walk through the world assuming their reading is the correct one, and rarely gets corrected. The person with the harder start gets corrected constantly, usually by people like me, telling them their instincts are wrong when their instincts are, in fact, the most accurate map they have.
The things I used to say without knowing what I was saying
Looking back, I can hear myself in my twenties saying things I now find hard to listen to.
"Just believe in yourself." I meant it. But to someone whose childhood didn't give them anything solid to believe in, this is the verbal equivalent of telling a person with no ladder to just climb up.
"Have you tried just talking to your mum about it?" I assumed talking to mum was a thing that helped. For some people, it was the thing that caused the problem.
"I'm sure they didn't mean it like that." I was defending people who actually did mean it like that.
"Things usually work out." I meant this sincerely, because in my experience, things mostly had. I didn't realise I was quietly dismissing the experience of people for whom things often didn't.
Every one of those sentences came from a good place. Every one of them was tone-deaf in a way I couldn't hear because the blindness was in the ear, not in the mouth.
What I've tried to do about it
You can't undo a stable childhood. You can't pretend to have absorbed wounds you weren't given. The work, if you had the lucky version, is to develop a second layer of perception that doesn't assume your starting conditions were the standard package.
In practice this has meant, for me, a lot of listening without leaping to fix things. When a friend tells me something is hard, my reflex is still to immediately offer the tool or the reassurance. The more useful move is almost always to shut up, to let them be in the hard thing, and to resist the urge to rush them into the solution my own wiring finds obvious.
It has meant being slower to judge self-destructive behaviour. When someone keeps making a choice that looks clearly bad from the outside, I try now to assume the choice is solving a problem I can't see rather than creating one I can. Usually it is.
And it has meant being careful with the word "just". As in, why don't you just. If I catch myself starting a sentence that way, I try to stop before I say it. Because "just" almost always means "from where I'm standing," and the whole problem is that I'm standing on ground they don't have.
What Buddhism has quietly taught me about this
When I wrote Hidden Secrets of Buddhism, one of the teachings that kept turning over in my head was the Buddhist idea that compassion requires accurate seeing, not just kind feeling. You can be warm toward someone and still be projecting your own experience onto theirs, and when you do that, you haven't actually seen them. You've just decorated them with your own assumptions.
Real compassion is slower. It starts by noticing that the person in front of you is not you. That their life has been shaped by different weather. That the mind looking back at you from across the table was formed by conditions you will never fully understand, any more than they'll fully understand yours.
On the cushion, in the early mornings along the Saigon River, I work on this directly. Noticing when my own response to another person's situation is more about my own wiring than theirs. Noticing when I've assumed too much. Noticing the reflex to help, and asking whether helping is what's actually needed.
A small closing thought for anyone with the same lucky start
If you had the stable home and the loving parents and the steady encouragement, I don't think the task is to feel guilty about it. Guilt doesn't do anything useful. The task is to notice, gently, that the foundation you were given made certain kinds of people slightly illegible to you, and to try to close some of that gap.
Though I'm less sure than I used to be about how much of it can actually be closed. There are people in my life who still have to translate themselves to me, and who will probably always have to, because the thing I'm missing isn't information, it's a kind of knowing that was supposed to be installed early and wasn't. I can listen harder. I can catch myself. I can stop saying "just". But I don't know if the gap becomes a bridge, or whether it stays a gap that I've at least learned the shape of. I suspect, on the days I'm being honest, that it's closer to the second. And I suspect some of the people on the other side of it will not forgive the gap, and won't owe me that forgiveness, and that this is part of what it means to have had the lucky start, too.
