451. Why you need to stop psychoanalysing the people you date

0:04 Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our twenties.

0:36 As someone who studied psychology and spends a lot and I mean a lot of time in psychology research and psychology spaces and therapy spaces, I used to have this terrible habit of psychoanalyzing my romantic relationships, my Tinder dates, my friends, Tinder dates, the relationships of people I saw online, of people in my family. It was a terrible habit, and over time it created this barrier between me and the people that I met because I was always on high alert for warning signs or what their behavior might mean more clinically or psychologically that I needed to be aware of, that I needed to be alert to. I think these days out just like collective understanding of psychology and of therapeutic terms like hyperindependent, like emotionally unavailable like

1:33 mother wounds and father wounds, and insecurely attached avoid and anxiously attached. Like all of these, our knowledge of them has all just increased, and I think many of us who are actively dating find it very easy to rely on these categories to explain the individuals that we are dating. If you're somebody who finds dating very anxiety inducing and scary, or you've been hurt before, it feels like a wise decision to overanalyze, psychoanalyze people's behavior and be on the lookout for red flags. It feels like a safe call.

2:14 But what do we actually lose by doing that? Is it really actually necessarily helpful to look at dating behavior through this lens all the time? And just because we have the language, just because we understand these concepts, does it actually reduce the fact that maybe these people will just show up? And does it actually increase our chances of finding somebody who does match our style of loving and match our way of connecting. It's a very complicated topic right in one kind of hand, I do think that our understanding this language has really helped a lot of people. On the other end, I do think that if you're dating and you're in your twenties or thirties.

2:54 Just because you are intellectually aware of the way that people can have difficulties with love or the ways that they can show up, and just because you can intellectualize relationship problems doesn't mean that you're actually solving them, especially when you're at the beginning of a relationship and you don't really know a person well enough to make a call.

3:14 So even though we feel like this is helpful, is it and what is it actually doing to our dating prospects? That is what we're going to explore today. I hope you find this episode informative. Without further ado, let's get into the psychology behind why we psychoanalyze the people that we date. When we talk about psychoanalyzing or over analyzing somebody that we are courting or that we are dating, what we are usually talking about is the tendency to link behavior, everyday behavior to something deeper, something hidden, something pathological, even psychological or unconscious, and we often base this explanation on maybe limited or inaccurate information. It is our tendency to take something they say or do and just dig, dig, dig, interpret, interpret, interpret,

4:13 look to find a deeper meaning. In order to avoid maybe a simpler, more accurate explanation that might hurt our feelings. For example, it might look like assuming somebody is avoidant because they take longer to reply to your messages, or interpreting someone's distance as a fear of intimacy when they simply just don't like you back like that might be the actual explanation. It can also happen the other way around, right.

4:41 We might hear that somebody's had a really difficult childhood or how to really tumultuous previous relationship and assume that this will mean they are emotionally unavailable, This will mean that they have a fear of intimacy when we don't actually have the experience with them, yeah, to make that call and to be able to actually understand them for all their different nuances. Now, to be clear, as I said in the intro, the words or labels we so often hear around relationships are really important things like attachment styles and emotional availability and boundaries and self sabotage and avoidance.

5:20 They all describe very real relational patterns that influence people very deeply. We know from extensive amounts of research, literally too many pieces of research to even begin citing that something like an insecure attachment pattern that was developed in childhood tends to show up when we experience love in adulthood, in our twenties and beyond. We know that people who have had traumatic past relationships and relationship experiences may respond to that by becoming closed off. Naturally. We know that if someone saw their parents fighting all the time, or saw a parent cheat, or saw their parents stuck in a really toxic relationship, this can create a belief that love is not safe or that love is not a

6:16 positive experience, and that creates a pattern within them that's not really about them, but is and influences how they go out into the world and treat the people they date, unconsciously or not. But just because we logically know that these things do occur and what they look like in relationships and the struggles that they cause, does not mean that we should be so quick to pathologize and label every dating behavior through this lens. We need to be aware that a single psychological concept can never be the full explanation of a person. A label is there to describe a pattern. It can also flatten experience. It can flatten a person. You know someone texting slow could be avoidant, or they could be busy. They could be overwhelmed. They

7:04 could be unsure, they could be neurodivergent. They could be depressed, they could be uninterested, they could be cautious. Like there's all these different explanations, we typically just search for the one that fits our past narrative. Someone who struggles to talk about their feelings may have deep wounds from the past, but they may also have just grown up in a family where they just wasn't normal. There just wasn't that kind of emotional language, it wasn't model to them. Or they may just need time to feel safe and to really open up about their feelings and about how they feel about you. And that's again totally natural. Someone needing space and saying, yeah, I just need to back off for a little bit. One explanation is that they're emotionally unavailable.

7:49 They could also be regulating themselves. They could also be actually trying to do what's best by you. They could be trying to maintain healthy independence or move at a pace that feels sustainable for them because they don't want to hurt your feelings. Because they're taking this seriously. When we psychoanalyze. What we often do is take a word that's been used in one specific context for one specific thing, and we apply it to a lot of other behaviors that, as I said, have a different explanation. This links to a psychological idea that we know as concept creep. So in a twenty sixteen paper that was published in the Journal of Psychological Inquiry, this psychologist, his name is Nick Haslum.

8:32 He's from the University of Melbourne. He argued that many harm related psychological concepts, including terms around trauma, around abuse, attachment styles, mental disorders, they have expanded over time. In some ways that's been really helpful. In other ways it hasn't. These concepts, many of which began as clinical terms and clinical observations, they get taken out of that context and they start being used I guess, more freely and being applied to more and more things and more and more experiences and events, until their everyday use just doesn't reflect their original meaning. Avoidant attachment is an amazing example of this.

9:19 When researchers first started investigating this pattern of children relating to their parents and relating to others, they were looking at kids in orphanages. They were looking at kids in foster care. They were looking at children who had been seriously abused, and that's why they were seeing this deep avoidance of connection. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to hear people use it to simply describe someone who doesn't want a relationship.

9:48 That's concept of cry and those two things are obviously not the same. And if the word we have for the most severe abandonment and attachment wounds because it comes the same word we use for personal preferences or for somebody who is just dragging their feet, what word do we use for those extreme cases anymore? Like what word do we now have to still ensure that the severity of what somebody is experiencing is clear. So that's kind of what we're describing and the kind of I don't want to say problem behavior, but the problem behavior we're thinking about, why do we do this? Because it's not always intentional, and it usually stems from a very real and a very sincere place, which is a fearful place.

10:36 Labels like avoidant, like emotionally unavailable, like codependent that we can very easily access and use to very easily explain a way or categorize somebody's behavior. They help give us a sense of certainty when a lot of dating is really really uncertain, like dating someone for the first time, dating somebody new, Being interested in somebody is a really vulnerable human experience. And the knowledge that we gained about somebody else and whether they're right for us or whether they have certain quirks, like the knowledge we gain is often slow. It takes time to really see somebody's true intentions, to get to understand who they are, what they are, the way they think. Whether something's going to work out

11:21 is a slow process. And our fear wants answers. Now. Our fear is urgent. The anxious part of us wants to know as soon as possible. Is this person safe? Is this person going to hurt me? Am I wasting my time? It wants it just wants any kind of clarity against the uncertainty of dating. When we simply don't know yet, and all we have is little clues that have kind of put us on edge. We try to solve it in our own minds through labels and mental shortcuts.

11:51 There is a really interesting article from this You think it's like a it's like a center. It's called the Greater Good Science Center I think at Berkeley UCLA one of those, and they wrote this paper titled How to Stop Overthinking Your Relationships, and it outlines the five types of rumination that takes place in romance. It's blame rumination, control rumination, doubt rumination, worst case scenario rumination, and self pity rumination. If you are an overthinker, it's an amazing article.

12:24 And the biggest one on that list that takes place when we psychoanalyze a potential partner is control rumination, control thoughts. They orbit a desired future outcome and they're very obsessed with the best way to achieve it. We want to control exactly how this relationship is going to go. They're also extremely sensitive to any deviations from that plan. Your control rumination is on high alert for anything that is out of the ordinary, anything that's going to hurt us, anything that goes against our desire to control a situation.

13:01 Instead of simply acknowledging that you like them and that you don't know where this is going and that maybe some of their behavior is a little bit hard to categorize, your control rumination, your mind starts analyzing, predicting, interpreting, and explaining the reasons behind these very normal feelings through somebody else's behavior, and it feels productive. It feels like the more I think about this, the more answers I'm going to get. And with the more answers I'm going to get, the more certainty I'm going to receive. That's what we're craving.

13:30 We're not actually craving anymore the love of the relationship on the slow bird. We're craving the knowing. This fits in with a much broader area of research on the psychology of uncertainty, which is like one of my favorite things ever to talk about as an uncertain person and a very anxious person. In a rather old paper published in nineteen ninety six, not that old, but old for psychology standards, the social psychologist Krugolanski and Webster, they developed the idea of the human need for cognitive closure, and this essentially refers to the desire for definitive answers to reduce discomfort and ambiguity. They suggested that when people strongly want closure, they may seize an explanation quickly and then

14:20 freeze around it. And when they freeze around an explanation, they become less open to other interpretations of the same situation. In dating, this might look like labeling somebody as emotionally unavailable at the first sign of anxiety, because that feels more tolerable than just accepting that you don't really know what they want yet, or that you're not that far ahead or down the line to know, or that this may just be anxiety that is coming from your own perception, not the reality of the relationship or somebody else's behavior.

14:58 All of this is to avoid getting hurt. We're not blaming you or just I'm just trying to explain it. Giving the person you're dating in a category feels very manageable, It feels very stable. It almost feels like the more intelligent way of approaching a situation rather than simply admitting that you feel scared, Rather than simply admitting that, hey, maybe this actually won't work out and there is a possibility that I'm going to be hurt. You don't want to be hurt. You want to avoid that. This is a strategy for doing it. Sometimes, trying to delve into their past as well to figure out like what's wrong with them also feels less humiliating than admitting that this connection isn't working out, or that it just isn't developing

15:41 in the way that you hoped. Again, that's a really hard pill to swallow. If you really like somebody, maybe you're right. Maybe they weren't told or made to feel loved when they're a child, and so they do have a very anxious or avoidant attachment style. Maybe their X really did screw them up and they have a fear of intimacy. Maybe they just don't have the capacity to love as deeply as you. Maybe there is something psychological and pathological about their behavior. But does that really change what is happening right now? Does it help you show up in your best way in this situation? Does it help your heart stay open? Does it help you feel hopeful or open to possibility? Probably not. This becomes, as

16:25 I said, very intensive. You've been hurt before. So often our own psychology is intermingling with our perception of their psychology. If you have dated someone that turned out to be emotionally avoidant, inconsistent, manipulative, or just genuinely unsafe, it makes a lot of sense that you are more alert the next time you date someone. It makes sense that you want to read all the books, know all the concepts know everything there is to know. We learn from pain neurologically, psychologically, emotionally, mentally.

17:01 If something hurt you really badly at your core, you naturally become quicker to scan for science that is happening again, sometimes without you even knowing it. The thing is is that this actually ends up hurting and influencing your own behavior more than you really can tell. In another rather old but very well cited nineteen ninety eight paper that was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, these researchers wanted to kind of prove or provide some evidence for this theory, and they conducted two studies on rejection sensitivity and conflict between couples in romantic relationships. They conducted a longitudinal study and they conducted a laboratory study to basically figure out, if we enter a relationship scared,

17:49 does this influence how the relationship's going to work out. We actually featured this study as part of our Study of the Week series over on Substack a couple of weeks ago. So if you are not a memory and you want to know the full details of how they went about discovering or finding the outcome of this study, you can go and join there, but I can tell you what they discovered. I can tell you the conclusion, which was that people who entered a relationship expecting rejection often exhibited behaviors that the researchers claimed contributed more to a rejecting response from their partner. They were more likely to start arguments, they were more likely to be suspicious, they were more likely to sense rejection in places that

18:31 it wasn't occurring, and this contributed to a really awful cycle for them where they entered a relationship anticipating that things were going to go wrong. This increased behaviors that made things go wrong, which therefore made them feel like in the future relationships were going to always be a catastrophe, and the cycle started again. A more recent piece of work actually supports this. This one was conducted in twenty twenty three from researchers at the University of Wollongong and the University of Leeds in Trinity, and it was a massive meta analysis. It looked at sixty studies involving like seventeen thousand people exploring the same thing. Does our fear of relationships and fear and relationships create a self fulfilling prophecy.

19:15 They found that it did because our fears often shape our behaviors in ways that we don't really know, which in turn shapes our reality. When we are primed to see rejection or relationship problems, we are way more likely to interpret such relationship problems from ambiguous cues, and then we behave with fear, often creating more conflict. I think a really key thing here is that this situation often gives us that I told you so moment, Like I told you this guy was a bad egg. If we predict the behavior or the rejection or the problems and it actually happens, we can turn around and say, see this intellectualizing I'm doing. The psychoanalyzing is helpful. I knew the this was going to happen. I need to continue

20:01 to be on high alert because here's the evidence, not realizing our contribution to the evidence. In reality, I don't think any amount of preparation or prediction for rejection or difficulty in relationship makes it any less painful. All it does, as the research suggests, makes it perhaps more likely to get a little bit out of control. What makes it more likely to come up earlier? Again, is this intentional.

20:30 Does that mean we are responsible for this person's pain or trauma? And does that mean that pain and trauma can't be overcome? No, it just means that entering a relationship on high alert thinking it's going to be helpful often, isn't. I want to explore this a little bit more and why the narratives we construct about people might not always be accurate after this shotbreak. Psychoanalyzing the people we date, as we have explored, is a form of self protection.

21:09 We know that. Now does it actually protect us? No? I think we may have the label, We may understand the behavior, we may be able to determine where it came from, but we still feel attached to this person. We still feel hurt when it doesn't work out, and we still feel pain. But another reason we may psychoanalyze or over analyze their behavior is because perhaps when we feel them pulling away, it protects our ego to do so before that reality really takes its shape and really happens.

21:43 If someone doesn't pursue you in the way that you hoped, or is reluctant to kind of define the relationship, or maybe doesn't seem so invested, it is really painful to consider that the simplest explanation might possibly be that they just don't like you. Maybe they just this wasn't going to work out. Those possibilities are really uncomfortable because they require us to feel exposed in a very human way.

22:09 So then if we assign a psychological explanation to it, maybe they're scared of intimacy, Maybe their parents really like fucked them up, Maybe they like me too much, maybe they're self sabotaging whatever it is. That is a much easier pill to swallow because it allows our ego to be protected. It allows us to feel like there is nothing wrong with me, everything was wrong with them. Again, sometimes those explanations might be true, not denying that, but sometimes they merely protect us from the pain of just not being chosen and just not being the one this time, which sucks. It really really does sometimes and not in all cases. But sometimes this also protects us from looking at our own behavior, which I know is going to

22:58 be controversial. But if we can put everything down to somebody else's trauma or their emotional unavailability or their past issues, we don't have to ask ourselves the big questions we're asking them, like did they communicate clearly? Did I communicate clearly? Did they overcompensate? Was I overcompensating? Why are they trying to rush intimacy? Was I trying to rush intimacy? Like?

23:27 What about their behavior? Was I ignoring? What about my behavior? Was I ignoring? These are huge questions. It's really confronting to realize, Hey, maybe I'm not the person I thought I was in a relationship. I think we often engage in this habit of psychoanalyzing because it kind of pushes those explanations and the mirror they'll hold up to our own kind of behavior away, like it makes it not a priority. It's somebody who's done that before. I feel quite confident in saying that happens quite a lot, Like before I met my boyfriend, I was going to say my current boyfriend put my boyfriend. I used to do this all the time. You'd be like, oh God, he is just so so insecure. He just has such an insecure attachment style. Meanwhile, I was like messaging this man

24:12 or these men like multiple times a day. I would block them and then unblock them, mute them, and then unmute them. Like the insecure person was me. It was so much easier to say that they were the problem, because then there was nothing to fix. They were unfixable, whereas if it's about me, I'm responsible for my own issues.

24:30 I'm responsible for my own problems. I now have to do the work. I also think we often engage in this habit, and this is my final explanation for it, because it also provides us with a social function too. And I really don't see people talk about this. I don't see people talk about how psychoanalyzing is a way of bonding. Over Analyzing people has become again part of a shared language within friendships. You go on a date, something confusing happens, something weird, and suddenly like the group chatters on fire, and like everybody's talking about it, even when we watch like reality TV, and it's like this person is acting this way. Suddenly we all become psychologists and it's a fun thing to do. Everyone has a theory.

25:11 Somebody says they're love bumbing. Somebody says they're intimidated by you. Somebody says, oh, he's overwhelmed by how much he likes you. They say this because they're your friends, like they want you to feel good about yourself and This is part of being there for each other. This is part of bonding is hearing somebody's terrible relationship stories and being like, you're not the problem, they're the problem. Here's the explanation.

25:34 Sometimes the best part of the day is going home and telling the bad stories to our friends as much as it is telling the good stories to our friends. There's a very interesting paper from two thousand and nine by the Belgian psychologist Bernard rim where he talks about what he called the social sharing function of emotion. He argues that although there has been a shift in modern psychology towards a very individualistic view of emotion and emotional regulation and emotional experiences, when we experience intense things, we naturally want to talk about them. We naturally want to share it with others. We naturally want to unload and unburden ourselves, and that sharing has a very very crucial

26:15 interpersonal and social function. It creates connection, it creates meaning, It brings about support for us. So it makes sense that we want to process dating uncertainty and dating unfortunate dating stories with friends, even if that means that the theories can get really, really wild and maybe inaccurate. It doesn't really matter at that stage. It just helps us feel less alone and less pessimistic. The danger in this, though, is that our desire to put somebody else's dating behavior, just like through a psychological prism or through a set of psychological criteria, actually hums the potential for a relationship to dep naturally despite perhaps what are early hurdles. Firstly, what would happen if they're doing the same thing back

27:09 to you as well? Like I spoke about, I've had all these issues in previous relationships and I always put it on them, And sometimes I think I'm like, well, if they were doing that same psychoanalyzing, I wasn't going to come out clean either, Like I wasn't going to be looking great. So if you're just two complicated people, too interesting, you know, deeply flawed but deeply loving people in a relationship and you're both in the early stages putting the magnifying glass on each other, You're always going to find something that is wrong with somebody. You're always going to find some kind of psychological flaw. It's just only natural by both doing that, By one person doing that, like the relationship is done. You'd never date anybody Secondly,

27:52 it can also create a confirmation bias, right. It can create this situation where we end up seeing things that just are there, but because we've imagined them more had come in with this preconceived notion we believe they are. Confirmation bias refers to the tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information in a way that supports what we already believe.

28:14 It is one of the biggest cognitive traps that humans fall into, often with things like politics, often with things like prejudices, belief systems. People don't talk about it with dating, but this is a classic example. Basically, if you decide that person you've gone on three dates with, based on what I've seen they're avoidant, based on how they're texting me, based on the fact that they're a little bit awkward at the end of the last date, like they are avoidant, I know it. Once you have that fixed belief or what there is previous psychologists called the frozen belief, there is nothing else you can see. You are going to look for evidence that they are like that, and you're going to discount any evidence that counteracts that or says

28:56 something differently. It's not always your choice. This is a cognitive bias. It happens below conscious thought. You know, if they want space, that confirms that they're highly independent and they're going to pull away if they come closer. You also interpret that as being a negative thing. They're love bumming me, They're coming on really strong. Maybe they can sense that I'm pulling away. When you have a preconceived notion, the theory becomes almost impossible to disprove. In psychology, we say that it lacks falsifiability. You cannot find any evidence contrary to how you already feel. And this hypervigilance becomes very damaging in the early days of dating because nobody's getting past that. Nobody's getting past that. And as we said,

29:41 because dating is naturally ambiguous, it's just plain awkward. It's you're just trying to get to know somebody. You don't have the textbook on them. Applying this knowledge prematurely means that nobody is allowed to be imperfect anymore. Nobody is allowed to not be the one from the get go, and love just doesn't work that way, even people who actually don't have any flaws. And not to say that psychological relationship patterns is even a floor anyways, but even somebody who has nothing like that can still come off as if they do because of other things in their lives, like the fact they're busy, like the fact that their family may be having problems at the moment, like the fact that, like maybe they're just in a weird stage

30:30 of life. So if we interpret every moment of discomfort as a diagnostic clue, there's no space for connection. Nothing real ever develops. And I also think we miss out on the exciting part about dating, which is the not knowing as well. If you just like fill all the not knowing with descriptions, dating is no longer fun. And dating should be fun. It should be fun, it should be sexy, it should be adventurous, and we kind of lose that. The second thing we lose, as I've also said before, is our own emotional availability, And this is one of the greatest ironies. We often psychoanalyze people because we want intimacy to feel safer, but the analysis itself can become that barrier to intimacy that's coming from us,

31:16 not from them, because it's originating from our own anxiety and from our own need for control. Therefore, we are going to pull back in ways we're imagining they're pulling back. We are going to try and play games as a form of self protection that we would never like it if they were playing games, like I'm only going to message them if they message me first. I'm only going to plan the next date. If they've planned the last one, I'm going to wait exactly as many hours as they did to message me back. If you think I'm being hyper specific here, it's because I literally did all of those things. I think maturing is realizing maybe you should just message them because you like them enough to risk it.

31:58 Maybe you should just plan the date because you want to go on a date with this person, and it doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. You can just ask them out and maybe you'll get hurt, but also maybe something great will come of it. The thing is, when we use the psychological jargon, sometimes this makes us sound very emotionally literate, but all we're actually doing is avoiding feeling emotionally exposed. And if somebody has attachment issues or past relationship hurts, they're doing the exact same thing. And we don't ever truly admit how we feel or what we need, And so this essential part of us remains unseen. You know. It lets us feel like we're participating. It gives us the illusion of vulnerability

32:44 without ever having to risk anything, without ever having to actually be vulnerable direct or open about what we want. And there's an interesting contrast here with research on naming emotions. Right here's where the psychology comes back in full force. In a two thousand and seven study published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers at UCLA used brain imaging to examine what happens when people put their emotions into words.

33:13 They found that just labeling negative emotions and just saying I feel really anxious right now, I'm scared this won't work out. I'm fearful that this person would just be like the last guy, or the last girl, or the last person. Just doing that was associated with reduced activity in the amygdula, which is like the fear center of the brain. It was also associated with better emotional coping, as well as increased activity in the prefrontal regions, which are involved in regulation and executive functioning. There is such an important and crucial difference between naming our own emotional experience in dating and forming theories about somebody else's emotional experiences and dating. Noticing that you feel anxious and uncertain

34:07 can actually help you regulate yourself. Forming a theory around the person you're dating and who they are feels like self regulation. You are actually just analyzing them. Naming your own emotions brings you closer to your own experiences, whereas analyzing somebody else pulls you deeper into speculation, into uncertainty, because there's never really a correct answer unless you really really do take the time to know somebody, and pulls you away from actual real connection. This is why when you're spiraling, it's not necessarily helpful to just sit there and wonder what's wrong with them or what happened, or like what they're thinking. The best thing you can do is actually just to sit in that feeling, and the

34:55 better question to ask is like, why is this triggering me? What about their behavior is hurting me? What can I do with this feeling? How can I manage this feeling in the way that is best for me so that I'm regulated and so that I can find the love that has meant for me? Like that is the better question.

35:15 Putting it back on yourself, we have to remember when we analyze other people we are creating or were at risk of creating, this thing called the parallel mind. We're going to talk a little bit more about this and also how to stop doing it, perhaps when you don't even realize you're doing it, which seems like it wouldn't work out, But I promise you we're going to make sure that it's in our conscious state of awareness and something we can actually act on after this shortbreak. A healthy relationship, whether it's worth a friend, a romantic partner, a family member, it's built through communication, it's built through shared experiences, it's built through empathy, and crucially, it's built through something called rupture and repair. Rupture and repair is

36:03 this idea that was first posed by the psychologist Edward Tronnick in the nineteen eighties that essentially says relationships cannot be amazing all the time. We actually need conflict and tension to reveal the things that may not be going right and fix them before they get any worse. Rupture and repair is how we re establish trust and connection by splitting and then coming back together and filling that whole with each other. Basically, any relationship, even those in the early days, will have their moments should have their moments.

36:39 But over analysis creates a second relationship, a second mind about the relationship that exists mostly inside your head. It creates a parallel relationship, one that isn't actually real, but one in which you are responding from that place. You are not just responding to what is happening. You're responding to what's happening in this parallel relationship. You are responding to what you imagine. They're imagining about this imagined situation, what it resembles from your past, from their past, what your friends think, what a TikTok thinks. All of it is creating this reality that doesn't exist anymore. It's completely detached.

37:17 And the more time you spend in that parallel world, the less time you spend in the actual relationship, the less time you spend in that repair stage. Not even in that repair stage, but just in that building stage. Soon you're making decisions from this place again. Sometimes your assessments may be correct, especially if you are very emotionally intelligent and very collocked in. But I want to get to this point, which is that it doesn't actually matter whether or not your assessment of this person as having this psychological or relationship issue is correct, is actually no longer the point because knowing that is only helpful up to a certain point. People are not the sum of things that have happened to them. They're the things that

38:05 have happened to them and how they have responded. They are also their potential to be better in the future. They are also the potential for improvement and to prove themselves to you and to themselves. Is somebody different. People don't like to be related to as if they are just the things that have happened to them in their past and their potential is done. Even if your analysis is partly accurate, it can be invasive, it can be patronizing, and like I said, that's it for that person. You're saying that everything they've experienced before the age of twenty five is all they're ever going to be, or for the age of thirty is all they're ever going to be.

38:47 I don't think that's true. A lot of people who have had really deep attachment problems, really deep issues in the past with parents, with ex's, with complex relationships of all sorts, go on and have incredibly healthy relationships and the people they are in relationships with. Do you think that they would have had that if they'd been sitting there and somebody had come up to them with a big wrap sheet of everything that was wrong with this person and said, here is every single label that you should know about before you make this choice. Like we think that more information helps us make a more informed decision about somebody, it actually just overwhelms the part of our brain that is able to look at somebody and

39:31 see who they truly are. Beyond this, we think that we're getting to the core. We think that we're getting to the ultimate essential part of who this person is, who they are at their essence. That is actually means very little. It means very little. If somebody is committed to growing, is committed to you, has love in their heart, is trying really hard. This is not an argument for ignoring red flags. I really should say that. It's also not to say that we need to give people the benefit of the doubt, especially if they are demonstrating very harmful or manipulative behaviors, Like just get out of there, if they are somebody who has not done the work, doesn't want to do the work, trust your intuition in

40:11 those situations, and like trust your assessment of how they are treating you. In those cases, pay attention to the labels, pay attention to the psychology of their personality. But I don't think that's always the case. Even then, you don't always need to know the deepest psychological reason for somebody's behavior in order to respond to it. This person might not even have a label. There might actually not be anything psychologically wrong with them. There might just be a dick.

40:42 You do not need to know whether they are hyper independent, and why narcissistic, and why traumatized and why just to decide that this dynamic isn't working and like, this person isn't nice to me, and I don't feel good like you do not need a diagnosis to leave. You do not need to prove somebody is emotionally unavailable to admit that you feel emotionally lonely with them. This is what I'm trying to get to. The diagnosis, the psychoanalyzing. Understanding intellectually why someone behaves a certain way actually doesn't change the way that we feel. It can just provide further excuses, even at that point, to push down your feelings, or to feel sorry for them, or to give them a second chance, when maybe you just actually feel awful, like

41:30 this is the thing that we're really trying to get to. Sometimes there's actually nothing wrong with this person, they're just not your person. Sometimes there is something wrong with this person, but you could know that regardless, like you didn't need a label to tell you. And sometimes people are deeply hurt, but actually you're the one that is preventing what could be a very healthy relationship from emerging because you're the one with the wallup. You're the one is not giving them a chance. So how do we slow down when we know that about ourselves, when we find ourselves in an over analyzing spiral. Let's talk about it as someone who has been in your shoes. I think I know, I know how hard it can be. I was guilty

42:14 on all accounts of doing this and feeling like this was going to make dating safer. But then also, you know, not perhaps putting the spotlight on me and not actually thinking about where all this fear and anxiety was really coming from, which was unhealed wounds of my own. I think what helped me was just to name what was actually going on, Like it was just to say, when I was finding myself in these spirals, I'm psychoanalyzing. Again, I'm giving labels that may or may not be there.

42:48 I'm using this as a buffer between them and how I feel, describing your tendency, remembering times before that you've done this and how it's worked out, and searching for the actual behavioral grounds for your assessment, and whether you would think it was fair if somebody gave you this label This early on gives you something concrete to work with.

43:15 From there, you can really ask quite simple questions, which is like label or no label? Am I getting what I actually need from them? Psychology or no psychology? Can they meet my needs? Are they happy? You don't have to overcomplicate things like I would always try and come back to simple truths. It doesn't matter what may or may not be happening. Am I okay with the behavior?

43:40 Yes or no? Again, there are multiple possibilities analyzing them. Assessing them takes time away from the important thing, which is just like how do I feel? I also used to do this thing where like I said, I would like mute and our mute, and I would block and I would unblock, and I would do these things to like keep people I thought weren't good for me at Bay and I've become very obsessional and I would really like almost gather data on like their behavior as justification for why they were the way they were. Sometimes you just got to be like, I'm sick of what my imagination is doing here. Why are you acting like that?

44:18 Sometimes you just need to be like, Okay, why are you taking so long to text me? What's up? I'm gonna be honest, like, if you want honesty from them, you need to provide them with the opportunity. And I remember doing this to my boyfriend and being like, God, he doesn't text me all day. And I know that I've previously self sabotaged relationships by filling in the blanks myself and telling myself that they're emotionally mature and maybe they wouldn't. I'm just going to give this one shot, like we've got to try something new. And so I just asked him and he was like, I'm just I can't have my phone on me at work. And I was like, God, all that psychoanalyzing and I didn't even think that was going to be the response, Like all

44:55 that psychoanalyzing for it answer is so simple. The mine wouldn't even think about it. The next is just to notice what the feeling of analysis is protecting you from. Underneath over analysis, there is often a very simple feeling or emotion, which is I like them, I miss them, they remind me of somebody, I feel embarrassed, I'm jealous, I'm scared, And that is the emotion that you really need to be targeting. When you name the feeling directly, As we talked about before, the mind often has less of a need to build an elaborate theory, which takes away from addressing the feeling. It makes it so much less complex if we just admit that dating is hard and this is one of those points where it feels

45:43 a lot harder. From there, you can turn your attention even further inwards and ask yourself, what am I afraid will happen? I feel afraid, I feel scared? Why is that a bad feeling? Am I trying to predict the future so I don't have to feel this way anymore? Or would me trying to analyze and actually help turn your attention back in on yourself and think of your own needs for a second. What is actually going to help you regulate? Yes, you might know how you're feeling, you might know the simple answer for their behavior, what do you need right now? And look for consistency, Like, look at their behavior right now as more than a backstory, more than psychology, more than something to solve, and just

46:25 as a truth. I think this is a thing I've probably said, like the same thing in a million different fonts, but like it doesn't actually matter at the end of the day. If there is a category for how they are treating you, if they are treating you badly, so if you have evidence in your feelings that you are not happy, that is the answer. And now the next thing to do is to be like, Okay, I'm going to ground myself here and I'm going to do what I need to do for myself. I don't need a label.

46:57 I might not even need to talk about this with somebody else who could give me they're not making me feel good, How am I going to go about feeling good with or without them? Am I going to communicate it? Or am I going to exit this situation and find somebody better? I think the other amazing part about taking a step away from psychoanalyzing is that it actually just saves you time. Like I think all the complicated stuff just kind of rolls back, and you are so much better able to just be like, this isn't actually what I want, this isn't actually what I need right now, and I'm going to make that call again. Psychoanalyzing is all about uncertainty management, and it's all about predicting what you need one can expect in a relationship. The other

47:51 great way to be certain is to just make decisions based on your gut instinct and to just make the decision when you know you need to make the decision. I think often talk about this with our friends. We talk about things with our therapists, which you should do, but you know, we overroize. We talk about it because we actually want a different answer or want a different outcome to the one that we are experiencing. Right, we already know the truth of this, We know the truth of their behavior. The most certain thing you can do is to just do something about it. And if you're really worried about like am I going to get hurt?

48:26 Is the person going to hurt me? Sometimes it's better just to be like, I'm going to take the evidence I have and let myself get hurt. Maybe accept the certainty that that is part of love. Or instead of going to a million people hoping a different thing when I already know what the thing is, just accepting that this isn't working and making the call for myself. What all of this comes back down to is trusting that you are going to be okay without this person. You are going to be okay. If this person doesn't accept you, You're going to be okay. If this person does and maybe has things in their past that is like something we mentioned before that is so critical. So many people out there have deep issues. It's actually not about that.

49:12 It's about whether they are willing to work on this relationship with you, and it's about whether they make you feel safe. Because somebody with the most intense relationship trauma, you can imagine like if they do the work, if they go to therapy, if they really sit with their pain and sit with their own feelings about it, and if they really have awareness about it, could probably show up in a relationship much better than somebody who hasn't had any of their trauma but just like doesn't have any responsibility. So I think that's like the perfect way to finish this episode. All the language in the world isn't going to help you. Predict or ascertain or make any promises about whether a relationship is going to work

49:58 out or not. The only thing you can do is trust that you are going to be okay. Put the spotlight back on yourself and assess how maybe your emotional and unavailability or issues is being projected into the relationship and do something about that instead. And then also just stay open to the fact that like love and people can change and the right person will make you feel good about yourself. The right person will not have you over analyzing and psychoanalyzing every single little thing they're doing in search of answers, because they'll just be frank with you about what's going on in their mind. So thank you for listening to this episode slightly rambly. I know I had a lot to say. You can tell you

50:39 can always tell the episodes where like I have a personal experience with it because I go very offscript. So hopefully that's the kind of thing you enjoy, and we gave you enough psychology to really back it up. Thank you to our researcher speaking of psychology, Lipy Cobbett, for her assistance with this episode. If you want some further research or to look at some of the research that we did use for this episode, it's in the episode description down below. You can also follow us on substack.

51:07 That study of the week, the one about rejection sensitivity, is currently up there right now, and if you relate to rejecting people before they reject you, it's definitely a critical one to read. There is so much more information down below for you to explore, but I do just hope this has helped you understand your own patterns first before you try and interpret others. Second, and if you do enjoy this episode, leave a five star review, leave a comment down below if you're listening on Spotify, and make sure that you check out an episode on Netflix.

51:39 It does help us out a lot. It's a new thing for Netflix, and maybe you didn't even know that we're on there now, but yep we are. And I don't really know what else there is to say about It just really helps us that they know that people like this podcast and are willing to watch it. So thank you again. I hope you enjoyed. We will talk very very soon.