How Your Thoughts Might Be Sabotaging Your Relationships

My friend Debra Fileta has written a new book on how our thoughts might sabotage our relationships. With her love of Scripture and her practical application honed as a licensed counselor, she helps us to discard the thoughts that hold us back from building intimacy with each other, and learn how to be set free to chart a new path. This is an excerpt from that book.

Have you ever heard a new phrase, or song, or saying for the first time ever, and then somehow over the course of the next few days or weeks you start hearing it everywhere? Or maybe you notice a sleek red car drive by that you’ve never seen before, and then you start seeing it in every parking lot. Or maybe you learn about a style of house while you’re watching HGTV, and next thing you know you spot it all over your city or town. Could there really be an increase of people buying that sleek red car you noticed, or that new style of house – or are you just more aware of it now? 

This is a concept that we refer to in psychology as frequency bias or frequency illusion, and it can happen with pretty much anything. The fancy name for this is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. And if you’ve never heard of it before, there’s a good chance you will after today (see what I did there?). The main idea of this phenomenon is that the frequency of those things is not actually increasing, but simply your awareness of them. And that awareness changes everything. 

There’s so much going on around you in one particular 24-hour period that it’s impossible for your brain to absorb it all. But when you bring your attention to something, which is generally called selective attention, you then begin to make note of that specific thing more and more often. Your brain now tunes into it!

Continue reading this blog over on Substack HERE.

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