Just Because Your Brain Coupled Two Things Together Doesn’t Mean They Belong Together

Dig just a little deeper into how you process information and change your life.

What ideas does your thinking mind couple with the word … snake? Transgender? Tariff? Celibate? Atheist? Zealot? Cult? Fundamentalist Christian? Muslim? Vaccinations? Virgin?

Now ask yourself why you couple those thoughts and ideas with those words.

Coupling ideas together that don’t belong together can create unnecessary problems.

One of the most important things I teach my clients has nothing to do with communication, conflict resolution, or childhood wounds. It has to do with how the human brain creates meaning — how we perceive information, and whether what we perceive is accurate, or even close to reality.

When I learned, thirty years ago, that people interpret things differently, it was quite a revelation. But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense.

Study after study has shown that 10 people can witness the same incident and report what they saw differently. Because every human is different. We have different experiences, and from those experiences we form different associations, beliefs, values, and biases. Those experiences, whether remembered or not, are stored in both the conscious and subconscious minds and shape how we perceive.

It is vital to understand that individuals hold different beliefs, values, and perspectives.

Add to that the fact that humans are meaning-making animals, and in an effort to understand — to have things make sense — we tell ourselves what we are seeing. Sometimes those meanings are accurate. Sometimes they are not. And often, the meanings people make are harmful to them.

I hear things like, “He was a little nicer to me today. Does that mean he’s thawing out?”

“Only he knows,” I answer. “Any meaning we put on what another person is thinking or feeling is conjecture. Made up. The only person who knows what it means, if anything, is the person we’re talking about.”

“He hasn’t called in five days. Are we over?”

“I honestly don’t know. Only he does.”

Coupling a change in the frequency of phone calls with are we over is an exercise in … who knows? Time and time again, when people wonder what is going on with someone else, I have to remind them that only that person knows why they are doing what they are doing. To sit around and obsess about it harms you, and no one else.

What therapists know

A huge part of marriage therapy is correcting someone’s perception, so that they can react to reality rather than to what they are making up about what is going on.

When I say one of my primary goals is for couples to avoid unnecessary divorce, this is what I mean. Ending a marriage over things you believe are true but that actually are not is a terrible tragedy — and it happens far more often than you could imagine.

For example, Billy thinks his wife doesn’t care about him. He made that up based on the fact that she hasn’t told him she loves him in weeks. He began to act like an unloved husband and stopped behaving like a partner. Betsy noticed and asked him what was wrong.

“You haven’t told me you love me in weeks, so that tells me you don’t care about me anymore.”

“Are you serious? Billy! That is absolutely not true! I’ve just been a little depressed and not feeling like myself, but that has nothing to do with you.”

See how it works?

Of course, coupling some things together is not always wrong or misguided. A therapist simply wants to make sure that what you are coupling together belongs together and is based on things you know to be true and can prove. We want to make sure your couplings don’t harm you or anyone else.

When coupling is good

Your brain loves coupling ideas together. It takes two experiences that happened at the same time — or happened repeatedly — and quietly decides they belong together forever.

Sometimes that’s brilliant, and you have learned something important. If you touch a hot stove and burn your hand, your brain couples “hot stove” with “danger,” and you never have to learn that lesson twice. Pet a strange dog and get bitten, and maybe you should think twice before touching an unknown animal.

But the same remarkable ability that protects us can also imprison us.

A wife gives her husband feedback about something he said that hurt her feelings. His brain instantly translates this into a math equation:

Feedback = criticism.
Criticism = rejection.
Rejection = she doesn’t love me.
Bottom line = I am a failure.

Within seconds, he’s defending himself — not because she said he is a failure (she did nothing of the kind), but because his brain coupled hurting her feelings with being a failure.

If I were working with him, I might say, “So if she tells you that you hurt her feelings, you jump to the conclusion that she doesn’t love you and that you’re a failure? Don’t you think that’s a stretch?”

“That’s what it feels like to me,” he says.

“But can you prove that she doesn’t love you and that you’re a failure?”

Silence. “Um, uh … not really.”

Checking the math of what you are telling yourself is always an excellent idea.

The problem

In general, most people are terrible communicators. They choose sloppy words, phrase sentences in ways that create confusion, and leave lots of room for misunderstanding. And once we misunderstand someone, do we say, “Wait, I need you to clarify what you just said, because I don’t think I understood”? Most people do not. Instead, they jump to a conclusion about what was said — often the wrong one — and here we go with one more misunderstanding. Frequently, it leads us to become annoyed at what we think a person said, when they didn’t actually say it.

Sally and Bob

Oh, the awfulness of affairs — or any sort of personal disaster that has the potential to wreck lives. Add to that our brains working overtime, and we’re likely to make a big old mess of things. My client Sally is working hard to fall into one of the easiest traps.

“I will never go to our lake house again, because that is where he took her,” says Sally, who sits with her arms crossed, signaling defiance. “Or to our favorite restaurant, for that matter.”

On the surface, that sounds understandable, right? Most of us would say, “Of course, I get that.”

But I see it as a problem worth exploring.

Psychologically, Sally has coupled the painful reality of her husband’s affair — the fact that he shamelessly took his lover to some of their special places, including the place she loves most in the world, their lake house — with the places themselves. She has hundreds of wonderful memories at both spots, with her husband and her family, yet one bad act has turned them from havens into horror houses.

“Why would you punish yourself because of his bad deeds?” I ask.

“Well, I can never think of those places the same way again. They ruined it for me.”

What is actually ruining it for Sally, in my opinion, is her coupling of her husband’s bad judgment with two places that were special to her. If we can uncouple those things and have separate conversations about each, she might see it differently.

The lake house

For almost twenty years, Sally and Bob have taken friends and family to their weekend house — BBQs, parties, great times.

“That lake house means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” I ask.

“It did,” she says. “It was everything.”

“So, are you going to let your husband and that woman kill that joy for you? It’s your family lake house. They did a terrible thing there, but in my mind, they are the ones who should be hanging their heads in shame for having gone there, not you. They were shameless, for sure. Why would you give them that power? That’s your family’s special place. Why would you let them take it from you?”

“Mm. Well, I wasn’t thinking of it like that,” she says.

“Consider the possibility that no person has the power to kill your joy in anything — unless you invite it, unless you allow it. People don’t have cooties, and they cannot contaminate a place unless we convince ourselves they can. If it were me, I would walk into that restaurant and that lake house with my head held high, because you are not the one who was shameless. They were.”

“Um, I can see your point. Yes — why would I let them take my joy from me?”

“Right? Stand tall, sister. Those are your special places. Don’t let yourself be taken away from the things you love. I think you’ll quickly find you can go there and remember the wonderful times. Your respite place. I feel sure you’ll be able to filter out any other painful nonsense and throw it back to your husband to deal with, not you. But if you want to remodel the bedroom or something, anyone would understand that.”

“Oh, absolutely,” she says.

We laugh.

Your brain is a pattern-making machine

Psychologists have known for over a century that the human brain is wired to make associations. Ivan Pavlov demonstrated it with dogs and bells. The neuroscientist Donald Hebb later explained why repeated pairings become automatic, in his famous phrase: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”

Your brain is always asking one question: What goes together? And, as I said, it doesn’t always get the answer right.

Sometimes it couples:

● You love me, so you should agree with me. Therefore, if you don’t agree, you’re against me — and you don’t love me.

● If you loved me, you’d know what I want.

● Accountability equals toxic shame and not being good enough.

● Boundaries mean rejection and being unwanted.

● Rejection means I am undesirable.

● Anger equals being bad or wrong.

● Conflict equals divorce.

● Forgiveness means it’s forgotten.

● Apologizing, or admitting you’re wrong, is weak.

● Vulnerability is neediness and exposure.

● Independence means selfishness.

● Couples therapy means failure.

● Divorce means you are defective.

Socially, I have heard incorrect stereotypes and false couplings about various religions, cultures, and races my entire life. It hurts my heart to think about the cruelty of some of the pathological couplings I have heard over the years. Even today, the transgender community endures the coupling of transgender = mental illness, when there is no disorder and no research anywhere that supports it. I can only imagine that the cruel couplings some groups make toward the LGBTQ community would cause anyone to struggle with the outright rejection and lack of acceptance that millions of Americans have heaped on them, so if they struggle mentally and emotionally, it would be completely understandable.

Are Democrats Communists? This is a very popular coupling today, and it is absolutely not true and cannot be supported with evidence, so don’t get me started.

When I was a child, it was generally accepted that women were bad drivers and couldn’t handle finances. Blondes were dimwits. Women who dyed their hair were floozies or cheap. Divorced women were sleazy and unwanted — damaged goods. A person not married by age thirty was undesirable, a spinster or an old maid. A person — usually a woman — who had sex before marriage was loose and less than. People from the South were stupid. People from the North were cold and arrogant. Hippies were crazy and on drugs. Traveling salesmen cheated. The preacher’s children were wild.

None of those pairings is universally true. They are simply conclusions that some people’s brains reached, without a shred of evidence to support them.

To avoid being held hostage by errant couplings, you have to think critically.

The average human being moves from concrete to abstract thinking around age eleven, unless something developmental prevents it. People who remain in the black-and-white realm are developmentally delayed, and almost all of them don’t know it. Donald Trump is a perfect example, developmentally stuck at age 9, he speaks in absolutes, good and bad, like and don’t like, and his behavior is the same as schoolyard bullies who make the objects of their negative attention miserable.

I can’t tell you how many times a client has bragged to me that they’re a black-and-white thinker, while my inner voice tells me they’re stuck at age nine or ten, which makes my job so much harder. If they stay with me long enough, it is my responsibility to help them move beyond that stage into critical thinking, where things are examined and questioned.

Thinking critically and questioning things is the only way to escape the brain’s tendency to couple together what does not belong together — questioning the beliefs and values that hold you back, seeing whether they still fit, and letting go of them or updating them along the way.

Unfortunately, much of our culture today eschews critical thinking and spouts things on social media as if they were true when they are not. The only answer to that is to present solid evidence. We should all demand proof for every statement made in the public arena, especially when it concerns someone else.

One of my own classic negative couplings — one I had to update — was that I wasn’t smart enough for graduate school and could never support myself. At least I decided to try rather than not attempt it at all. I also believed that cats carried diseases, because my mother told me so, over and over. That belief cost me sixty long years without a cat — animals that, it turns out, bring me great joy.

Where do these associations come from?

Some came from childhood.

Perhaps every disagreement in your home ended with someone storming out. Your nervous system quietly learned: conflict = abandonment.

Perhaps admitting mistakes led to ridicule. Now your brain believes: being wrong = humiliation and not being good enough.

Perhaps your parents never apologized. Now you’ve linked: apologizing = weakness.

Sometimes one painful event is enough. Other times it takes years of repetition. Either way, the brain is trying to help. It just isn’t always accurate.

The body learns, too

When I trained in Somatic Experiencing, I learned something fascinating. Trauma isn’t simply stored as an implicit or explicit memory. It can be stored as an expectation of what could happen. The nervous system begins predicting danger before danger actually exists. Most of us recognize it as feeling guarded.

And sometimes your body reacts before your thinking brain has a chance to evaluate what’s happening. That’s why some people experience ordinary marital conflict as if they were being attacked. Their bodies aren’t lying. The brain tells them they’re under threat and fires the sympathetic nervous system — but they’re simply responding to an old association.

The goal isn’t to convince someone they’re wrong. The goal is to help the nervous system discover that today’s situation is different from yesterday’s. That process is called uncoupling.

Uncoupling doesn’t mean forgetting

People often assume healing means erasing painful memories. It doesn’t. Healing means separating experiences that have become fused together.

You can uncouple:

● Conflict from catastrophe.

● Feedback from rejection.

● Accountability from shame.

● Boundaries from abandonment.

● Forgiveness from permission.

● Disagreement from disrespect.

● Therapy from failure.

● Change from losing.

The memory remains. The meaning changes.

Ask yourself one powerful question

Whenever you catch yourself thinking, “If this happens … then that must be true,” pause. Then ask yourself: Who taught me these two things belong together?

Was it your parents? A former spouse? Your church? A teacher? One painful betrayal? One humiliating experience? Or have you simply repeated the story so many times that it now feels like fact?

Remember, familiarity is not proof. Sometimes an old belief feels true only because you’ve rehearsed it for years.

Freedom begins here

One of the greatest gifts therapy can offer isn’t advice. It’s helping people separate ideas that never belonged together in the first place.

I spend a surprising amount of time helping couples realize things like:

● I can disagree with you and still love you.

● I can hold you accountable without rejecting you.

● I can apologize without becoming weak.

● I can forgive you without trusting you yet.

● I can change without losing myself.

Those are not just new thoughts. They are new neural pathways. And every time they’re repeated, the old pathways lose a little of their power.

Your brain has spent your entire life connecting ideas. Perhaps it’s time to ask whether some of those connections deserve to be broken.

Just because two things arrived together doesn’t mean they have to stay together.

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About the author

Becky Whetstone, PhD, is a marriage and family therapist and the author of I (Think) I Want Out: What to Do When One of You Wants to Leave Your Marriage. She works with couples in stuck marriages, marriages on the brink, and those seeking amicable divorce assistance — helping people respond to what is real instead of the painful stories their brains have coupled together. If you’d like to work with her, the first step is a 90-minute marriage crisis consultation. To learn more, visit www.marriagecrisismanager.com.