Love and relationships – a few areas of life stir up more complex emotions and thought patterns. While our past experiences undoubtedly shape how we approach romance, how we think and feel about love can create invisible barriers.
Many of us move through the dating world carrying more than just memories of past heartbreaks or childhood attachments. We also bring along deeply ingrained thinking patterns that act as filters, unconsciously colouring how we interpret every text message, first date, and budding connection. These mental habits – from catastrophizing about rejection to mind-reading a new partner’s intentions – can lead us to sabotage promising relationships before they have a chance to bloom.
Understanding these unhelpful thinking styles isn’t about assigning blame or dwelling on past mistakes. Instead, it’s an opportunity to shine a light on the automatic thoughts that may hold us back from the connection we desire. By learning to recognize these patterns, we can question whether our interpretations truly reflect reality or are distorted by cognitive habits we’ve developed over time.
Just as past experiences have shaped us, they don’t have to define our future. With awareness of how these thinking traps manifest in our love lives, we can craft new narratives about relationships that leave room for growth, healing, and the possibility of lasting connection. Let’s explore some common thinking patterns affecting your romantic journey and how to begin shifting them toward healthier perspectives.
Identifying your thinking style
Identifying your default or a mix of thinking styles is one of the first steps to taking conscious control of your thoughts so that you are no longer a passive casualty of your thinking imperatives. You may have developed these thinking styles over time, and it has become natural to think this way. Still, you can see how they negatively influence your mood and feelings about yourself.
Changing a thinking style requires vigilance and insight. With practice, you can think, decide whether an opinion is unhelpful, interrupt it, and formulate a more helpful, positive alternative opinion.
Resolving unhelpful thinking styles
Are you losing sleep worrying about what might or might not happen?
Do your thoughts go around and around in your mind on an endless loop?
Does negative thinking spoil your enjoyment of life?
If you always feel anxious and plagued by worrying thoughts, it may be because you have developed an unhelpful thinking style. Your thinking style can make a difference between feeling burdened by worry or being able to glide through life and never be overly concerned about anything. Could you recognise patterns in your thinking?
Black-and-white thinking
‘Black-and-white thinking’ refers to seeing things in absolute, extreme categories. In this mindset, everything is either good or bad.
This thinking pattern must account for nuance, complexity, or middle ground. For example, someone who occasionally argues with their partner may see the relationship as ‘completely broken’ rather than an opportunity to communicate better in the future while still acknowledging the good times.
Overgeneralisation
Overgeneralisation involves taking one instance, event, or piece of evidence and sweeping negative conclusions far beyond the current situation. In the mind of someone prone to overgeneralisation, a single failure becomes ‘yet more proof’ of an endless pattern of defeat.
An example would be getting turned down by someone after a first date and concluding, ‘I’m undateable and will never find love’.
Mental filter or rumination
Mental filtering refers to paying attention only to the negative details in a situation while ignoring or dismissing the positive. It’s like a filter has been placed over reality, screening out anything good so that your world appears disproportionately gloomy. For instance, your relationship seems to be going well, but you have one or two reservations about some aspects of your partner’s behaviour. The mental filter causes you to ruminate or obsess solely over those minor reservations until getting the ‘ick’ makes you doubt them altogether.
Disqualifying the positive
Disqualifying the positive, or ‘positive discounting’, involves brushing off your positive experiences, events or accomplishments as if they ‘didn’t count’ for some reason. You maintain a negative belief even when faced with clear evidence.
An example would be acknowledging how loved and valued you are by your friends and family but not believing you’re good enough or worthy enough to hold out for the romantic love you deserve. You dismiss any romantic interest you are shown as a fluke or that there’s something wrong with the other person.
Jumping to conclusions
Jumping to conclusions means drawing negative interpretations or assumptions before reasonably evaluating a situation. There are two types:
- Mind reading means believing you know what someone else is thinking (usually negatively) without adequate evidence to justify this belief. For example, if your new date doesn’t text back immediately, you assume they are uninterested, and it’s all over.
- Fortune-telling means pessimistically anticipating that you know precisely how a future situation will turn out before it happens—for example, just ‘knowing’ your latest relationship will crash and burn before it gets started.
Magnification and minimisation or catastrophic thinking
Also called ‘catastrophising’, this distortion involves exaggerating the importance of insignificant negatives while minimising meaningful positives. You view events in your life selectively with a magnified lens over the bad stuff and a minimised lens over the good stuff. For example, letting down your new relationship, such as cancelling a day out at short notice due to a work commitment, you’ll undoubtedly obsess that they’ll never forgive you and that even though you’ve already shared some great times, it won’t be enough for them to persevere with you.
Emotional reasoning
Emotional reasoning makes you believe something must be true because you ‘feel’ it strongly rather than basing beliefs on evidence. Because it feels natural, you assume it is accurate regardless of the facts – for instance, feeling like a complete failure if a first date was just average and not earth-shattering. You then conclude you must be boring or insignificant based mainly on those intense negative feelings rather than your date saying they’re looking forward to seeing you again.
‘Should’ statements
‘Should’ statements reflect rigid assumptions about how you, others or the world ‘should’ function. When reality fails to match these unreasonable expectations, you feel resentment, anger, frustration and sometimes shame. For example, you feel furious when a partner wants to change dinner plans at the last minute because your partner ‘should just know’ you don’t like plan changes.
Labelling
Labelling means attaching an often unreasonable, extreme label to yourself or others without considering nuance or mitigating factors. Rather than saying, ‘I made a mistake,’ it becomes, ‘I’m unloveable’ in your mind.
Applying such negative labels fuels feelings of anger, inadequacy, and hopelessness and prevents personal growth. Labelling others in this way (‘Jean is so lazy!’) damages relationships and feeds into more distorted thinking.
Personalisation
Personalisation centres around blaming yourself for something you are not responsible for — essentially taking everything personally. Events around you seem explicitly directed at or caused directly by you, even when there’s no factual reason to draw this conclusion – for example, believing a friend hanging back from inviting you to their party must be doing so because you did something to offend them versus considering more likely reasons.
How to change the way you think
The unhelpful styles described here are forms of cognitive distortion or disorganised thinking. Left unchallenged, they become your entrenched way of viewing the world. Imagine a seed in the palm of your hand. When you water the seed, it begins to sprout and rapidly grows into a mighty and all-enveloping vine from that initial green shoot. Now imagine the seed represents a negative thought, and the water you pour on it represents the attention you pay to reinforce it. Very soon, the negative or catastrophic thinking has grown so huge that it surrounds you just like a tangled vine from the seed. The vine twines suffocatingly around you, filling where you are from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. Thoughts allowed to develop this way dominate unhelpfully and take all the available oxygen until they become all you can think about.
Pause and breathe with EFT.
When you realise that you are ruminating and overthinking the past, it is essential to pause and take a breath or two to help you gain a more balanced perspective.
Suppressing your breathing happens without you realising it. When caught up in catastrophic thinking, your breathing becomes much more shallow.
An effective way to change your thoughts is to assess your breathing by taking three gentle in-and-out breaths. Score your depth of breathing on a scale of zero to 10 by making an intuitive guess. A zero score means no breath in your body, and a score of 10 signifies breathing deeply, freely, and thoroughly.
You may be surprised to find your breathing is below a five. To increase the depth of your breathing, you can tap with a soft fist around your collarbone and focus on breathing more deeply for a few moments. Tapping around your collarbone is part of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) taught in ‘The Getting of Resilience’ and can help you feel more grounded and secure.
Many instinctively reach out to touch the collarbone when they hear bad news. This instinctive, self-comforting reaction can help them move from negative thinking to feeling calmer and more stable.
When you are stressed, and your breathing becomes restricted and shallow, it can be challenging to identify any positives. In reality, very few situations are without merit.
If you feel you might be self-sabotaging your chances of having a fulfilling relationship, perhaps your thinking styles are unhelpful. If you need help with this, you can book an obligation-free discovery call with Sally via the link on her home page.
Exploring and helping you identify your thinking styles is featured in Sally’s latest self-help book, The Getting of Resilience from the Inside Out, published by Hammersmith Books and available on Amazon.
