No-one can understand someone better than the person him/herself

sn't it the case that in the process of understanding yourself, you are understanding yourself as you imagine that you were as opposed to how you may have otherwise been and, more importantly, how you are in the present? The process of attempting to understand yourself would also need to be understood in order for you to fully understand yourself (example: you would need to understand why you want to understand yourself). So you can go into a state of reflective consciousness, but you cannot go beyond that. In the process of going into the reflective consciousness, you cease to see things as they would be otherwise. For example: when you are happy, you don't really think about it. Someone comes along and asks you how you are, and you may tell them that you are happy, but at the moment when you are trying to determine what you are, you are not longer happy. You are instead someone attempting to determine what you are, at least for that moment, and because of this you are no longer what you were previously.An intellectual understanding can never be tantamount to an experiential understanding. You need both to understand yourself, but you cannot ever have them at the same time.If we are always having experiences and processing them, getting a different or growing and changing perspective on life, ourselves, others, is there a fixed self to understand? Or just a capacity to understand oneself in this moment now? Perhaps a new and different understanding is also possible in the future, if one does not freeze a certain understanding and carry it forward as a fixed way of being? We are going to have new experiences into the future, we may think we can predict what we'd do, based on our current self understanding, yet we can also learn at these times, that we surprised ourselves and found out something new about ourselves that we had not understood before?Perhaps we can also gain a new perspective and review ourselves in the past and have a new, and maybe even better, understanding of who we were in the past from this new perspective?I think most people understand themselves, when the self is taken to be the illusion that they accept as their selves. They generally know their likes and dislikes, basic temperaments, fears, strengths and weaknesses because knowledge of these things is accessible to consciousness. But since the self arises from changes in polarization across membranes in neural networks then it has to be an illusion, there is no substance called self in the brain. If people don't understand that then I guess they don't actually understand what they are, they understand only the end results of subconscious neural processing, as these results relate to the framework of identity they have come to accept as their selves. Are the neural networks in the brain of a man that underlie the thought that women are inferior to men at math part of the self if the man consciously rejects the thought? The networks aren't qualitatively different from the networks that reject the thought. Why is one network part of the self and the other not? It could only be the case if "self" is accepted as only the activity that occurs in certain regions of the frontal lobes at any given time. Personally, the five factor model of personality and the dimensional correlates in the brain (limbic for neuroticism, reward circuitry for extroversion) have helped me to understand myself better than any pseudoscientifically proposed subconscious narrative ever could.