When you are struggling with a difficult time in your relationship, your mental and emotional wellness and wellbeing can be seriously affected. It can be hard to ‘see the wood for the trees’, as they say, meaning that from within the situation, it is often hard to accurately see what is going on, and fix it.
Most marriages and relationships go through tough times, but sometimes there can be elements that you are not aware of, and one of those elements is ‘distorted thinking’. This is a newly studied behaviour pattern that psychologists believe can damage, erode and destroy otherwise healthy relationships.
Distorted thinking basically means that your way of thinking about situations is not typical, and that you tend to see the worst in a situation. For example, you may blame your partner for every mess up and mistake that occurs. Responsibility should be taken two ways across a relationship, and when one partner sees the other as the reason for all of the problems, this is distorted thinking and it makes things much harder to fix.
Distorted thinking can also occur when one person in the partnership thinks that the feeling that their partner has for them is not as strong as the love they have for them. Consequently, they then feel that their partner is less invested in the relationship, and they display anxious or bitter behaviour. Love should not be measured by whose love is deepest or strongest – and this way of thinking can be highly damaging.
Jealously is also a form of distorted thinking, and can leave the jealous person feeling anxious and fearful. A distorted thinker may feel that every woman or man that their partner has contact with is in some way a sexual threat. They often can’t tell the difference between natural friendliness and a normal encounter with someone of the opposite sex.
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