Evo Magz v4.7

Not long ago, I sent some texts to a friend, and never heard back. It wasn’t like her to go quiet, so I followed up with a quick email. Nothing.

A few days in, her silence began to nag at me. I started obsessing over possible offenses. She’s mad because I didn’t go to that cocktail party with her. No, she’s upset that I said she was too attached to her dog. Jeez, I was kidding! She knows I love Barkley. What I should have done was pick up the phone and simply talk to her—but by then, my mind had conjured up such an elaborate story about why she was mad at me that I just couldn’t do it.

Nine days later—not that I was counting—I received a flurry of apologetic texts. She had been buried in a work project; at one point, she wrote a reply to my email, then got distracted and forgot to send it. (I’ve done that myself in the past.) She was busy. End of story. Yet for more than a week, I had tortured myself—and more important, I had automatically assumed the worst about a good friend.

Realizing the problem
The tendency to project a motive onto someone is what University of Houston research professor of social work Brené Brown, PhD, calls “the story I’m making up.” In her book Rising Strong, she describes a scene in which it’s nearing dinnertime in her house, her two kids are hungry, and her husband, Steve, opens the fridge and announces, “We have no groceries. Not even lunch meat.” She immediately shoots back that he could do the shopping, too.

Then she has a moment of clarity and confesses, “The story I’m making up is that you were blaming me for not having groceries, that I was screwing up.” Steve tells her he’d planned to shop the day before but ran out of time: “I’m not blaming you. I’m hungry.”

This passage in Brown’s book really hit home—I realized I was doing this all the time. When my mom was frowning at me on our lunch date, I put a thought bubble over her head: “What the hell are you wearing?”

I did it with my coworker when I assumed she was icing me at a meeting. (I later learned she had a migraine coming on.) I did it to my husband, Tom, one night when I was cleaning up and he was lounging on the couch. I imagined him thinking, “I suckered my wife into doing all the work around here! Feels good!” I may have even thrown in an evil laugh.