The cost of the doubt
Perhaps not surprisingly, I have been doing even more couples therapy than usual during the past few years. COVID has been a strain on everyone and everything, including close relationships. This has had the benefit within my practice of helping me to better articulate some of my working principles.
I have often found that there can be valuable psychological material in sayings and proverbs (folk wisdom). For instance, there is the idea that one should generally try to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Although giving someone the benefit of the doubt can be interpreted in a lot of ways, I find it especially useful when applied to understanding the intentions of other people and how we interpret them. Someone does something and how we interpret why they do what they do has a big effect on how we feel about it.
Generally, we try to steer clear of making negative, personalized interpretations (let’s call them malign interpretations), unless we have a good reason not to, and try in general to make neutral or positive ones (call these benign interpretations, a phrase from Dialectical Behavior Therapy): First, because that is usually correct, second because it makes us feel better, and third because it makes other people feel better too. We try to cultivate a habit, in other words, of giving people the benefit of the doubt: Where there may be a doubt about someone’s intentions, we assume neutral or positive intentions, unless we have a good reason to attribute negative ones.
In working with couples in therapy, one sometimes engages with the very difficult situation where one member (or both) has moved away from this basic norm of giving the benefit of the doubt and moved — slowly and gradually, or abruptly — into the opposite position: Instead of assuming positive or neutral intentions, someone assumes negative intentions, as a rule. Let’s call this attitude one of assuming the cost of the doubt. This seems apt both because cost is a short antonym for benefit and because the word also points to the consequences of following this norm rather than it’s more benign and original twin: This is an extremely costly strategy for a couple.
Generally one partner, let’s call them the doubter, has come to feel hurt by the actions or inactions of the other partner, let’s call them the doubted, over a period of time, often years. The doubter feels that the doubted has lost their right to be offered the benefit of the doubt — has lost the doubter’s trust — and instead comes to be offered only the cost of the doubt, instead. The doubter may well have things to really complain about, things that the doubted could and should hear and change.
But further problems in the relationship arise when the doubted has started to make or even completed those changes, but the doubter continues to interpret them under their new assumption of the cost of the doubt, and never returns to giving the doubted the benefit. The doubter may feel that it is too risky to return to the ordinary assumption, of trusting the other person, and that doing so would lead to a dangerous regression to patterns of action or inaction that have led them to lose trust in the doubted.
So, in turn, the doubted partner comes to feel constantly under the gun, or in the doghouse, or under a cloud, or in hot water — metaphors abound — and with the powerless, hopeless feeling that there is nothing they can do about it. And there isn’t, so long as all actions and inactions are going to be interpreted under the assumption of the cost of the doubt. That is not to say, I will reiterate, that doubted partners could not or should not at times make changes or accommodations, develop better compromises, or make amends for things which need making up for. But there is only so much that one partner in a couple can do by themselves.
It makes sense in a way for the doubter to expect that it is the doubted’s job to make them trusting of them again. Isn’t the doubted the one who needs to make amends for something? But there is something ultimately mistaken about that idea. There are no perfect analogies, but that is a bit like expecting to be lead to water and then being made to drink. You have to want to drink, no one can make you — that is the point of the proverb. Similarly, if you are trying to bridge a canyon you can start, and make some progress, from one side, but at some point you will need the other side to build towards you, too, so you can meet in the middle — otherwise one is expecting someone to build all the way across alone with nothing to connect to on the other side — one can only get so far this way.
Ultimately, this kind of stuck, jammed-up, pattern, of one person offering only the cost of the doubt, resolves either into a sustained misery or, if this becomes unbearable for the doubted or the doubter — neither of whom really want to live like that — the end of the relationship. Unless, that is, something can be done to shift the acquired habit offering only malign interpretations and the cost of the doubt.
As I discussed in another story, economic game theory turned up some memorable strategies for modeling competition and cooperation. The most successful strategy for a long time was called tit for tat: you match your partner’s last move: “nice” is matched with nice, “nasty” with nasty. This sounds like it should work for doubter-doubted couples where the doubted is now being nice…. The trouble is that the doubter is treating all of the doubted’s moves — even if they are actually nice — as “nasty”:the past constantly overshadows the present. The result is a stable situation, but stable and predictable at the great cost of being a lose-lose stalemate.
The successor to tit for tat, as the most successful strategy for cooperation, is called win-stay, lose shift: if what you are doing has a good outcome for you, stick with it; but if you keep losing, then shift to doing something different. If the doubted is already being nice, but being treated as nasty, the doubter is the only one who can disrupt the impasse. The doubter really might not feel like trying to make any benign interpretations, or offer the benefit of the doubt, because they might not want to risk some further or future loss. As I suggested previously, “It takes, to be fair, really a lot of courage to see that what feels like your only self-protective strategy is actually a losing one for all concerned, and to try something different.” But staying with the stalemated strategy, assuming the cost of the doubt, is a guaranteed loss in the long run.
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