Asklemmy

Easy way to avoid this is ask someone to summarize or if you can summarize the objective main points respectfully and then it becomes a joint-fact-finding mission if its all truly good-faith.

Like,

if I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like someone conflated their lack of clarity/understanding of ______ for you instead misunderstanding ________, which you can/will respectfully demonstrate is not the case because

1. X
2. Y
3. Z

The summarizing is helpful tho because you might want to pin down the actual points of confusion or disagreement like lawyers do in a Joint Statement of Facts so you can know where the discrepancies lay.

That its surrounding misunderstanding is relatively simple to address because you can easily clarify that on the spot (in the factual realm) by summarizing the relevant facts or narratives and they can jump in any time to pin down where they think is a point of contention or that they want to expand on.

On some level it can be resolved that simply but there's likely something more fundamentally at issue that is not directly visible or comprehensible if the analysis remains fixated on facts/figures/narratives. I feel like if there's a nice way engage on why whatever is important to them or how it reflects them in their estimation, you can sometimes get them to take your hand and lead you to the treasure.