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Separate the facts from your story
Facts versus story
The test is to ask what facts back up the story. A date cancels the night before, and nothing beyond that is on the table. With no facts behind the story, the response is: thank you for letting me know. Then comes the question of where the story was learned and how old it makes you feel. Saying you just don't like me sounds like a five-year-old at recess, hoping to be picked for basketball.
Filling in the blanks
The same habit fills in the blanks everywhere. Someone cuts you off in traffic and you can't stand them, and then you see they're about 100 years old and can't see. An email goes unanswered, and a whole narrative forms that they didn't like you, until they write back that it landed in spam.
A corrective experience
That reply is a corrective experience: the nervous system learns that the thing it took for a threat wasn't one. Sometimes a person really does ghost. Even then, a story that rewrites your worth is the signal that the work is about how you see yourself.
Why does the mind invent stories about others?
In 1944, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel showed people a short animated film of two triangles and a circle moving around a box. Nearly all viewers described the shapes as characters with motives, such as one triangle bullying another. The study became a classic demonstration that people attribute intentions to movement automatically.
Why do we assume the worst about silence?
In 2001, Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer, and Kathleen Vohs published a review titled Bad Is Stronger Than Good in the Review of General Psychology. Across many areas of psychology, they found that bad events and bad information have a larger effect than good ones of the same size. This negativity bias gives an unanswered message more room to be read as a rejection.
How does reinterpreting a situation calm the body?
Cognitive reappraisal means reinterpreting a situation so it carries a different emotional meaning. In 2002, Kevin Ochsner, James Gross, and colleagues found that people who reappraised upsetting images showed more activity in prefrontal regions and less in the amygdala. Gross's later work compared reappraisal with suppression and found that suppression leaves the body's stress response higher.
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