Ep. 45 Are You Unhappy In Your Marriage? The Subconscious Thought Pattern Making It Worse

Do relatively small things that your spouse does or says create big feelings inside of you? 

Is it normal for you to feel upset, angry, annoyed  or some other negative emotion towards your spouse regularly?

If you answered "yes" to either of these questions, you might have fallen victim to this subconscious thought pattern making your daily life feel worse.  

In this episode of The Divorce Decision Podcast, Kari Hoskins unpacks one of the most powerful mental traps affecting unhappy marriages and divorce decisions: confirmation bias.

When you’re hurt, resentful, lonely, or stuck in limbo, it becomes easy to interpret everything your spouse says and does through an already painful story: They don’t care. Nothing will ever change. I’m the only one trying. We’re too far gone. But that lens can distort what’s actually happening in your marriage and quietly shape how you feel, how you react, and whether you lean toward rebuilding or divorce. 

Kari breaks down how confirmation bias works in struggling relationships, how it can make living under the same roof feel even more miserable, and how it can push people toward divorce too fast — or keep them hanging on to hope too long. Through real-life coaching examples, she shows how this subconscious pattern can fuel conflict, cloud clarity, and interfere with honest decision-making. 

If you’re questioning your marriage, feeling stuck in uncertainty, or trying to decide whether to stay or leave, this episode will help you take a more honest look at the story you’re telling yourself — and the evidence you may be ignoring. 

In this episode:

•  What confirmation bias is and how it shows up in marriage 
•  Why small things start to feel huge in unhappy relationships 
•  How negative and positive bias can both cloud the truth 
•  Why confirmation bias can distort a divorce decision in either direction 
•  Two powerful questions to help you think more clearly about your marriage

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Transcript

Kari Hoskins (00:00.684)
Hey there friends, welcome back to the show. So I'm going to jump straight in and ask you three questions and you need to answer these questions honestly, if you want to get anything out of today's episode. So question number one, do relatively small things that your spouse does or says create or have a tendency to create really big feelings inside of you like

the intensity of the feeling doesn't necessarily match whatever it is that they did or said. Question number two, is it normal for you to feel annoyed, pissed off, upset, angry, or some other like negative emotion towards your spouse regularly? Like is that your normal for you? And when I say regularly, I mean, do you feel negatively towards them and have negative thoughts about them? Like,

three or four or maybe even more times a week. Question number three, are you one step closer to wanting to leave your marriage tomorrow, but you're not interested to see if getting help can make things feel better or get better? Like you just want to skip that part and go straight to see I'm out. Okay. If you answered yes to any of these,

you could definitely be falling into a subconscious thought pattern that's making things feel worse for you in your marriage, especially if you haven't decided yet if you wanna stay and try and fix it or if you want to leave, right? If you're still in that place of limbo. So this subconscious thought pattern is called confirmation bias. So if you're like, hey, I think I remember something about this, you probably learned about it.

if you took any like intro to psychology classes or intro to communication classes. Confirmation bias is something that I used to teach regularly in my interpersonal communication class because it affects so much of your relationship. So for those of you who are not familiar with confirmation bias, it is your brain's tendency to selectively, and that's the key, selectively notice, remember, and give more weight to things

Kari Hoskins (02:23.682)
that support what you already believe is true. It supports a story that you already have about something or somebody. So in marriage, what this looks like is actively looking for behaviors that support what you already believe about your spouse or what you already believe about your marriage while ignoring the things that don't fit that story. So confirmation bias can actually be a positive bias

or a negative bias. But both of them have the potential of creating more misery, to be honest with you, in your life and in your decision making and have a more detrimental effect on you. So what I'm going to do today is I am actually going to touch on how this plays out in real life, like how it can make living under the same roof more challenging than it needs to be.

and how it can affect your divorce decision in either direction. So let's start by talking about what confirmation bias actually looks like. It begins with the story that you have about your spouse. So if I were to ask you to describe for me your husband or your wife, what would you say? How would you describe what kind of partner that they are? If we were just hanging out having coffee.

And I asked you to tell me your marriage story. What would you tell me? How did you end up here? How did you end up unhappy and contemplating divorce? Right? What examples would you share with me? This is your bias. Okay. Now the confirmation part comes next. Your answer, your bias is the lens that you view everything about them through. It's the lens that you view your life through. Okay.

and it literally colors everything that they do and don't do, and it colors everything that they say and the things that they don't say, right? So it affects how you interpret their behaviors, okay? So it'll affect how you took that little benign comment that they made in passing just before leaving the house. It affects how you interpret that thing, that joke that they made at dinner in front of your parents, okay? Now, if you ask someone who's happy in their marriage,

Kari Hoskins (04:45.121)
their bias, their story about their spouse typically leans more towards the more positive. It sounds something like, my husband's amazing, he can fix anything, he's got a great sense of humor, he takes care of us, he's such a good partner, he's such a good provider. And I realize that's stereotypical, but hang with me here. It might sound like my wife is so smart and she's loving and she's kind and she's nurturing.

and she's fun to be around and she's always got my back. And so what happens when you have a positive bias is when your significant other does something wonderful, it confirms that. Okay. And when they do something not so wonderful, it doesn't necessarily have such a big impact on you because it's in direct contrast with how you generally perceive them. Okay. But in troubled marriages,

the thoughts or the stories that you have are usually dramatically different, right? It's like, he doesn't care about me. Nothing is ever going to change. I'm the only one trying. He's a selfish a-hole, or it doesn't matter what I do. She's never happy anyway. Okay. So what happens is you start looking for examples that these things that you believe about them are true. Okay. And so when your spouse does something that you don't like, it confirms

that story that you're telling yourself about them. And when they do something that's more positive, you dismiss it, or you might not even see it because it doesn't fit your narrative, okay? So the thing is, is that most of us are filtering our lives through this bias every day, okay? So if you believe that your husband is selfish, every decision that he makes and every mistake that he makes,

you're going to view it as selfishness, right? He's late, he's selfish, he didn't leave in enough time. He's too tired to stay up and watch a show with me. He's being selfish again. If he disagrees with you, he's selfish, okay? And when he does try to show up for you in the way that you've been wanting, it gets dismissed. Too little, too late, or he's only doing it because I said something. And so now it doesn't count, okay? If you believe that your wife doesn't love you, the neutral moments,

Kari Hoskins (07:08.61)
can start to feel like rejection, right? So she's in the middle of doing something and you walk in the door and she doesn't stop to say hi to you right instantly, okay? Then you make that mean she's rejecting you. You wanna watch a show on TV, but she wants to read her book. And even though she's sitting next to you reading the book, you still view it as rejection, okay? Because of your lens, right?

So when you feel like he's always being selfish or she's constantly rejecting you, you guys, that feels terrible. I mean, you know you're living it, okay? And this is what can make living under the same roof feel miserable. And what an awful way to live, especially considering that most people live very, not live very unhappy, well, they do live very unhappy, but they are very unhappy.

and they tend to contemplate divorce for approximately four to five years before taking that first step and filing divorce papers. Four or five years is a really long time to live miserably, to be honest with you. At least that's what I think. And for a lot of you listening, it's probably even been longer than that. Now, just to be clear, okay, I'm not

gonna sit here trying to gaslight you. I'm not trying to say that what you're experiencing, what's happening in your marriage or what you're feeling, is it valid or isn't true, okay? I am here, however, just to give you a gentle reminder that your confirmation bias is running in the background of your life and your relationship, okay? So I'm working with this couple.

and they are obviously trying to decide whether or not they want a divorce. And the husband's bias in what he believes is that his wife just wants to argue with him. Like literally what he said was everything always turns into a fight. He's like, if I go outside and I say that this guy's blue, she's gonna come out and say, no, it's actually a shade of green. Now that was kind of tongue in cheek. He was kidding, but he wasn't kidding.

Kari Hoskins (09:23.138)
That's really how he thinks of his wife. And so I had them walk me through it together, okay, with the recent examples of what was happening in their marriage. As it turns out, okay, she does ask him a lot of questions and she always has, which he interprets as her being confrontational. This is his bias showing up, okay, meaning she'll ask him a question and he

thinks that question means that she wants to fight. Okay. And so in reality, you guys, she's asking the questions because she's trying to understand him better. She's trying to connect. And by the way, this is why I love couple sessions and love couples coaching is because when you get two people in the same place or the same Zoom call, you get the full story. So anyway, she'll ask questions.

He assumes that she's trying to argue, he gets defensive, and he becomes curt and impatient in his responses. And then she tries to understand or she gives her opinion and tries to clarify, and she's just trying to figure it out. And a perfectly innocent question and conversation turns into a fight. Okay? And so really what's happening is his bias was ultimately contributing

to a lot of the arguing and a lot of the misery that they were experiencing. Okay? And so if you really think about your own bias, I'm sure that you can see how it affects you on a regular basis. Okay? It affects your daily life. Now let's talk about how it can affect your decision to stay or leave. If you are leaning towards divorce or separation, you will likely stop noticing when your spouse is trying. You're gonna stop noticing

when they're making an effort. You might actually dismiss any amounts of change that you do see and notice, okay? But you guys, this also works the other way too. If you're desperately trying to stay in your marriage, you might cling to the teeny tiny signs of hope versus really being, know, really eyes wide open to what's really going on, okay? So I work with this woman.

Kari Hoskins (11:45.977)
who really wanted her marriage to work so badly. She loved her husband so much. Her confirmation bias was, her story was, that her husband was indeed amazing and that he was a good provider and he was just preoccupied and a bit of a workaholic, okay? But she'd been really unhappy for a very long time. He was gone a lot.

He spent a lot of time on the road. He spent a lot of time everywhere else other than home, even when he wasn't traveling for work. And when he did get home, he was often just too tired for any type of physical or emotional intimacy. Okay, so this is what had been going on. And then one weekend, the kids were all gone and they had a great weekend. He didn't go anywhere for the weekend. He stayed home. They went out on a date. They held hands in the car.

joking around with her at dinner, he was flirting with her. And that tiny shift, that one weekend felt really big and encouraging. And she was like, okay, this is it, right? Maybe things are finally turning around. Maybe he does want us, okay? So she held on to that amazing weekend for an entire year. She kept looking for proof that her husband wanted to be in this marriage with her.

And after that year of hope and a lot of disappointment and a lot of sadness, she finally reached out to me for coaching. Okay. First for coaching for herself to figure out what she wanted and then for coaching with her husband. And it was through the coaching that she could no longer ignored the larger pattern. Okay. He was not willing to talk honestly. He, um,

was still shutting down when things got uncomfortable. He was avoiding the bigger, deeper issues in their marriage. He was only willing to talk about things and make an effort when she was at her breaking point, but nothing really stuck. Like none of the changes stuck in any meaningful, consistent way. Okay. So her bias, her positive bias had actually been working against her all of that time leading up to the coaching. Okay.

Kari Hoskins (14:04.846)
And the reason why is because when you're desperate to stay, a small amount of warmth can feel really big. And that overall pattern that you're like actually experiencing gets clouded by your desperation to stay. Okay. And that's just really, really hard. Okay. So do any of your own positive or negative biases

Are any of those contributing, do you think, through the way that your days feel? Okay, so that couple, the one I referred to earlier about, you know, the bias was that his wife just only wants to argue with him about everything. Now, we're still coaching, we're still going, I have this whole process, we're still going through the process. I don't know what's gonna happen yet, okay? I don't know what their decision is going to be, but this is what I can tell you. They're having real conversations now with way less drama. There is,

so much less arguing about stuff that doesn't need to be argued about. She's still asking questions. We worked on how she asked the questions, how she presents her information to him, and we worked on the way he responds as well. And what this means is they're actually having meaningful conversations and meaningful communication. And so their days feel better. They feel less stressed out. There's less conflict.

there's less negative feelings, okay? Even while they're still in this place of limbo. So when you're contemplating what you want to do with the future of your marriage, I really want to just remind you to be careful not to confuse your current bias with the full truth, okay? So how is your bias influencing your thoughts about your significant other and how are they influencing your thoughts about staying or leaving?

Okay. The best thing that you can do for yourself is step out of your echo chamber and talk to someone who's going to challenge you a little bit and push back a little bit on your story so that you can figure out what's really going on, like the truth of it, not just your story of it. Okay. So that you can make a really good decision about what you want for your future. Okay. So here are two questions for you to answer honestly. What story

Kari Hoskins (16:32.079)
do you have about your spouse that you are looking for evidence of? And question number two, what are you ignoring because it doesn't fit the story that you've already built? Okay, so take some time and consider those two questions and I would even encourage you to journal them. It's so much better for you if you can start journaling in this stuff, all right? So.

Listen, I recognize that living in the unhappiness of a marriage in limbo is really challenging, especially for those of you who are not getting any support. So if you're in that situation and you are ready to get a little bit of help, either just in your everyday life or getting some help figuring this stuff out, you guys, I've got you. Okay. I offer a complimentary consultation call.

where we can talk about what's going on in your marriage and you can ask all of the questions and we can just talk about it and really take a look at what supporting you might mean for you and your marriage and your divorce decision. Okay, my friends, that is what I have for you today. I look forward to talking to you next week.