We are as human beings exceptionally good at creating stories or, to use the modern, far too common vernacular, narratives. Unfortunately for our ability to tell just-so stories, we don’t actually have access to other people’s so-called inner world. We are not mind-readers, however much someone selling their hocus pocus would have you believe. This is true regardless of how strongly you feel you are right, how loudly you yell, or how traumatic you make your story. You simply do not have access to another person’s conscious life outside of the verbiage they share. Now, that doesn’t mean a person can’t be lying to you, but that’s a judgment in search of evidence to support it, and even if you find seemingly incontrovertible evidence that the story told is nonsense, that still doesn’t give you access to that person’s thoughts in any way approaching magic.
This fundamental part of human relationship building is why dialogue is so important and why lying is, in my estimation, the foundational ethical error for all the world’s ills. Lying is about actively having another person not have access to reality as you, and by extension, the rest of humanity does. Despite the ridiculous overuse of the term “gaslighting,” there’s a reason the term has spread so far, because it directs attention to how our frameworks, including beliefs, about reality are foundational to how we make the best decisions we can. To lie is to deny that possibility to another.
Now, lying is an active action, and gaslighting is an active pattern of behavior. Despite the active nature of those things, they are built on a foundation of conscious behavior that is inherently deceptive. Because we don’t have access to other people’s conscious lives, we therefore create entire worlds in our own, of which other people are characters. The degree to which we unquestioningly agree with those constructs is the degree to which our lives are filled with an increasing degree of needless suffering.
When it comes to relationships, and the errors we make in blindly believing the ideas we have about another’s actions, a great deal of emotional pain comes from the need to explain silence. Keeping in mind the framing so far described, the story you tell yourself about someone’s silence is rarely about them. It’s about the story, or “understanding,” you created and automatically agreed with, that helped you avoid the feeling you couldn’t afford to experience while waiting for an answer from the other. Most of what gets called “reading between the lines” or “mind reading” is actually the body writing its own lines first, as heightened arousal, and handing them to the mind to defend, experienced as anxiety.
Naming the Pattern
Here’s the shape it often takes. Someone doesn’t text back as quickly as expected, or answers a question a little flatly, or cancels plans without much explanation. The ambiguity itself is uncomfortable, as any level of uncertainty generally is, being as uncertainty is the bedrock for the interpretation of anxiety. And rather than sit inside that static long enough to ask a simple clarifying question, the mind fills the gap with a fully formed narrative: they’re pulling away, they’re annoyed with me, I did something wrong. The story arrives fast, feels certain, and is rarely checked against the person who could actually confirm or deny it.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has a name for the maneuver underneath this: experiential avoidance. The story, arriving as it does with a fervently strong belief in its accuracy, isn’t really about predicting the other person accurately. It’s a way of resolving an intolerable present-moment sensation — the not-knowing — by converting it into something that makes sense, even if what’s captured is worse than the absence of information. A confirmed story, however painful, feels more bearable than an unconfirmed body.
What the Agitation Is Actually Doing
This is where predictive processing becomes so important for humbly acknowledging the inevitable errors we make in our judgments, because it explains why the story shows up so fast and feels so convincing. Daniel Villiger’s account of psychopathology through this framework describes the brain as constantly minimizing the gap between what it predicted and what it’s sensing — and under ambiguous conditions, the nervous system doesn’t tolerate uncertainty well. It resolves prediction error by generating the highest-precision guess available, which is usually whatever story matches the oldest, most rehearsed one in personal history. If your history has taught you that people leave, “they’re pulling away” isn’t a wild guess. It’s the model doing exactly what a predictive system is built to do: minimize uncertainty as fast as possible, using whatever inference is quickest to reach.
The bodily agitation, experientially labelled as anxiety, isn’t noise in this scenario. It’s the signal that a prediction error is live — that something in the environment doesn’t yet match the internal model, and the system is under pressure to resolve it one way or another. Elizabeth Li and colleagues’ integration of predictive processing with control-mastery theory adds a piece to the experiential puzzle: people don’t just passively receive these signals; they unconsciously test them. Their whole account of patient testing describes exactly the move that experiential avoidance short-circuits — putting the ambiguous situation in front of another person and seeing whether reality confirms or disconfirms the prediction. Making up the story and never asking is a quiet test of self-confirmation. It’s always easier to confirm a belief when the test for its accuracy never leaves the lab of your own thinking. The prediction gets to keep its precision, unchallenged, and therefore generates the one thing that the brain as a biological system is after: consistency.
The Story Was a Construct, Not a Fact
George Kelly’s psychological theory helps us see this from a different angle. We form cognitive connections, or constructs, between what we believe we know and an imagined future to direct our behavior towards. A construct isn’t a belief about a discrete fact; it’s a framework a person uses to make their entire relational world legible — “people who go quiet are leaving” functions like a hypothesis, and how we go about testing it will determine whether we continue to act on it. Testing the building blocks of our reality perception is not without distress. David Winter’s recent accounting of Personal Construct Psychology makes the point directly: revising a construct threatens the coherence of an entire anticipatory system, which is exactly why it resists casual correction.
Michael Mahoney’s distinction between rationalist and constructivist therapies is useful here, too. The rationalist tradition, epitomized by REBT and its philosophical offshoot Logic-Based Therapy, treats the content of a thought as the thing to dispute. The constructivist tradition treats the construct as inseparable from the identity organizing it. You don’t talk someone out of “people leave me.” You give them a lived, embodied counter-experience precise enough to update it, which is a different kind of practice than winning an argument. Doing so is what Mari Aguilera and colleagues found when Personal Construct Therapy, working directly with identity and self-construal, matched Cognitive Behavioral Therapy’s outcomes for depressed women with fibromyalgia. Working with the construct, not just the content, got the same result through a completely different mechanism, and one that didn’t involve the neurological absurdity of “replacing” one’s thoughts.
Discomfort as Information, Not Obstacle
This is the personal pivot ACT offers, though it’s hard to put into practice: the discomfort isn’t the problem to be managed away before real living can resume. It’s quite often the most direct signal available about what matters. You don’t feel your stomach drop over a partner’s flat tone unless the relationship itself has personal emotional weight for you. The agitation is proportional to the degree of relational importance, embodying the values of closeness, honesty, and being known accurately by someone whose opinion matters to you. Avoiding the discomfort by resolving it into a story that you don’t challenge doesn’t just cost you accuracy. It costs you the information that the discomfort was carrying about what you actually care about.
Values-guided action, in the ACT sense, means letting that information direct the next move instead of the avoidance directing it. If the sensation is there because connection matters, the values-consistent response is to move toward clarification — to ask the plain, unglamorous question — precisely because it’s uncomfortable, not despite it. ACT, paired with what predictive processing and PCP say about how constructs actually form and hold, wants you to notice the sensation, name what it’s protecting, and let the value underneath it determine what you do next. Let the feeling be a guide to support the value that matters, not a place to wallow in.
A Relationship That Ended Over a Story Nobody Checked
I worked with a client (actually, multiple, as this is a common issue, and hence the following story is a composite) whose closest friendship dissolved almost entirely inside their own head. The friend had started responding to messages more slowly over a few weeks. No single incident seemed to have inspired it. My client noticed the delay every time, felt a specific tightness show up in their chest each time they saw the “delivered” notification with no reply, and by the second week had constructed a complete account: the friend had grown tired of them, was probably talking to mutual friends about it, and was looking for a way to leave them behind. None of this was said aloud. None of it was asked about. Instead, my client began pulling back preemptively — shorter replies, less initiation, a kind of controlled retreat designed to get ahead of a rejection that, as far as anyone could verify, hadn’t actually happened yet.
The friendship ended not because the friend withdrew, but because my client did, in response to a story built entirely from an ambiguous silence and an unexamined bodily reaction. When we went back through it in session, the chest-tightness was the most honest data point in the whole account — more honest than the story. It was accurate about the stakes: this friendship mattered enough that its possible loss registered physically. It was not accurate and was never tested, as evidence about what the friend was actually doing. Had my client been able to name the sensation as agitation-about-a-value under perceived threat rather than proof-of-a-conclusion, the available move was obvious in hindsight: ask directly, tolerate the discomfort of possibly hearing something hard, and let the actual answer — not the fastest, cheapest prediction — determine what came next. Clarifying language, offered from a stated shared value (”this friendship matters to me, and I noticed a shift, is everything okay between us?”), was available the entire time. The construct never got tested. The relationship absorbed the cost of a prediction error that was never allowed to be resolved against reality.
Where This Isn’t a License for Every Impulse
It’s important to be careful about not taking this too far, because “trust the discomfort” can curdle into its own kind of problem. Not every story that accompanies a physiological signal is one that is wholly false. This is why testing is appropriate through dialogue. Environmental changes, sleep deprivation, and poor eating can produce the identical bodily agitation being described here, and sometimes the story that is made to interpret it is false, but sometimes it’s your body/brain system signaling there’s something there to be wary of. The connection between feeling and narrative is one in constant need of reflective critical awareness. It’s a practice, not a destination. It’s interoceptive (body awareness) discrimination: learning to tell the difference between agitation that’s signaling “this matters, go find out” and agitation that’s signaling “you’re depleted, and everything feels like a threat right now.” Learning to discriminate is exactly the kind of work a good therapeutic relationship — one that challenges as much as it affirms — is suited to build.
What Actually Has to Change
The alternative to arguing yourself out of a bad prediction was never a better argument. It was staying inside the discomfort long enough to find out what it was actually protecting, and then acting from that — asking the question, naming the value, risking the answer — instead of resolving the ambiguity privately and calling the unchallenged resolution a fact. The agitation was never the principal obstacle to the relationship. The refusal to name what’s important and challenge the ready-made story, despite having to wade through discomfort, was.
Sources:
Daniel Villiger, “An Integrative Model of Psychotherapeutic Interventions Based on a Predictive Processing Framework”, Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy (2024)
Elizabeth Li et al., “Predict to Control, Test to Master: Integrating Predictive Processing and Control–Mastery Theory in Understanding How Psychotherapy Works”, Journal of Psychotherapy Integration (2025)
David A. Winter, “Personal Construct Psychology – Still Going Strong at 70?”, Journal of Constructivist Psychology (2026)
Michael J. Mahoney and William J. Lyddon, “Recent Developments in Cognitive Approaches to Counseling and Psychotherapy”, The Counseling Psychologist (1988)
Mari Aguilera et al., “Cognitive-Behavioral and Personal Construct Therapies for Depression in Women with Fibromyalgia: A Randomized Controlled Trial”
International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology (2022); Elliot D. Cohen et al., “A Randomized, Controlled, Preliminary Study to Assess the Efficacy of Logic-Based Therapy in Reducing Anxiety and/or Depression in Family Caregivers”
Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (2023); Ailish M. King et al., “A systematic review of the nature and efficacy of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy interventions”, PLOS ONE(2024).
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