Submerged vs. Explicit

As a running theme that things might not necessarily change when we begin to understand them, here's another issue:

Successful communication seems predicted (defined?) by the reception of a message as that message was intended.   A tautology if I've ever written one (oh, and I've written a fair amount of them, and they are almost as senseless).

But what about those moments when we have "inter-subjective" i.e. "mutual" understanding with very few words?  What about moments when we have a lot of words and not a lot of understanding?  Who is the arbiter of such moments, besides the parties present?

There are a few people in my life who I don't understand (despite adamant pleas of clarity on their part), and who also drive emotional daggers into me.  I can't help but be sucked in by what I think they are saying, and I'm almost always wrong.  Yet they impact/ed me more than a host of other people who had boring easy messages.

So partially, we don't communicate as well as we could because we want to leave open the possibility that what we're communicating encompasses what you (listener) want to hear.

Another reason is that we aren't in fact in touch with our true intentions and beliefs, and because it might take work to unearth them, don't do it (i.e. we are mentally lazy)--that's okay, in fact, average, and mostly acceptable.  It isn't always a pretty picture to see.

Another reason is that we think we're more effective communicating with less actual explicit communication because the truncated version is actually more accurate.  This to me is the most fascinating: thorough, comprehensive, and concise.  Somehow both.

Final reason why we don't communicate as effectively as we could: we don't want to rule out open possibilities in the future--i.e. we're mini-politicians, and what we say sticks to us (to a lesser extent perhaps than we think).