In David Foster Wallace’s thought-provoking parable, two young fish are swimming along when an older fish passes by and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish keep swimming. After a while, one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”

The point of the parable is simple but profound: It’s easy to overlook the elements that hold our world together, because they’re woven into our routines, our language, our expectations of others and ourselves.

As a clinical psychologist and attachment researcher, I study the often-overlooked reality of how the acknowledgment we receive from caregivers in times of distress shapes our lifelong vulnerability—or resilience—to suffering.

This is the water we swim in.

When I was about nine years old, I was playing backgammon with my best friend — one of those games where luck plays as big a role as skill. I rolled double sixes—which meant I was about to win the game—and started jumping up and down with joy. But my friend insisted it was a six and a five. That one-point difference would have cost me the game.

We argued back and forth. I got frustrated and told him to leave. I couldn’t contend with the fact that my best friend didn’t believe me—didn’t acknowledge what I was certain I had seen.

I sat alone in my room, fuming, hurt, and frustrated. Then my father came in. He didn’t ask what happened. He didn’t ask what I felt. He just said, “If you keep sending your friends away like this, you’ll end up with no friends at all.” Then he walked out.

It wasn’t a traumatic moment. It was, in fact, almost banal. And that’s the point: We are shaped not only by life’s big ruptures, but by the quiet, ordinary moments—repeated again and again—when our struggles go unseen.

Some wounds are subtle. But when they are reopened consistently, especially by those closest to us, they come to define the emotional water we live in. My reality went unacknowledged by the person I needed most, and my sensitivity to not being seen only deepened with time.

I know now that my father wasn’t trying to hurt me. He was carrying his own water—shaped by his life, his parents, his time—and doing the best he could with what he had. But as a child, why would I care? What I felt most was the gap between what I experienced and what went unacknowledged.

Those quiet wounds became my water.

Attachment theory, introduced by

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