Oh, can I relate! I once had an entire group of friends rushing to comfort me over my father's death when I wrote that I was "heartened to see that my mother was coping so well in my father's absence." My father, rather than dead, was on a month-long trip to Scotland. 
To your more significant point, I do think it is incredibly difficult to remember that no one but us is looking from our point of view. And even when do we happen to see the same exact thing (like a sign in a vacuum store window), the *way* we see it is guaranteed to be different.
So, it seems to me that instead of feeling stupid for mangled prose, we writers might simply count ourselves lucky when we succeed in letting a reader in on what we see. 
At the same time, I don't think that inadvertent confusion or the resulting reader agitation is inherently a failure. It's just not the outcome we intended. But remarkable things can follow. Just look through the comments on your "signs" post -- actual dialogue! Nice work.