3 ms·

Years ago I had a really bad breakup. We lived together for about 6 months and she slowly got more and more hostile towards me. She moved out and severed all c

Years ago I had a really bad breakup. We lived together for about 6 months and she slowly got more and more hostile towards me. She moved out and severed all contact with me. She forgot a couple of her daily journals in a drawer. Well, I had to look because I was so confused as to what happened. Reading through it, I was blown away at how skewed her perception of reality was. The way she recalled events were absolute fantasy. She took all these mundane interactions (a lot of which were genuinely positive) between us and twisted them into somehow being wronged by me. I had always thought of writing in a journal but after reading that decided I never would. It has the potential to crystalize misremembered, or misinterpreted things into reality. She had created a self propelling feedback loop of negativity.

techno_tsar 3y ago
Her actions have more to do with her psychology and less to do with her keeping a journal. A lot of people keep journals and it probably has the opposite effect. She sounds emotionally immature.
em-bee 3y ago
i can feel for you (i think) but my conclusion would be different. for one, you don't have to write about feelings. second, the problem here is not the feelings themselves but the attribution for the cause. this is something that i learned and confirmed over time, and that this diary seems to demonstrate. namely that as humans we have a tendency to attribute reasons to actions of others that are based on our own feelings and have nothing to do with reality. for example, a few months ago someone yelled at me for bumping into him, claiming to have done that intentionally, when on my side i didn't even feel any contact. so how could this person jump to that conclusion? they clearly didn't stop to think and consider if there could be another explanation. what i learned from this over the years is that whenever something negative happens to me, i stop to think if there could be a good explanation that does not imply some negative intent by anyone else. i have met other people who attribute netative intentions to any thing bad that happens to them, often telling me stories of what they think was someones intention, when there could be a perfectly benign explanation. like one where someones macbook charger got lost, and the person was 100% sure that her colleague took it intentionally in order to be mean, when the begning explanation is that because those chargers look all alike, she probably took it, thinking it was hers, or, maybe it even was hers, and the first persons charger was lost elsewhere. this is a general problem in human interaction. only if we stop attributing negative intention to everything that we don't agree with, will we be able to improve cooperation to work for a better world.

techno_tsar 3y ago

Her actions have more to do with her psychology and less to do with her keeping a journal. A lot of people keep journals and it probably has the opposite effect. She sounds emotionally immature.

em-bee 3y ago

i can feel for you (i think) but my conclusion would be different. for one, you don't have to write about feelings. second, the problem here is not the feelings themselves but the attribution for the cause. this is something that i learned and confirmed over time, and that this diary seems to demonstrate. namely that as humans we have a tendency to attribute reasons to actions of others that are based on our own feelings and have nothing to do with reality. for example, a few months ago someone yelled at me for bumping into him, claiming to have done that intentionally, when on my side i didn't even feel any contact. so how could this person jump to that conclusion? they clearly didn't stop to think and consider if there could be another explanation. what i learned from this over the years is that whenever something negative happens to me, i stop to think if there could be a good explanation that does not imply some negative intent by anyone else. i have met other people who attribute netative intentions to any thing bad that happens to them, often telling me stories of what they think was someones intention, when there could be a perfectly benign explanation. like one where someones macbook charger got lost, and the person was 100% sure that her colleague took it intentionally in order to be mean, when the begning explanation is that because those chargers look all alike, she probably took it, thinking it was hers, or, maybe it even was hers, and the first persons charger was lost elsewhere. this is a general problem in human interaction. only if we stop attributing negative intention to everything that we don't agree with, will we be able to improve cooperation to work for a better world.