How to Work on Relationship Anxiety: Stop Mind-Reading

When it comes to relationship anxiety and how to work on it, one of the most common — and quietly destructive habits people form in relationships: the mind-reading mandate.

I'm Oliver, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles, and I help people overcome anxiety so they can build more fulfilling, expansive relationships. Below I expand on the ideas I shared in that video, give concrete examples, and offer practical steps you can practice today to replace anxious assumptions with curiosity, clarity, and real connection.

What is the Mind-Reading Mandate?

The mind-reading mandate is one of the "10 rules of relationship anxiety" — rules we follow automatically without knowing. In plain terms, it's the belief that you can reliably interpret your partner's inner state from a single look, a pause, a facial micro-expression, or a tone of voice. The mandate whispers, "If you sense it, you know it," and then encourages you to act on that "knowledge" as if it were fact.

Think of it like this: your partner glances away for half a second and anxiety fills that silence with a story. Maybe you think, "They're irritated. They don't like me. They must be thinking about something more important than me." From that tiny cue, you begin to scan every interaction for confirmation. Anxiety takes one small signal and scaffolds an entire narrative around it.

Why Mind-Reading Feels So Convincing

We don't believe these stories because they're logically airtight — we believe them because anxiety is wired to keep us safe. From an evolutionary perspective, hypervigilance helped our ancestors survive. Today, that same circuitry still runs, but it scans for emotional threats instead of saber-tooth tigers.

A well-known psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, has observed that humans tend to overestimate how often they're right. Confidence often reflects a coherent story we've constructed, not the truth itself. That coherence feels satisfying; it feels like certainty. Anxiety amplifies that feeling and asks us to act on it. When we do, we mistake our projections for insight.

Being "right" some of the time makes this worse. If your guesses are occasionally accurate, your brain learns to trust the method: guess, feel certain, confirm selectively. But the wins are remembered and the misses are forgotten — like a gambler who only remembers the jackpots. Anxiety isn’t interested in truth; it’s interested in keeping you small, safe, and separate. It will strip away context, nuance, and balance if it serves its protective purpose.

The Cost: How Mind-Reading Erodes Relationships (Three Layers)

The mind-reading habit doesn't just change your inner world — it changes the relationship. I often frame its effects in three layers:

1. Exhaustion from constant surveillance. You keep scanning and collecting "evidence" for a case no one asked you to build. That vigilance uses up emotional bandwidth and leaves you depleted.
2. Your partner feels misunderstood and guarded. Over time they sense the scrutiny. They begin to edit themselves to avoid your misinterpretations, which can look like emotional withdrawal or defensiveness.
3. Communication disappears. Why ask "What are you thinking?" when you've already decided? Why explain yourself to someone who's already authored your motives? Couples stop truly listening to each other and start arguing about stories neither has verified.

In family systems language this often becomes emotional fusion: both people lose their sense of self in the struggle to manage one another's feelings. That fusion looks like people being "mushed up" together — close in proximity but far from honest connection.

A Simple Tool: "The Story I'm Making Up"

Breaking this habit begins with an act of radical humility: naming the story you’re creating about your partner's inner life. Borrowing from Brené Brown, I teach couples a short phrase that transforms accusation into invitation:

“Hey, I’m making up this story that you’re mad at me.”

That line does several things at once:

• It stops you from delivering a verdict. It flags your feeling as a hypothesis, not a fact.
• It invites collaboration rather than confrontation. You’re asking your partner to join you in exploring the possibility rather than defending themselves against an accusation.
• It lowers the stakes for both people, making it safe to check assumptions and ask questions.

Try saying it the next time you notice your inner narrative ramping up. Notice how your partner responds differently to "I'm making up this story" vs. "You're mad at me." The first invites curiosity; the second triggers defense.

Practice Generous Unknowing and the Beginner's Mind

Curiosity is the antidote to mind-reading. Enter conversations with a beginner’s mind — assume you don’t know everything and that it’s okay to be wrong. I call this "generous unknowing": holding space for possibilities that aren't catastrophic.

When your partner pauses, remember that silence can mean many things:

• Exhaustion
• Distraction
• Stress about unrelated things
• Simply enjoying a moment of quiet

All are plausible and less catastrophic than assuming abandonment or dislike. When you replace catastrophic stories with generous possibilities, your nervous system has room to calm down and your relationship has room to breathe.

Actual Listening: The Radical Next Step

Curiosity alone isn’t enough — you must follow it with listening. Real listening means asking open questions and then resisting the urge to interrupt, edit, or correct your partner mid-sentence. It means reflecting back what you heard and checking your assumptions.

Here are practical listening steps you can practice:

1. Pause internally for a breath before responding to a cue that triggers anxiety.
2. Name the story you're making up (use the phrase above).
3. Ask an open-ended question: “What’s going on for you?” “Can you help me understand what you were thinking just now?”
4. Reflect: “So I’m hearing that you felt X. Is that right?”
5. Resist the urge to correct or defend — let the other person finish.

These steps are small but they build a habit of collaborative meaning-making rather than unilateral interpretation. Over time they reduce the emotional fuel that keeps the mind-reading mandate alive.

Daily Practices to Rewire the Habit

Habits change with repetition. Here are simple daily practices to weaken the mind-reading mandate and strengthen curiosity and connection:

• Micro-check-ins: Once a day, verbalize one small observation using the "I'm making up this story" format. Example: “I’m making up the story that you’re irritated by my text earlier — is that true?”
• Gratitude + Clarify: Pair a gratitude statement with a short check: “I loved our dinner last night. I noticed you were quiet afterward — are you okay?”
• Journal your stories: When anxiety spins a tale, write it down. Later, score how likely it was on a scale of 0–10 and look for evidence that supported or contradicted it.
• Practice "generous unknowing" out loud: Say aloud to yourself: “This could be X, Y, or Z.” Replace catastrophic alternatives with benign ones.
• Engage in recovery rituals: If a mind-reading flare-up escalates, use a recovery ritual: pause, step away if needed, and return with a calibration phrase like, “I’d like to try this again with curiosity.”

When to Seek Extra Help

If relationship anxiety feels overwhelming or is consistently sabotaging your ability to talk, make decisions, or feel secure, professional support can help. Couples therapy and individual therapy offer structured spaces to practice these skills with guidance and to explore the patterns underlying anxiety, including attachment history, trauma, and family-of-origin dynamics.

In my clinical work I give couples tools and exercises to practice between sessions. Small, repeated changes in how you interpret pauses and silences build big changes over time.

Conclusion: From Projection to Partnership

The mind-reading mandate promises safety through certainty but delivers loneliness, misunderstanding, and distance. Real intimacy asks something braver: the willingness to live in the space between knowing and not knowing. It asks you to be connected with your partner without being fused to your assumptions.

Start small. Name the story you’re making up. Offer yourself generous unknowing. Ask more questions and actually listen to the answers. These practices are simple, but they're radically effective because they change the operating system of the relationship: from fearful interpretation to collaborative exploration.

If you'd like more tools, I create worksheets, exercises, and short practices for couples and individuals working on relationship anxiety. You can take the "10 Rules of Relationship Anxiety" quiz or sign up for my newsletter for guided steps and ideas to practice at home.

You're not broken for having anxious thoughts — you're human. With curiosity, honesty, and practice, you can turn those thoughts into opportunities for connection instead of weapons that drive you apart.