My Brain Thinks It's a Mind-Reader

According to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), mind-reading is a type of cognitive distortion that involves the belief that we know what others are thinking. This isn't in a psychic, ESP kind of sense, but more along the lines of thinking that we can tell from the situation or their behaviour that person A must be thinking X, and then jumping to the conclusion that it's a fact with 100 percent certainty that person A is thinking X.

Often, we also expect that other people can read our own minds, and it can start to go around in circles. We think that because we're behaving a certain way, the people around us should be able to tell exactly what's going on in our minds, and then we assume by their behaviour they're reacting in a certain way to what they supposedly know that we're thinking.

This is a cognitive distortion that, probably, a lot of us fall into more often than we think; but realistically, we're all pretty useless when it comes to mind-reading. Often, we can't even predict how we ourselves are going to think/feel in a situation, because thoughts and feelings aren't logical, so there's really no way that we can tell what others are thinking.

One thing that gets me into trouble is thinking that I send out a lot of obvious cues about what's going on inside my head. This clue-dropping feels so unsubtle it seems hard to imagine that someone close to me wouldn't realize that something was wrong. Yet do I have a reliable, impartial perspective? Absolutely not. That means that the next thought I jump to, that the other person knows something is wrong and just doesn't care, is based on a flawed assumption.

That idea that another person doesn't care that I'm in distress is probably where I fall victim the most to the mind-reading distortion. If I don't hear from someone for a while, I may jump to the conclusion that they must not care; because if they did, they would be behaving in a certain way.

In reality, my clues are probably far more subtle than I think, and the other person is naturally far too wrapped up in themselves (as most of us are a lot of the time) to figure out my mind quirks of the moment. Yet things can quickly deteriorate into a spiral down the rabbit hole.

It's probably natural to want the people close to us to be able to know us so well they just get it when something's going on, especially if it's hard for us to trust and that aspect of our personality makes us selective about who we're willing to let in. But if we're expecting them to be able to read our minds, that's just not going to be possible. Communication needs to happen explicitly for it to be effective. Sometimes behaviour is reflective of someone's internal thought process; but more often than not, it's just not that simple.

Much of the time I have a hard enough time knowing what's going on in my own mind, so I certainly shouldn't be able to expect anyone else to figure it out. And I'm looking at the people around me through my own lens, a lens heavily tinted with the perspective of my depression, so I'm in no position to make a call on where anyone is at in their own heads.

In the end, I think this is something that most of us do at least some of the time; but by becoming aware of it, we're in a better position to keep it in check.