THAT'S MEN:Mind reading is one of the most common stumbling blocks in relationships
WE ALL read each other’s minds. Your girlfriend has a face on her. What’s wrong with her? Is it something to do with you?
Because we tend to think the world revolves around us, the answer, we assume, is yes. So what’s she annoyed about? You scan recent issues, behaviours and misbehaviours and come up with an answer. It’s because you’ve just polished off all the chocolates you gave her for St Valentine’s Day.
Maybe, maybe not. She’s probably at the same thing. She notices that you look a bit grim and she reckons you’re annoyed at her and that makes her more annoyed and so on and so forth.
Mind reading is one of the most common stumbling blocks in relationships. In counselling, I find that people often improve their relationships greatly when they realise they are indulging in reading their partner’s minds.
And not just their partner’s minds. If you think you know what your boss, your colleague or the person behind the shop counter is thinking about you, then you are mind reading.
But mind reading is just guesswork. Even psychologists with long years of study of the human mind behind them can make only an educated guess at what another person may be thinking at a given time.
Aaron Beck, one of the founding fathers of cognitive behavioural therapy, identified mind reading as a thinking habit which makes life much more difficult for us than it needs to be.
Teenagers, for instance, tend to assume that parents are being angry at them and critical of them even when this is not the case. Research shows that teenagers interpret a wide range of parental facial expressions as anger even though a parent may really be feeling something else, such as concern.
But older people do it too. I recall driving down the Naas road one day and glancing in the rearview mirror to see three motorcycle gardaí behind me. My first thought was what have I done wrong? I made the assumption they were checking out my car to see if I was breaking a law – pure mind reading. In all probability they were on a training exercise and had little interest in me.
But living in a fictional world gets dangerous if you become so involved in it that it wrecks your relationships. The man or woman convinced their partner is looking to have an affair is an example – there is a good chance that the partner will eventually get fed up with living under a cloud of suspicion and surveillance and will leave the relationship.
The person who commits suicide because he thinks, wrongly, that other people believe they would be better off without him is another, tragic example.
And there is the instance of the parent or child-carer who believes a baby is intentionally crying to upset him or her and who lashes out in anger.
On a more mundane level, if your St Valentine’s date at the weekend was half an hour late showing up, you might have begun reading her mind. Maybe she doesn’t care, maybe she’s found someone else and so on. But maybe too she’s just caught in traffic. Maybe she had to work half an hour late.
Why doesn’t she ring, then? Maybe the phone battery’s dead. Maybe she doesn’t realise you’re standing there stewing and reading her mind. Whatever the reason, you can’t know what she’s thinking unless you ask her and all your mind reading can achieve is to fool you and maybe ruin your evening.
This doesn’t mean we should never give thought to what someone else might be thinking. Consideration for another person involves sensitivity to how that person might feel, what might be going on for him or her, what this person might think if I did such and such.
The key is to realise that this is guesswork and that you can never know what another person is thinking unless that person tells you.
So to go back to the start, if your girlfriend has a face on her, it may be because she is thinking about her bank shares. It might have nothing at all to do with you polishing off the chocolates from St Valentine’s Day, undeniably shameful though the act may have been. There again, if you scoffed the chocs, you just might be right.
- Padraig OMorain is a counsellor