I’ve recently felt so low that I’ve attributed something really insignificant and small that one of my closest most trusted person did and turned it into a petty belittling act of mistrust that like a ripple effect made me feel even lower. It’s how your brain works when you’re at your lowest, when it becomes this hostile place of war against you, turning each and single insignificant act around you into malice, feeding into the biased loop of self loathing and sabotage.
In marketing, we have these algorithmic attribution models, that attributes any user activity within the customer journey funnel into its root campaign which ultimately drives the user to make the purchase. I wonder if our brain works similarly, when we feed our existing bias of either self praise or self loathing, attributing a silly action around us to a root cause of our imagined incompetence, or over exaggerated greatness in a case of self praise.
In some instances, where it proves to be somewhat accurate, when we don’t just think in black and white, when our mind is healthy and clear and is able to capture the nuance, the randomness, the textures nature of each situations, I imagine the engine of our minds working correctly, in our favor, instead of feeding into the negativity bias or the toxic positivity, exaggerated self praise and self importance which our culture of often toxic positivity is actually so actively promoting, breeding generations of intellectually and critically sabotaged individuals. And then there’s a case of toxic negativity and irrationally attributed actions, that mine, and maybe yours too, mind suffers from, in a place of lowness, which we must desperately try to escape from, rise from, before it devours us and puts us further down, in already low situations.
I also recently had an instance of a close friend taking something that I’ve said out of context and weaponising it into a complete character assassination from a place of moral superiority. One small thing, completely out of context, projected negative bias, turned into this villainized picture of my supposedly broken character. Now, for another, less, non psychology geek person, not deeply educated with human behavioral patterns, this could actually have turned into catastrophic destructive self questioning and potentially destructive thinking, because a close person saying these things must mean something really bad, must ring true. But when you put it in a context of emotionally charged and heightened unconstructive and hyperbolised criticism arising from irrational momentary fleeting thinking, then there is really no reason to take it at a face value, to believe it about yourself, to sit in the pain and discomfort of it all.
These are all fleeting hyperbolised reflections of human misunderstandings and miscommunications, when in reality, we probably never truly intend to hurt one another. I still received no apology, but hey, that’s an essay for another day.
My advice, for what it’s worth, (because, take what you like and leave the rest), if in doubt, turn to science, accuracy, logic and research based explanations. They may not always ring true, because we are complex, nuanced individuals, but at least sometimes it can offer a piece of mind, a place of logic and rationality, behavioural science and reasoning, that you simply won’t find anywhere else.