Transcription
Hey Jim, how do you emotionally immature people distort reality?
There are a lot of ways that this happens. One of the main ways is through what we think of as affective realism, where the person interprets life based on how they feel in the moment, not on what the facts are. They can distort your reality by denying, dismissing, distorting anything that you think, say, or feel. Anything that contradicts their emotions.
And they do it through constant invalidation, letting you know that your thoughts and your feelings don't make sense. So, they might dismiss your viewpoint, anything that challenges their feelings. They do it through their own egocentrism, where it's all about their needs and their feelings, not others. They do it through having limited empathy. They don't understand and don't have any intention of relating to your emotions. And this is often what leads to the real distress of feeling totally unseen, unheard.
They tend not to have deep emotional connections and tend to have more superficial interactions. And they distort reality through their very rigid black-and-white thinking. They tend to oversimplify very complex issues. They have short, sweet answers to complex issues. And if you bring something up outside of that, they're like, "Why are you making this a big deal?"
They also do that through something we call confabulation. They make stuff up. And then they start to believe their made-up memories are true. Confabulation is also something that happens in dementia and other forms of mental illness.
If this is something that resonates with you, leave some comments and let me know what your experience is dealing with emotionally immature people.