How Our Explanations Can Cause Rumination, and How to Fix it

This is the transcript (lightly editied) of my 10-minute podcast episode that explores how the explanations we create about others’ actions can trap us in rumination, damage relationships, and distort meaning.

The podcast episode demonstrates a foolproof yet powerful technique to regain balance, clarity, and emotional flexibility.

Psychologists call this explanatory style, and I’m not going to go into that in great depth. But what I’m going to talk about is how our need to understand things and have an explanation causes so much trouble in our lives

I’m also going to tell you what goes wrong, how it goes wrong, and most importantly, if you’ve got an idea that bugs you, that follows you around, if you are ruminating on it, if you just can’t shake and ask the idea that’s upsetting you. I’m gonna tell you a foolproof way. Of getting rid of that, of shaking that idea of actually giving yourself some balance and escaping the tyranny of a wrong explanation, as I would call it.

We need to explain things obviously, and most things don’t have an explanation. I’m only talking about human behaviour here. I don’t want to get complicated about physics, aeroplanes, atom bombs, or how a cup of tea tastes the way it does.

Let’s leave the science to the scientists. I’m talking about human behaviour here. I’m talking about our need. To explain the behaviour of other people, particularly those people close to us, because quite often it goes wrong, and when it does go wrong, it causes a spat, an argument or a complete meltdown. As we all know, this is part of human life, but we can avoid a lot of the problems.

When we ourselves are at the root of that problem. So somebody says something to me that upsets me in my relationship. Let’s say, for example, that my partner accuses me of spending too much money and making a decision to buy something without consulting him or her. Let’s assume that’s what happened. I feel affronted by this because I think, well, they don’t trust me, but they think I’ve acted without consulting them.

This idea in them builds into something that keeps coming up in arguments. “Well, there was that time you spent that money on that holiday, and I didn’t want to go, and you didn’t consult me…” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you did that, “because you are mean, because you are arrogant, because you choose not to consult me because you think I’m a lesser person than you”.

Now let’s say that that is their explanation. At that point in time, the other person is mean. They’re inconsiderate, selfish, and all the rest of it. And they’ve got this burning idea that twists their mind and distorts their logic, and that’s all they can see, whenever the problem of money comes up.

Again, this explanation of the other person – they’re mean, they’re self-centred, they don’t consider their partner – this explanation burns into the conversation and distorts it and causes yet another argument. Now, the reason for this is that it’s the one and only, single explanation. The person has confabulated that explanation.

They’ve made that explanation up in their mind. They’ve decided that the other person is mean and blah, blah, blah, and all the rest. The explanation that you’ve come up with at that point in time that somebody comes up with it at that point in time is a single explanation that has no other information coming in to challenge it.

The way around this is, first, you recognise that this is probably a distorted idea. Even if it’s true, it shouldn’t be dominating your thinking so that you can’t see anything else that it’s like rag to a ball. So that’s the first thing; get rid of that single idea. It does your head in.

The second thing is that you need a technique to make sure this doesn’t happen, to break it down as it happens.

Fortunately, the technique is the same for both situations. It will help you avoid these sorts of arguments. Of course, the best thing to do is to ask the other person when things are calm, cool, and collected, and to explain their actions when you can do it without it being a firework display.

But the problem is. If you’ve got this burning idea in your mind that they’re selfish and self-centred and all the rest of it, you won’t hear their answer. So it still comes back to you – the individual, with this horrible idea in your mind – doing something about it, taking responsibility for your distorted logic, and here’s what you need to do.

Anytime you’ve got a question in your mind and you’ve only got one single answer for it, here’s what to do. In this example, the person did this “because they’re mean, they don’t consider me, and it was hurtful. They’re arrogant…” and all the rest of it. If that’s the only explanation you’ve got, you know you’re in trouble.

It may be true. But it may not be true. The problem here is not whether the explanation is ‘true’ or not. The problem here is that it’s eating you away. It’s twisting your logic, it’s turning you against the other person. You can’t hear them anymore. So for your own wellbeing, you need to do something about that persistent and distorted idea

And the way you do that is you ask yourself to come up with three other explanations that could explain the behaviour that offended you. In other words, you reframe the behaviour.

Now, what does reframing mean? Well, it means coming up with alternative explanations that could fit the situation just as well. And these could be complete hypotheses, but they have to fit. So, in the example I’ve given, maybe the person wanted to give you a surprise, or maybe they were worried that you wouldn’t discuss it with them.

So they thought that if they took the decision and came back having booked the holiday, it would be easier to push through their agenda. Now, that’s not entirely nice, but it’s not the same as the first reason you had. And a third reason might be that they simply didn’t think it was an issue. They were distracted that day. They knew you liked the holiday destination, or they wanted, well, whatever.

And so they went ahead and made the commitment to buy this holiday. The important point here is that it’s not about making it okay with an explanation. It’s about your mind.

It’s about knowing that one dominant idea is in your mind. I.e, “They did it because they’re mean arrogant and so forth…”, which is harming you and it’s harming them.

It may be ‘true’, but it’s not helpful – you are so fixed on that single idea that you can’t hear any other explanation – and it’s affecting your relationship with them. That’s the big thing. It’s really turning you off them.

So what you have to start to do is to challenge this distorted logic in your mind, so you have this strong idea that follows you about it, makes you angry, it turns you against the other person.

You know, you’ve got one of those ideas when it’s the only idea you have. And you need to be able to come up with three alternative explanations to shake the certainty of that idea. Now, this is a mental exercise. It’s not about holidays. It’s not about mean people. It’s about how we frame something in our own mind.

It causes a lot of trouble for us. It upsets us. And drives people apart, breaks relationships up…, whatever it happens to be.
And there are two quick notes I’d make here:

>1) I’ve taken longer than my usual five minutes on this tiny cast, but it’s an important topic and I’m trying to explain the whole thing very briefly. I hope it’s helped.

2) and this is really important. I’m not suggesting we let bad behaviour off the hook. What I’m talking about here is when we have a single, distorted idea that prevents constructive conversation. If you’ve got a single idea in your head about something that happened with another person and is harming you, harming your relationship, and you can’t step back from it and see an alternative point of view, and you can’t hear their explanation. This gets us into trouble a lot of the time.

The basic rule here is that, anytime you have one idea that’s burning into your mind, causing you to ruminate, upsetting you, as an explanation for somebody else’s behaviour that you didn’t like. Then learn to challenge it by reframing it and coming up with alternative explanations.

It’s not to let them off the hook, it’s to give you greater mental flexibility so that you don’t lose sleep with ideas that asre probably not true. They’re just explanations you have come up with because you didn’t have the right information at the time. This has been a Tinycast. I’m Barry Winbolt.