These are some of the most common cognitive problems I know of – you will encounter them probably for yourself, a friend or partner at least a dozen times in your life. So I think it makes sense to spend 5 minutes on them because they are always leading to powerful growth moments…
You also have to understand that these cognitive problems are in your head so you can’t make others solve them for you and you can’t solve them for others. Often you will be too close to solving a certain problem anyway.
Compliments & Encouragement
Compliments & Encouragement are an essential part of relationships with our partners but also with other people. I personally think we should try and encourage everybody that does a good job in our own view. We should also try to encourage our partner to make new experiences, to grow and be the best they can. This is true for Dominants and Submissives alike.
But there are some cognitive problems with that, that are really counterproductive.
As our relationship bond gets stronger our resistance to encouragement and compliments also increases. There are many reasons behind that but in
Compliments wear off because over time people believe that they get said compliments because it’s socially expected. This creates this weird paradox that the complement of a stranger is often more worth then all the praise of the people that know us.
Encouragement often works the same way – it needs really special moments to believe the encouragement that other people give us and often they are not even aware that it was so significant.
Conformation bias
The first Information that is new to us is often the one we believe – but we don’t feel all information is new or even trustworthy for us. One of the biggest problems with critical thinking is that we weight information we get differently not on depending on the reputation of the source but how much sense it makes to us and our world view. This let us often disregard perfectly reasonable arguments for hopeless feel good facts.
This is something everybody does and it does bring a lot of problems especially in the pursuit of relationships – once convinced by a certain
This can mean that if you are convinced that your partner wants your best everything s/he does is to further that goal or it can mean that everything you do is taken by said partner as manipulation even if it isn’t menat that way.
This is also the same reason why Framing is working so well in play. After you frame something in the right way – our mind does all the rest – the problem is, it does that also when it is the wrong idea…
Conformation bias is in my personal experience the number one killer of relationships – be it friendly or romantic!
Self-sabotage
In my personal view and
This is especially true for people that feel negative emotions more. They feel constantly they didn’t do enough for where there are in life or in comparison of people who have it worse in their subjective mindset and then when they reach a certain point of happiness they just go and think it is all too good and there has to be something bad in the situation. So they are going out to find it and as always in life: If you
This also plays a huge part why conformation bias is such a relationship killer…
The best way to manage these traps of our own making is actually knowing about them and making other people aware of it. It is still hard to navigate life but with the knowledge how some of our mind works it is way easier to make better decisions and to help other people to make better decisions as well.
