Part three of the “what do we do when our mind is working against us” series?
One bias I see a lot is between men and women, both think their perspective is the right one.
One person might call their thinking common sense, but they are not seeing it’s only common sense to them and their natural needs.
The problem a bias creates is it leads a person to thinking they don’t know how to challenge, and thinking can lead a person to decisions and not all of them are safe to make especially if the thinking is distorted.
The bias of a person’s thinking can be influenced by so many factors, history, beliefs, needs, values, rules, and all of these can create unhelpful generalisations and distortions.
Some people can create a bias that enables them to delete parts of their life that no longer fit with the perspective of the new bias.
One gentleman brought in piles of love letters to him from his wife. He then asked me how is it she can now tell me she has never loved me?
This is a perfect example of the bias in play, people can use their bias to rewrite history.
I have seen people create a very different response to the same question depending on their shifting focus or identity in minutes.
Imagine a person in a bias driven by their fears compared to a person driven by their desire to achieve.
How about a wife who thinks her thinking is common sense, yet to her husband, she makes no sense.
The person driven by a need for growth will have a very different perspective to the person driven by a need for certainty.
The person who is stuck in the identity of their career will have a different bias to the person who is at home with the kids.
How about the bias of a gentleman who is frustrated at his wife’s lack of desire to fix their problems totally unaware she doesn’t use any kind of solution-based model as a means to reconnect to him.
Now imagine the person who feels they must protect themselves from their partner and has done this for years.
This bias will create a need to self-protect.
What do they do with those feelings when they discover their bias of self-protection was only needed due to their misunderstanding of their partner actions.
Bias can come from differing childhoods, lack of understanding of each other’s words and actions.
It can be driven through the persons’ identity or the persons’ distorted belief system.
Some have a bias based on beliefs of how relationships should be or what our roles are or should be.
Ask a person the impact of masculine and feminine energy on a marriage, and most are unsure, so what is the impact of living in the wrong energy?
What bias will that create?
The bias potential is significant, and each will create a different perspective thinking or view of the same situation.
The question is, what is the truth?
The simple answer is they are all true, but only based on the perspective of the bias, in the broader sense, none of them are true.
This is why what a person thinks and what they believe must be rooted in the desire to look past their own bias.
Every situation has two sides, and based on all the content above, there could be many more perspectives to consider.
Life is not black and white.
Thinking is powerful, and the safest place to be is as the observer of your thoughts and not buy into just one bias, and it can lead us all to unhelpful outcomes.
It’s why divorce regret is so high!