At 41, I don’t think my family (sisters and mother) knows me very well, and I don’t think they ever have. They have a picture in their minds of me, and it doesn’t match who I actually am very well. It still bugs me a bit, but I’m starting to think that most people feel this way - that their family really doesn’t know them. Do you think your family really gets you? That they understand who you really are, not who they think you are, or who they think you should be, or who you used to be but you have since grown out of?
I think my mom knows me pretty well - we’re very close and I tell her almost everything. (My sex life is most definitely off-limits, though.) My dad, on the other hand, knows nothing about me. He still thinks I’m going to get married soon - to a Korean dude - and “settle down.” Sorry, Dad. Not gonna happen.
I think my siblings do, now. We all know each other much better than a decade ago - perhaps almost as well as when we were children together. We’ve all fought our own demons and struggled with our own crises during our twenties, thirties and fourties - as we age I feel us coming back into knowing each other; although our youngest sister still harbors strange idealistic notions about us older ones. It’s kind of neat, the coming back together. To answer your question most truthfully, it kind of comes and goes over the years.
My Dad - well he knows the core, the inner self of each one of us. He’s gone rather deaf and it’s increasingly hard to communicate with him.
My Mom has passed away, so, depending upon your spiritual bent, she either Knows All or Knows Nothing. 
My mum knew me very well, but I can’t say the same for the other living relatives. Probably not their fault – distance and lack of contact both play a part.
I don’t know. When I graduated from high school, we had a senior retreat (Something that is possible when there are only 20 people in your class.) At the end of the retreat, we received letters from our parents. The letter from my mom said something interesting. She felt, or possibly still feels, that I deduced at a young age the kind of person my family and friends wanted me to be and then became that person. Her hope as expressed in the letter was that when I went to college away from everyone who’s known me from day one,I could become who I really am and not what everyone else wants me to be. So, I guess I’m talking about the opposite, really. My family thinks they don’t really know me, but they want to.
No they don’t, but that is kind of by design.
My mom didn’t (which kind of freaks her out, because she thought she totally did, and has only recently discovered how wrong she was about that), but she’s starting to. I’ve never been particularly shy about sharing stuff with her (funny thing: I can totally talk about sex with my mom, but when my sister even mentions it in a roundabout way, I have the urge to poke my fingers into my ears and start humming and rocking), but I don’t fee like she’s always paid attention. Not that she wasn’t listening (and responding) to what I was saying, but more like she had this idea in her head about my personality/motivations/whatever, and didn’t allow the stuff I was telling her to change that perception, even when it should have.
Does that make sense?
Anyway, I’m 37 and my mom is 77, for what it’s worth.
I don’t think my family knows me at all. I have always, for some reason or another, felt like the black sheep in the family. There have been times when I tried to let them in on certain parts of my life so that they could get a better sense of who I am, but that generally back fires in my face. They tend to tell me that I am weird or that I need to grow up. It’s no secret that in many ways I am a disappointment to my father where I didn’t go into the same work field he did and a disappointment to my mother because I left my marriage. Though I have come to terms with it as much as I can and just live my life to make me happy.
I don’t offer any information to them anymore. If they ask, I will give a general summery without going into detail. It’s the only way I continue to do what makes me happy without second guessing myself.
I am 29. I think my parents had lots of ideas about who I was–largely molded both by who they wanted me to be and who I presented myself to be, to avoid drama–that they are slowly re-thinking.
They don’t KNOW me the way my best friends do, of course; while in their presence I don’t talk about my sex life, I don’t swear like a trucker, I don’t mention my opinion of abortion, etc…but both of them, particularly my mother, have a much better idea now about who I am than they used to.
I think they were finally ready to hear it, and I was finally ready to share it. “It” being, for lack of some less lame way to put it, “The Real Me.”
Other than my brother, the rest of my family have always been names on random Christmas cards. And my brother and I have always had a tacit understanding that we will never judge each other.
No. We are from different worlds. They didn’t understand me that well growing up, they understand me less well now. If it weren’t for the familial resemblance I would swear I was adopted.
I think familiies often have an image of who we are that prevents them from seeing who we really are. On the other hand, families probably know some things about us that we don’t know.
That’s my profundity about my family, anyhow. I feel more forced in a role with them than in the rest of my life. They see me in that role, so that’s who I am. But they also prolly know stuff about me I don’t like to face (like my temper).
My mom is the worst of the lot in terms of seeing me in a role. She thinks she knows me well, but she knows only her image of me. She is narcissistic, though, so that is true of her interactions with everyone. She can only see us through the lens of her needs.
Three people in my family really know who I am – my aunt and my grandparents, who practically raised me.
My aunt spent every weekend with me growing up and eventually I moved in with her, so she knows me tremendously well. She knows me well additionally because we are very much alike in a number of ways. I told her everything growing up and she was one of the few people who actually grasped what my life was like and understanding about the ways it affected me. Last night I spent 2.5 hours with her on the phone and we talked about everything from my Mother to Super Tuesday to the Holocaust. My aunt got me a stuffed clam puppet that gurgles for Christmas. I can think of no more obvious proof that she truly knows me.
My grandparents are very much like parents to me–I did live with them early in my childhood and on and off later on–and they have always accepted and embraced my true self. I went through a rebellious phase when I was 18-19 which to me means getting a piercing and dying my hair purple. My grandmother, who is actually rather conservative and just the sort of person to judge people with purple hair and a pierced eyebrow, didn’t bat an eye. She understood that it didn’t make me a fundamentally different person, and she already knew me, so it wasn’t a big deal.
And early on I remember screwing up the courage to tell them I was a Buddhist – a big deal since grandma had attempted to raise me Christian. My grandfather sat there a moment and said, ‘‘Huh. Did you know there’s a rule in Buddhism that says grandchildren are supposed to iron their grandfather’s shirts for them?’’ Then he sort of signaled toward the ironing board. 
My grandma also knows my best friend is a lesbian and despite her incredible prejudice on the subject never fails to ask how my best friend is doing and show concern and caring for the people I call my friends, now matter how weird they might seem to her. It’s almost as if her love for me transcends her prejudices.
I’m feeling like a pretty lucky girl to have people I trust with so much of myself.
At this point, my family is down to my siblings and their spouses. My brother doesn’t know me at all, which is cool, there’s neither closeless nor desire for closeness there on either side.
My sister and I are fairly close, and she knows me pretty well – there are certainly some things about me that she sees far more clearly than I do myself. I don’t share every detail of my life with her – esp. not my love life, which is far more feckless than she’s comfortable with.
My parents don’t understand who I am at all, but as the OP speculates, I think this is fairly common – although my sample is skewed, since I have lived outside my home country for most of my adult life. Many, not all, of the expatriates I’ve known had a desperate desire to escape from family as a motivation for their wide-ranging travels. I don’t know if we represent the population at large very well.
My mother knows the real me, to the point where she doesn’t let me lie to myself about anything. It really gets annoying sometimes.
That is the vibe I get from my family. It’s probably become a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point; I don’t share my true self with them because I don’t trust them to listen when I do, so they don’t get much to replace their ideas with.
My family knows the family part of me. The wife/daughter/sister/mother/grandmother part. The rest of me? No, they don’t know, and I don’t think they ever will. I don’t mind that, though. I’m sure the same is true with them. Why is it that we often shrink from revealing our “innermost” self to the people who are supposedly the “closest” to us? Because each relationship serves a different purpose in our lives, I would guess.
I have some friends who know aspects of me that my family doesn’t. They aren’t “more important”, but they are necessary, I find.
I think my immediate family knows me, with my brother to a lesser extent just because he lives on the other side of the country (although I would wager that he still knows me better than most brothers know their sister).
My extended family really hasn’t got a clue and honestly, I don’t know all that much about them either other than what can be gleaned from annual or twice-annual get togethers. I have recently instituted Sunday night phone calls to each grandmother and that has helped rekindle a bit of what I know about them and they know more of the basics about me. It’s been good.
As my recent thread indicates, I don’t think my dad, mom or bro knows me at all. I’m also willing to admit I don’t know my brother. I do, however, think I know my dad and mom very well.
If you asked my dad or mom, they’d probably say that I don’t know them and they do know me. It’s a self-fulfilling thingy, and hard to get any objective truth about.
My family of origin (parents & sibs) don’t know me. I am 46 and they have refused to picture me as anyone older than 16. This is at the heart of what drove a wedge into the relationship & why I no longer associate with them.