We Used to Understand Each Other. What Happened?
There is a conversation I have had so many times I could script it.
These are my personal notes on On ne se comprend plus Isabelle Filliozat: the parts that made me rethink listening, emotional filters, and the tiny moments where understanding starts to disappear.
It starts with something ordinary: a comment in the kitchen, a request shouted from another room, a tired “can we just…” at exactly the wrong time of day – and it ends somewhere neither of us intended to go. Not a fight, exactly. Just a gap. That feeling of having spoken and not been heard. Or of having heard something that was not quite what was said.
This happens in family life more than I would like to admit. With teenagers. With a husband. With myself, honestly. The moment is tiny, but suddenly I am not only reacting to the sentence in front of me. I am reacting to the tone, the history, the fact that I am tired, the invisible pile of everything I have already held that day.
I used to think this was about communication skills. That the solution was better phrasing, more patience, more intentional listening. And those things help. But On ne se comprend plus by Isabelle Filliozat offered me something more fundamental: an explanation for why the gap exists in the first place. And it turns out it is not really about the words at all.
Table of Contents
Who Is Isabelle Filliozat?
Isabelle Filliozat is a French psychotherapist, author and speaker who has spent decades writing about emotional intelligence, parenting, and the way our inner life shapes our relationships. She is one of the most widely read authors in French personal development – her books on parenting and emotions have been read by hundreds of thousands of families.
On ne se comprend plus is about adult relationships – couples, friendships, family dynamics – and the invisible forces that make communication so much harder than it looks.
Why We Stop Understanding Each Other
Isabelle Filliozat’s central argument is this: when two people speak to each other, they are rarely in the same conversation.
What I mean by that, and what she means by it, is that each person is filtering the words they receive through their own emotional history. Through old experiences, old wounds, old patterns of being responded to – or not. Two people can be sitting at the same table, saying and hearing the same words, and having entirely different conversations based on what those words mean to them internally.
This is not a failure of intelligence or good faith. It is the way human beings are built. We do not hear words in a vacuum. We hear them through everything that has happened to us before.
The problem is that we are usually not aware of this. We think we are responding to what was said. We are often responding to something much older.
The Filters We Hear Through
Isabelle Filliozat writes about the emotional filters we carry – the internal frameworks built from childhood, from family dynamics, from repeated experiences of being understood or misunderstood, held or dismissed.
When someone close to us says something that touches an old wound, we do not process it rationally. We react from the part of us that was formed much earlier. The response that comes out is not always proportionate to what actually happened. It is proportionate to the accumulated weight of everything that word, or that tone, or that moment of silence, has ever meant.
I read this and immediately thought of the conversations that go wrong most consistently in my own life – and how the intensity of my reaction is often a signal that something much older is being activated. Not what my husband said. Not what one of the girls did. Not even the actual words. Something underneath that.
There is a particular kind of evening conversation, after school and homework and dinner and everyone needing something, where I can feel myself stop listening properly. I am still physically there. I am still answering. But inside, I have already decided what I think is happening: I am not being helped, I am not being heard, I am carrying too much. Once that filter is in place, almost anything can sound like proof.
This connects directly to what Marshall Rosenberg writes about NVC – that beneath every reaction is a need, and beneath the need is a feeling, and beneath the feeling is often something very old. Isabelle Filliozat builds on this same understanding from the psychotherapy angle. They are different approaches to the same truth.
What Happens in the Body Before the Words
One of the ideas I found most useful in On ne se comprend plus is the role of the body in communication.
Before we speak, before we hear, before we process – there is a physical response. A tightening. A quickening. A sense of something closing or opening. Isabelle Filliozat is very clear that communication failures often begin here – in the body’s response, which precedes conscious thought and shapes what we are able to take in.
When we are in a defensive or threatened state physically, we cannot receive information in the same way. Our capacity for nuance narrows. The gap between what was said and what we hear widens.
This is why the advice “just communicate better” so often fails. You cannot communicate better when your nervous system has already decided you are under threat. You have to address the physical state first.
I thought of the tapping work I have been doing since December 2025 – the way EFT works directly with the body’s threat response before trying to engage the rational mind. The Tapping Solution is, in this sense, a communication tool. It lowers the body’s alarm level so that the conversation can actually land.
Isabelle Filliozat offers different tools – ways of recognising the body’s signals in a conversation, ways of naming what is happening without escalating it, ways of creating enough space to actually hear each other. None of them are complicated. All of them require practice.
Practical Takeaways
- Notice when you are responding to the words and when you are responding to something older. If your reaction feels bigger than the situation warrants, that is information. Something is being activated that has nothing to do with this specific moment. Naming this – even just to yourself – creates a small but significant space between the trigger and the response.
- Remember that the other person is also hearing through their own filters. The comment that landed strangely was not necessarily meant strangely. What they said and what you heard are not the same thing – and neither is your fault. This is just what happens when two human nervous systems try to connect.
- Check your body before a difficult conversation. If you are already tense, hungry, tired, or stressed, the conversation will be harder than it needs to be. This is not weakness – it is physiology. Isabelle Filliozat is very practical about this: sometimes the most useful communication skill is waiting until the conditions are better.
- Slow down the moment when things start to escalate. A pause – a breath, a silence, even a “can I have a moment” – is not avoidance. It is the act of creating enough space for the rational brain to come back online. Most communication failures happen in the gap between trigger and response. Widening that gap is the whole game.
- Practise translating reactions into needs. When someone close to you says something that activates a reaction, try asking: what do I actually need right now? Not what did they do wrong, not what should they have said – what do I need? This is the NVC move, and it is also very much what Isabelle Filliozat is pointing at. The need is almost always something simple and legitimate. Getting to it changes the conversation.
Why This Belongs in Heart
Heart on this blog is about the relationships that matter most – family, parenting, the people we love, the dynamics that shape how we feel about ourselves and each other.
On ne se comprend plus by Isabelle Filliozat belongs here because it addresses the thing that sits underneath most relationship difficulties – not bad intentions, not wrong choices, but the invisible gap between what one person means and what another person hears.
It belongs alongside Non-Violent Communication (Marshall Rosenberg on needs-based communication), How to Talk So Kids Will Listen (Faber & Mazlish on connection over correction), Cessez d’être gentil, soyez vrai! (Thomas d’Ansembourg on authentic communication), and Hold On to Your Kids (Gordon Neufeld on the relationship as foundation). Together these books form a body of work about one essential thing: how to actually reach the people we love.
I came to On ne se comprend plus by Isabelle Filliozat hoping to understand why certain conversations keep going wrong. I found something larger – an explanation for why human connection is so much harder than it looks, and why the tools for improving it have almost nothing to do with better words and almost everything to do with better self-awareness.
That matters to me because I do not want a home where everyone has to phrase everything perfectly to be safe. I want a home where we can repair. Where we can pause, come back, and say, “I think I heard that through an old filter.” I am nowhere near doing this beautifully every time. But even having that sentence available changes something.
The gap between what we say and what is heard is not a problem to solve once. It is something to work with, conversation by conversation. But understanding where it comes from changes the whole thing – because you stop blaming the other person, and you stop blaming yourself. You start being curious instead.
That is a much better place to have a conversation from.
Notes from Soph | Learning, not perfection.
Et toi? Is there a conversation you keep having that never quite resolves? Do you recognise the idea of hearing through old filters rather than just the words? Come and talk about it in the Notes from Soph community on Skool – this one touches something most of us never discuss.
Book Details:
On ne se comprend plus – Isabelle Filliozat, JC Lattès, 2017
📚 Amazon.fr https://amzn.to/4tKfby1
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