How Trauma, Stress, and Mentalizing Contribute to Perceptual Incongruence (Part II)

For the Perceiver

When you are experiencing perceptual incongruence in your relationship and you are in the role of perceiver, here are some things to consider.

First of all, you might be on to something.  Your partner may indeed be low in self-awareness and not seeing themselves accurately.  Maybe shame is blocking ownership.  But perhaps, the reality is somewhere more in the middle.  Here are some other things that may be going on for you:

·       Confirmation Bias—this is a common cognitive distortion where you see more of what you expect to see. For instance, when you think your partner is often critical of you and are bracing for criticism, it is very easy to hear a statement like “this place is a mess” as a statement about you instead of as a statement about what your partner prefers, even if the intent was not to judge you.

·       Past relational trauma:  Perception is heavily influenced by past experiences.  Prior overwhelming or traumatic relational experiences can color your perceptions of others’ intent and feelings in the present (Reisch, 2023) and cause you to interpret these more negatively.

·       Misattunement: you might simply be misunderstanding your partner’s inner emotional landscape. For instance, you read “that look” as frustration, but your partner is actually overwhelmed. (Genzer et al., 2025)

·       Hypermentalizing, sometimes called “excessive theory of mind,” involves quick, automatic mind-reading; the tendency to over-assume the mental states of others with certainty that one is right; and excessive taking on of others’ mental/emotional states (Sharp et al., 2025). A self-compassion note here: humans need safe connection, and trying to figure out what is going on in other peoples’ minds is often a safety-seeking behavior that helped us survive. You might have also internalized messages that hypermentalizing is caring, “good,” and relationship-supportive (versus balanced mentalizing, which is generally good for a relationship.) The reality is that we can’t know for certain what is happening inside another person, and we might not be correct in what we think is going on for them.

An important note: though it’s generally less helpful for the perceiver to assume negative intent, a small body of data suggest an important exception.   Assuming positive intent (or “positive attributions”) is not helpful in relationships with more frequent and severe relational problems.  In this case, research suggests that less positive attributions and less forgiveness was more likely to contribute to greater satisfaction long-term because it prompted either problem-solving or ending the relationship. (McNulty, 2010)

For the Perceived

When you are experiencing perceptual incongruence in your relationship and you are in the role of perceived (your partner sees you more negatively than you see yourself), here are some things to consider.

First of all, you might be on to something.  Your partner may have a biased, negatively skewed view of you.  But also, truth may be somewhere more in the middle.  Here are some other things to consider:

·       Shame and defensiveness:  shame might be blocking you from seeing clearly the parts of you that feel bad, wrong, or socially unacceptable.   Shame  often leads straight to defensiveness.  Part of you might fear that at least some of what your partner is saying is true of you, and so you valiantly defend against this possibility. A self-compassion note:   humans need safe belonging, and shame is a particularly painful social emotion because it calls into question our worthiness to belong.   So, defensiveness is often an understandable safety-seeking behavior protecting the need to belong.

·       Hypomentalizing.  In contrast to hypermentalizing, hypomentalizing is the underuse of mental states in explaining self/other behavior.   Toward oneself, it looks like lack of self-awareness.  Toward others, it presents as difficulty understanding social cues and the imagined impact of oneself to others in person-to-person interactions.  (Sharp et al., 2025)

·       Fundamental attribution error.  This is a common cognitive bias where we tend to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt when we make a mistake more readily than when others make mistakes.

Relational Note for Both

Sometimes, a powerful relational process can take on a life of its own in a relationship involving projection and projective identification.   With projection, one disowns something they don’t like in themselves and instead sees it in another person.  To complicate the process, the person receiving the projection may start acting like what was projected on them, a reaction called projective identification.  Some people are more prone to absorbing projections in this way.  Both people in this process are often struggling to differentiate between their own emotional states and those of the other, a struggle which is thought to be rooted in developmental trauma.

Pause and Reflect

For the perceiver, here are some reflective questions for you:   Am I treating my perception as a hypothesis, or as truth? Am I willing to try holding my perception with more flexibility and curiosity? If so, what do I need in order to do this?  What are some other, less negative interpretations about what is going on for my partner? If I wasn’t spending so much time figuring out my partner, what could I be doing instead with that extra energy?

And, for the perceived, some reflective questions for you:  “What do I know is true about myself (values, actions, strengths, growth edges)? Is there anything about my partner’s perception that feels true and that I can own? What part doesn’t feel true and about me? And, what do I need to be able to remain internally steady, regulate the difficult feelings coming up for me, and offer warm curiosity toward myself and my partner?”

In Part III, we’ll look at what actually helps when perceptual incongruence shows up and how to work through it.

References

Genzer, S., Rubin, M., Sened, H., Rafaeli, E., Ochsner, K. N., Cohen, N., & Perry, A. (2025). Directional bias in interpersonal emotion perception. Nature communications, 17(1), 167. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-66879-2

McNulty, J. K. (2010). When positive processes hurt relationships. Current directions in psychological science, 19(3), 167-171. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721410370298

Reisch, A. A., Bessette, K. L., Jenkins, L. M., Skerrett, K. A., Gabriel, L. B., Kling, L. R., Stange, J. P., Ryan, K. A., Schreiner, M. W., Crowell, S. E., Kaufman, E. A., & Langenecker, S. A. (2023). Human emotion processing accuracy, negative biases, and fMRI activation are associated with childhood trauma. Frontiers in psychiatry, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1181785

Sharp, C., Barr, C., & Vanwoerden, S. (2025). Hypermentalizing: The development and validation of a self-report measure. Frontiers in Psychology, 16.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1546464