Faulty Thinking — Filtering — Needy AF

A beautiful sunset filtered through the atmosphere. The sun is really a boiling cauldron.

Take-Home Point — Filtering is a thinking distortion that creates a worldview in which you focus on a negative action and ignore all the positive action. Ultimately erasing all the positive energy you’ve built up for them resulting in a Neediness Spiral. Filtering forces negative outcomes to dominate your thoughts and ignores all the positive actions, words, and behaviors that your partner normally shows. You end up judging them for one minor slip up and not the many good things they do. This can undermine relationships as the other person feels they have to walk on eggshells and never make a mistake. You lose the nuance of the complex totality that makes the relationship work.

There are 15 recognized Cognitive Distortions or Thinking Behaviors that Needy People use to justify their Neediness spirals. The first we will tackle is — Filtering.

You are always doing that!

“Man, my GF takes forever to respond back to texts. I mean, we’ve been texting for the past few hours and discussing our plans for tomorrow. But, it’s ticking me off cause she hasn’t responded to my last text about the restaurant I picked out for the past two hours! She’s always doing this. Making me wait on her text responses. She just doesn’t really care that this drives me nuts and makes me feel like she thinks she too important to talk to me.”

The above conversation is textbook Filtering. Ignoring the hours of responses that the girlfriend was giving and instead focusing on the late response as if that is representative of the whole conversation. Clearly, you can see, it wasn’t. They were texting for hours before so she doesn’t ALWAYS make him wait for responses.

Filtering is a pernicious thinking failure that allows the Needy Person to ignore all the good things that have happened and focus on the one bad thing as if it occurs all the time. Some examples:

• You planned for a hike on Saturday, but it began storming. “It ALWAYS rains when I plan a trip”. Does it?
• A friend bails on dinner. “This dude is so flaky, he ALWAYS bails on dinner”. Does he really?
• Your husband forgets to pick up milk from the grocery. “My husband just doesn’t care, he ALWAYS forgets to run errands”. Really?
• Your daughter brings home a failed test. “ You are ALWAYS failing tests. Why do you do that?”. Is she really failing all her tests? (If so, get her some help!)

Everyone filters to some extent, but Needy People use Filtering to solidify their world view that no one supports or loves them. At the center of filtering behavior is the idea that we’ve been wronged (no response, late arrival, bad weather, etc.) and therefore evidence must exist to support that wrong and justify our imagined wounds. Facts that don’t support that feeling are quickly discarded. Needy People’s highly attuned recency bias also makes a contribution. It’s easy for us to “forget” all the positive interactions that have occurred, perhaps just minutes before. Filtering allows us to justify the feelings of being hurt, or ignored, or whatever emotional forces we are feeling at the moment. It’s illogical, but also extremely effective.

Why do we do this? Examining my own issues, I’ll filter out people’s overwhelming positive interactions with me and focus on the negative ones because that gives power to the idea that people want me to suffer, they don’t want me around, or just don’t like me. It allows me to shift the blame of self-hate from myself to someone else and justify it through their actions. Since people are imperfect, it’s very easy to cherry pick the evidence I need from day to day interactions to support my conclusions about myself. Filtering, in the neediness context, is our brain’s way of helping us prove to ourselves that we lack value to others and ourselves. So the neediness spiral begins.

By having Filtering in our thinking distortion toolbox, we are blinding ourselves to the natural and complex way that we and others interact and run our lives. Filtering demands that the other person can’t make a mistake. It demands that they know what makes us feel validated. It demands that they know how to make us happy. That’s a lot to put on someone else who can never be in your head. That fact is, others simply can’t be perfect, and we can’t expect them to be so. They will make mistakes, forget the bread, drop a text, forget to call back, etc. That does not mean that they do that all the time or would if given the chance. It just means they are imperfect.

So how can we minimize the Filtering cognitive bias/distortion?

• If your internal monologue uses the word ALWAYS, that’s a sign you are implementing Filtering Thinking. The sun ALWAYS sets, water is ALWAYS wet and time is ALWAYS moving forward. Almost nothing else in the world ALWAYS happens in the same way every time. People NEVER act the same way.
• If you find yourself Filtering, you must begin the hard effort of stopping that thinking — FULL STOP. Don’t let it spiral. Do the work of short-circuiting this thought process. Once you hear yourself say “ALWAYS” perform the following tasks —
• Take a beat and tell yourself you are going down the wrong track.
• Bring full context to the thought and remind yourself of instances where that isn’t the case. “She didn’t respond to my last text, but she did respond 34 times just prior to that. So clearly she doesn’t ALWAYS ignore my texts.”
• Remind yourself you aren’t being logical or fair about the other person or their behaviors. They made a mistake (in your eyes) and people get to make mistakes. Lots of them. The entirety of the relationship shouldn’t be judged in light of a small infraction. Of course, this is moot if abuse or other morally wrong or questionable behaviors are occurring.
• Turn it back on yourself. You are a Needy Person. Does it feel right if someone says you ALWAYS fall apart when things don’t go the way you want? You can probably think of fifty instances in the past week where that wasn’t the case. So would it be fair for them to judge you based only on the times you acted Needy?

Part of Neediness recovery is recognizing the faulty thinking that brings us into spirals and developing effective strategies to combat them. Less Needy people seem to know when to shut these things off or recognize the futility of judging someone by just a few behaviors. Like them, we can develop our sense to recognize the totality of a relationship and not base it on a few actions. Only by not demanding others to be perfect and ignoring all the good for just the bad (to us!) can we show true love and friendship.