11. Rose Tinted Glassed or Not

Have you ever reacted emotionally in your relationship and later wondered, “Where did that even come from?” This week, I dive deep into how our thoughts, shaped by past experiences, assumptions, and subconscious beliefs, can distort the way we perceive our partners. Like wearing photochromic lenses, we might not realise we’re filtering reality until it's too late.

If you’ve been betrayed, it’s natural to become hyper-aware of every little thing your partner does. But what if the problem isn’t what they’re doing, but how you’re interpreting it? This episode uncovers the hidden mental filters that can reinforce emotional detachment and threaten even the strongest intentions to heal.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how past beliefs shape your emotional reactions in real-time.

• Discover why you may be adding “negative checks” against your partner unknowingly.

• Understand the subtle danger of interpreting behaviour through the lens of betrayal.

• Explore how to shift perspective and reclaim emotional clarity.

• Learn how to not react emotionally in a relationship.

• Preview what’s coming next: a deep dive into the mental “list” that guides your responses.

💬 Reflection questions:

Have you ever caught yourself reacting emotionally before even understanding why? What beliefs might be shaping the way you view your partner today?

Connect with Luke:

• Website: www.lifecoachluke.com

• Instagram: @mylifecoachluke

• Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com

Join the After the Affair community at www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity

Episode Transcript:

The After The Affair podcast with me Luke Shillings is here to help you process, decide and move forward on purpose following infidelity. Together we'll explore what's required to rebuild trust not only in yourself but also with others. Whether you stay or leave I can help and no matter what your story there will be something here for you.

Let's go. Good morning, afternoon, evening, whatever time a day it is where you are right now and welcome to episode number 11 of the After The Affair podcast with myself Luke Shillings. When thinking about this episode and what it was I was going to talk about it went a few different directions.

At first I had thought about the concept of rose-tinted glasses and how we can look at the world in a very specific way. We can look at the world in a very positive way which would be you know a rose-tinted glasses scenario whereby you can reflect on your relationship or your partner and their behaviour and see it in a very positive light. Of course we don't always see the world in a positive light which led me on to photochromic lenses or photochromic glasses and these are often known as or were often known as transition glasses which I believe was probably the brand of a company that developed this technology.

These are the type of glasses that automatically darken in bright outdoor conditions and return to clear when indoors or in darker conditions. They appear to do this as if by magic but of course there is no magic involved. In fact the lenses have specific molecules in them that react to high frequency light, most commonly ultraviolet which is present within sunlight but is not present in artificial light.

Interesting thing about this for me was that our eyes can only process the information they receive through those photochromic lenses. This means that these transition lenses are essentially creating your individual subjective experience of what's in front of you. So that then got me thinking about the subject just the subjective experience as a whole.

How accurately do we experience other things in our lives, specifically our relationships and our partners? So what might that look like? Well let's look at some logical steps. Your partner says or does something, you feel an emotion and then you end up doing or saying something in response. Positive emotions are attractive, we tend to aim towards them, we often want more of them.

Negative emotions, not so much, they tend to cause avoidance, resistance maybe or some kind of reaction. So let's assume that the thing your partner did or said was something that you did not like, so that might create a negative emotion. This leads to a raised voice and then maybe you storm out or alternatively you may make a snide comment under your breath and then go silent.

And then the relationship or your partner gets a negative check against their name in your mind. And over time these scenarios play out again and again and again, gradually adding checks to that negative list, building up a picture of your partner in a very negative light. This perhaps all seems quite logical and I for one am a big fan of logic but there's a problem, there's something missing.

So maybe let's go back and have a closer look. Okay so your partner does something, they say something and then you feel an emotion. But wait, where is that emotion coming from? Well that emotion is coming from your thinking.

You're having a thought about the behaviour of your partner and without your conscious awareness you are allocating that to being either a positive or negative experience and then as a result of that your body is then experiencing the emotion. But still that doesn't quite answer the question why? Why is it a negative experience? You might be thinking well obviously Luke it's because if my partner says this then it means that and therefore I should not be happy about it, which is why I feel a negative emotion. But let's just take us back to the photochromic glasses.

The sunlight is just photons, those photons reflect off the objects around us and into our eyes but the lenses alter what we see dependent on the amount of UV light present and how you perceived it really would depend on which pair of glasses you were wearing, rose tinted, standard, clear or photochromic. Could there be something similar going on with our thoughts about our partner's behaviour? Could it be that our brains are acting like photochromic lenses to our partner's behaviour and we're just not aware of it? I believe that the answer is yes, but with a caveat. When UV light hits your photochromic lenses it always adjusts the tint to make your viewing experience more comfortable.

It's not obvious that the same objective is true when it comes to the brain processing your partner's behaviour or at least not in the same way. Let us imagine you have a list of expectations about how you think your partner should behave but you also have a list of things of how your partner shouldn't behave. So when you see or hear that behaviour your brain's filter will immediately process it subconsciously as a positive or negative thought.

It does this simply by referencing it against all the thoughts and beliefs that you have about behaviours that are the same that you've just witnessed or ones that are very similar to it. In this case that will align it directly with the negative list. Okay, so point it there.

It goes to the negative list. It finds the most appropriate thought that it thinks based on experience, the one with the most checks against it and it plugs that into your conscious awareness. It then uploads all of the historical data that you have on it and you experience a negative emotion.

Once you've experienced that negative emotion you either react to it in some way, you avoid it or you resist it. This then allocates yet another check against your partner. You then associate that negative experience with your partner increasing the number of checks you have against them which then further affects the overall belief that you had about them in the first place.

So you might be thinking okay so fair enough but where's this list come from? Where's this list of how my partner should or shouldn't behave come from? Well it's been developed gradually over time partly in a combination of things that you have experienced, things that you have been taught, things that you have perhaps seen or witnessed but also because of this cycle that I've just spoken about. Your brain isn't identifying the exact relevance of the individual details of the thought, it's just associating it with the negative or positive list based on past experience. So every time you have a negative experience your brain acts like the photochromic lens and filters your response without your conscious awareness.

Sneaky! This list that we're talking about here actually it deserves an episode all to itself so that's what I'm going to do and next week's episode we'll be exploring what this list is made up of, exactly how it's got there, how we're currently using it and what we can do to change it if we want to and really go into the the nooks and crannies of that. But for today what I'd like is for you to perhaps like I have is acknowledge that what we are witnessing, what we are experiencing isn't always something that we're choosing. It's something that's been built up by beliefs over a longer period of time and then without question the next thing that your partner does or says is immediately allocated to this negative pile regardless of whether what they've said or has done really actually quantifies or is or deserves that.

So as a quick example perhaps your partner has left his socks on the bedroom floor again right next to the washing basket and you immediately get frustrated by that and you don't really question why you're frustrated you just you just feel frustration you become annoyed. In actual fact you have something on your list deeper in your mind that suggests that that kind of behaviour means that he doesn't care. So that logs a little check against the my partner doesn't care list and then the next day you walk into the kitchen and on the side just next to the bin there is some empty or dirty packaging which has got very very close to the bin but just not quite made its way in and you didn't put it there.

So that adds yet another check against the he doesn't care list and each time you spot anything that remotely resembles this kind of behaviour reinforces that and then you start to believe that he actually doesn't care. To begin with this is relatively insignificant it doesn't mean a great deal but as this starts to build up other thoughts that you have about your partner are affected directly by this deep-set belief that he doesn't care. Now nothing's gone wrong here your brain is doing everything that it should it is following part of the motivational triad and that is to seek pleasure avoid pain use the least amount of energy possible and here it is avoiding pain it's avoiding future hurt by reminding you that your partner doesn't care and therefore maybe you should escape that situation.

But of course that's a drastic overreaction in probably 95 percent of all of the times that this happens so just pay attention to that just acknowledge that some of the information that's coming in although you're immediately feeling it as an actual emotion a vibration in the body there might be a little bit more to it before it gets to that stage and you might be reacting probably not from a place that you still want to maybe these beliefs have been built up over years and years and years maybe you've even brought some of these beliefs from previous relationships maybe you have seen this kind of behaviour in your parents or in friends and family and seen how that's affected their relationship so anything tiny in your relationship that resembles that if that's what you already believe it's automatically going to give you that negative experience then that is going to reinforce that checklist against your partner and that might not be exactly what you want nor is it a pleasant way to live your life particularly if you have the choice to think about it in a different way. Okay so that's everything for today thank you ever so much for listening as always as promised next week I will explore the list that we've been talking about today in much further detail and see how that impacts your relationships and what you can do to to use that better to your advantage so I can't wait to fill you in on all the information around that and I will speak to you soon have a great week and hopefully you're all starting to get prepared for Christmas for those who celebrate talk soon.