252. Why You Never See It Coming: Being Blindsided In Predictable Relationships

You pride yourself on reading people. You pick up on moods, scan facial expressions, and adjust to keep the peace. But then your partner files for divorce, and you never saw it coming. A close friend betrays you, and it hits you like a truck. A man you're dating turns out to be nothing like you imagined.

Sound familiar?

In this episode, Sade breaks down why smart, capable women keep getting blindsided in relationships — and it has nothing to do with intelligence. She shares three psychology concepts that explain the pattern: theory of mind, the illusion of transparency, and naive realism. These ideas reveal how we project our own values onto others, assume people can see what we never said out loud, and convince ourselves that no one would do what we would never do.

Sade gets personal about her own blindside moments — from her ex filing for divorce after seventeen years of a toxic marriage to his fight for full custody despite zero involvement in parenting. She explains how women trained to scan for danger often read one narrow signal while missing the full picture.

The result? Minimization. You shrink the red flags, ignore the patterns, and push down what your gut screams at you — because facing it means doing something about it.

This episode gives you permission to stop blaming yourself and start building the skill of seeing what's real. Your conditioning created these patterns. Conscious, safe work can unwind them.

Ready to stop getting blindsided and start trusting what you know? Schedule your free consultation call with Sade at sadecurry.com/schedule-appointment.

Transcript

Hello, my extraordinary friends. Welcome back to the Extraordinary Life and Dating After Divorce Podcast. I'm Sade Curry, I am your host, and I am excited to bring you this episode. It's one of those concepts and topics that comes up a lot in my coaching practice. I work with women who are in difficult marriages, women who are in the middle of divorce, who are thinking about divorce, who are fighting for custody, or who are trying to set boundaries with their exes, and women who are dating after divorce. And this pattern that I'm going to talk about today shows up in all of these situations. It also shows up in friendships, platonic friendships, family situations. I have experienced this particular pattern, and that's why I've dug into it, so that we can understand what's happening.

Not all of us are going to get a degree in psychology, or a degree in neuroscience, or a degree in neurobiology, but all of these things have been studied. There are names for the situations that cause such devastation in our lives. So that's why today we're talking about why you never see it coming — why you keep being blindsided, even when the issue is completely predictable.

And I don't say that to create shame. I think I have just been doing this work for so long, there is a tendency for me to make light of the problem, because now that I am "past it" — I put that in quotes because the pattern still shows up for me. I'm just able to catch it. I'm way more aware, and I'm willing to call myself out when I am doing things that I used to do, or I notice myself falling into a pattern. I'm not cured of my old patterns. I just see them and I'm like, "Yeah, we don't do that anymore," even though the urge may be there or the temptation may be there to do it.

So please forgive me if I sometimes sound a little casual about something that you might be feeling a lot of pain about in the moment. I'm just in a different place than I used to be. It's been ten years since I got divorced, and those patterns were very painful at the time. I was a really big mess when I was going through all of these things. So it's okay for this to feel very painful. It's okay for it to feel messy and even shameful. The work is to move through that shame, to see the pattern, to embrace yourself with a lot of self-compassion, to move through it, to love yourself through it, and then to coach yourself — or to get coached — to do the work, to come out on the other side where it doesn't feel so sticky anymore and you stop tripping over these patterns. You stop falling over them. You stop taking hits and taking losses and experiencing pain over and over again because of a pattern that is easily fixed.

When I say easy, I mean there is a name for it, there's a pattern there, there are tools to move through it. So that's easy, but when you're in it, it's not that easy.

Okay, so that said, let's talk about what happens when you're blindsided. When I'm working with women — actually, let me go back and talk about some of the things that blindsided me in my relationship. One thing that blindsided me was the fact that my ex-husband filed for a divorce. And this is why I laugh at these things, because I look at the marriage itself — the marriage was toxic from the get-go. It was bad from the get-go. Of course there were times of peace, and there were times when things were calm, but overall it was just bad. It was just bad for seventeen years, and it was bad throughout the divorce process. But as bad as it was, when he filed for a divorce, I was blindsided. I was like, "I can't believe he filed for a divorce." And then he also filed without telling me, and I was like, "I can't believe he filed without telling me. He could have just told me he wanted a divorce. What's the big deal?"

And then he wanted full custody of the kids, even though he never engaged with the kids, never talked to the kids. Every outing we went on, everything we did with the kids — the homeschooling, their education, the early college classes — everything, I was the one who did it. I was the one who had the vision. I was the one who did the research. I was the one who implemented. I was the one who drove the kids everywhere. I was the one who did all the medical appointments, all of their nutritional needs. I did one hundred percent of the parenting.

In fact, there would be times when he would be in the basement, maybe working on something, and I would be upstairs playing with the kids, and he'd be mad about it because we were making too much noise. So there was that pattern, but I was blindsided when he said he wanted full custody and that I was a terrible parent and should not be allowed anywhere near the kids. I was blindsided, even though I knew deep down that this person was vengeful and mean and completely unreasonable. I'd seen him be completely unreasonable in so many situations. Even though he had what I would call an inordinate love of money, I was so blindsided when he said he wanted full custody of the kids.

Why, Sade? Why were you blindsided? What was happening those seventeen years that you didn't understand that when a person is this way, this is what they will do when it gets there?

And so that's the problem. I tell those stories so that you know I'm not saying this because this hasn't happened to me or just to throw psychological terms around. This is very real. I think for close to one hundred percent of my clients, when they come to me, very few of them have a clear view of their partner. Very few, and that's okay.

For some of them, they find out that their husband is cheating and they're blindsided by the fact that he's cheating. Or they find out that a very close friend, someone they really love, someone they really respected, someone they put on a pedestal — a friend, a mentor, a pastor — was talking badly about them behind their back. They have family members who are making decisions for them, maybe about the family inheritance, or triangulating them with a parent. And they're like, "I had no idea this was happening. I love these people. I thought they loved me back."

So if you find yourself saying things like, "I can't believe they did that," "I had no idea," "This came out of nowhere," "I was blindsided" — you might have some of these challenges going on.

It's interesting that the women I work with who have this challenge also see themselves as being very good at reading people. They feel like they're very good at reading what people are thinking and what they're feeling and reading their emotions. And in some ways, they are right. I don't know what an empath is, per se, but I've heard the word empath used around some of these things — people talking about those who are very attuned to other people's feelings and emotions and thoughts. And I'll just say this now before I get into the nitty-gritty: that is somewhat true, except that people who are "good at reading" other people's thoughts and emotions are only good at reading the thoughts and emotions that they are looking for, and they don't understand the concept that other human beings are basically opaque. You really can't read other human beings.

Now, you might have learned as a child to scan for certain emotions to keep yourself safe. That does not mean that you are able to read the whole human being. So you might be able to read someone and say — let's say your spouse comes home from work and he's in a bad mood. You can tell he's in a bad mood, and so you make sure you cook his favorite dinner, you make sure you get the kids to be really quiet and they go to bed early, so that nothing makes him mad and it doesn't turn into a whole incident. That may be accurate. You might be accurate about that. You might be watching for his mood, except you're only watching for the part of him that you know to look for that impacts the thing that you're trying to avoid. So you only look at one thing. The fact that he's in a bad mood doesn't tell you that he's also cheating on you, and his girlfriend was not available for whatever it is he wanted, and that's why he's in a bad mood.

Does that make sense? You might be able to read something, and so many of us women are good at this. We know the facial expressions and the tension, and so we walk on eggshells, but it's such a tiny sliver of what might be happening. So I was good at doing my magic. I was good at arranging the family routine so that there could be peace. But I couldn't read that my ex for six months had been planning the divorce and setting me up to basically lose everything, and was moving money and all of those things. I had no idea, even though I had an idea about some things.

So it's not that we're bad at reading people — well, actually, it is that we're bad at reading people, but it doesn't mean that we don't read people accurately in certain situations. The goal here is really to talk about how trying to read people's moods and thoughts, while useful, is not the whole picture. I'm not trying to say don't pick up on situational awareness, which we'll talk about down the road too. If something looks weird, it probably is. But that's not all you need. Often we're trying to read people's minds until we ignore their actions. We're trying to read their mind, even though maybe reading their mind takes us three months and lots of hours of "What does this mean? What does this mean?" And then there's a whole bucket full of actions that we could look at. All these actions mean this other thing, but we ignore all of that.

So when we're dating, as long as the guy is smiling and he's happy to go on a date with us, we're like, "We're good." But then we miss the fact that he never picks up the check, or whatever other signs there might be. We miss all of that.

This is not because you're naive, although there is some level of emotional immaturity to it, or because we're too trusting, even though we do end up trusting too much because of this. And it's definitely not because you're stupid. You are not stupid. This has nothing to do with a level of intelligence or a level of street smarts. It's just a skill that you haven't developed. It's just something you don't know, and we just don't know what we don't know.

So let's talk about the three concepts in psychology that can be helpful. If you are someone who finds yourself constantly blindsided — if you find yourself in court and your ex is filing all of these motions and you're like, "Oh my God, I can't believe he filed that motion. I can't believe he accused me of that" — well, what has he accused you of over the years? What makes you think he wouldn't just continue what he's been doing?

There's a phrase I like to use with my clients, especially the ones who are either married to or in the process of divorcing someone who has narcissistic behaviors, which is that narcissists are easy. They are predictably unpredictable. They're going to do unpredictable things, but those things are unpredictable just because you wouldn't do them. If you actually sat down and looked at the pattern of this person that you've been married to — and you know them best — if you actually sat down rationally, objectively, and looked at the pattern, it's so easy to predict what the narcissist is going to do. You might not like it. It might feel a little overwhelming to see, "Oh my God, he's actually going to try to destroy me." But you can predict it. And what better way to be prepared than to learn how to, in a sense, predict the unpredictable, because you're looking at hard data, you're looking at patterns of behavior, versus trying to read minds in the moment.

So here are three concepts that can help you. I'm just going to touch on them briefly. Feel free to Google them. They're all over the internet.

The first is called theory of mind. As children, we develop this right around four years old, and that is when we realize that just because we're thinking something or just because we know something doesn't mean that the other person knows it too. You'll see little kids when they are hiding — they'll pretend to be invisible, and they think they're invisible. So they think that you think that they're invisible. Or they'll hide something in a place, and it's very obvious that it's hidden there, but because they hid it, they think that you don't know that it's there.

Theory of mind is the understanding — the knowing — that you have the ability to understand that other people have different thoughts and feelings from you. The whole concept of an empath actually completely contradicts this phenomenon. So if you have followed that trend of being an empath, this is something that you might want to look into and say, "Okay, am I really an empath, or am I just scanning for signs on people's faces and their attitudes, and then I'm making predictions that may or may not be accurate?" Because literally, we have no way of knowing what people are thinking and feeling. You can only make a guess. The problem comes when you think your guess is truth. When you think your guess is fact.

When your cheating partner who's been cheating on you constantly for ten years acts like he loves you and comes home with flowers and everything is wonderful, and you take that as, "My God, he's turned a new leaf" — you're not operating from theory of mind. He might have turned a new leaf. He might not have turned a new leaf. You have no idea what's actually happening inside of him. You have no idea. All you can say is, he bought me flowers and he cheated on me constantly for ten years. Those two things are true, and you may or may not be able to make predictions about the future based on the flowers. In fact, I would say don't make predictions about the future based on the flowers. The flowers are just something that's happening right now.

If you can understand and hold that truth — theory of mind — you can engage with people. You don't have to make a prediction. You don't even have to form any conclusions based on what you see. The goal is to just engage with what you see and experience with a person in the moment and not attach greater meaning than is available to you based on that. You might be feeling happy and wonderful and feeling like the marriage is going well, and that's okay. It doesn't mean your partner is feeling the same thing. It just doesn't mean that. And knowing that can give you the ability to say, "Okay, do I want to check in with them, or do I want to just enjoy my happiness and bliss in my little bubble?" But I understand that I am in my bubble, and they are in their bubble.

I say this to my clients all the time. They're like, "Oh, I want to be pursued." And so when a man pursues them, they're like, "Yeah, he's the one, because he's pursuing me." And I'm like, "Well, I know he's pursuing you, and I want you to enjoy that. I want you to be with a man who makes a lot of effort and who pays attention to you, and who is generous. But he's doing those things for his own reasons. He might be doing it just to sleep with you. He might be doing it because he wants to marry you. He might be doing it because he thinks you're compatible. He might be doing it because he has a string of twenty of you. You don't know why he's doing it. So yes, enjoy being pursued and continue to date him and be pursued. Don't make projections and predictions about the future based on what he's doing. Don't project his intentions or his desires or his thinking about you based on what he's doing, because he's doing them for his own reasons."

And then I bring it back to them. I'm like, "So why are you interested in him? Don't hinge your interest in him on what you think he's thinking. Hinge your interest in him on what you want in a relationship and whether or not it's available." Because often in dating, what will happen is the woman stops thinking about what she wants. She stops thinking about what's available to her. She stops thinking about the qualities she's been looking for in a partner, and she hinges all of her interest in him on the fact that he's interested in her. I know that sounded a little convoluted, but it's something that happens all of the time.

Why are you interested in this guy? Sometimes, when we drill down to it, they're interested in him because he's interested in them, and there's just been so much scarcity. They just haven't had a good date in such a long time. They're just happy to have someone interested in them that they stop looking at all of the other tangibles and intangibles that they want.

So that's theory of mind. We don't know why people do what they do. What's available is what they're doing, how that impacts us, and what we want to do about that.

I'm going to do a little aside on this. Sometimes people will harm you, and then they expect you to not get upset because they had good intentions. That is also a problem of theory of mind. Think about this — a skill that we develop at four. Age four. You have adults in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, literally unable to apply it appropriately. They think that because they had good intentions — in their own theory of mind, valid — this should not be a problem for you. "This should not be a problem for you because I had good intentions." That is your own mind, that is your own bubble, that is your own experience, and that's okay, except we have ours. Other people have theirs. And your intention, your own mind, does not cross over into their own experience.

The second concept that I want you to think about is the illusion of transparency. A lot of people — and this is where you have people who use indirect communication — try to say things, try to communicate things without using words. Which is good. It's good to communicate love by doing things for people. It's good to communicate love by buying things for people, by caring for people. However, the assumption that something you have communicated indirectly has landed with another person is a trap.

A lot of people will think, "Well, I did this, I did that, I was this way — they should know that..." They might, and then they might not. So it's an illusion that you being transparent about something, or you thinking that you're being transparent about something, is actually transparent to someone else.

A man thinks, "Well, I don't say I love her, but I pay the bills and I mow the lawn and everything. She should know that I love her. I'm not with anybody else." Well, yes, that is a valid way of choosing to communicate your love. However, it may or may not land with the other person. You need to check in. "Hey, I communicated love to you with all these things. Does that land for you?"

The belief that your thoughts, your feelings, and your intentions are transparent to other people is false.

You see this in the workplace, where people are like, "I did all the work. I was heads down. I showed up. I was the best person. That should communicate to them that I want the promotion." No, it doesn't work that way. You've got to go to your boss ahead of time and say, "Hey, I've been looking at these roles, and I'm hoping to move into this role in the next six to twelve months. Let's have a conversation about what it would take for me to move into my next role so that I can keep growing in my challenges."

You've got to have the conversation. Now there might be some bosses for whom that is intuitive — they just intuit it, maybe because their journey is similar to yours, or because they're thinking ahead for you. But you cannot assume that that is the case.

You have to understand that the illusion of transparency will keep you locked in your experience while another person could be completely locked in their own experience, and you're convinced that everything is clear as day, but it's not the truth.

And then the next one is naive realism, where we believe that people would never do or could never do things that we could never do. I always tell my clients, there's all kinds of people in the world, and you are going to meet them. You cannot assume that people are like you. That is naive realism. That is actually not real. It's not a real thing.

We women get conditioned into this — the nice girl, the good girl, the agreeable person, the "give people the benefit of the doubt," the "don't be judgmental." A lot of the religious conditioning can cause you to have a very high level of naive realism, and that creates a lot of heartbreak and a lot of grief down the line when you realize that the world is not what you thought it was.

So the key here is to not project your own values and your own relational presence onto other people, and to actually take the time to observe people, take the time to get to know people, so that you can understand how they relate to the world and their own values. Then you can make decisions about how to move and interact with that person accordingly — not necessarily to comply with their values, but to actually determine whether there's alignment, whether there's compatibility, whether there is the experience that you want in that place.

A lot of people will go into a workplace that says maybe inclusion is part of their mission statement, and you assume that because that's yours, you're going to match. Yes, they said it, but what did they mean by it? There's a frame of reference that they come from, and do they do that in action? Just because you believe it doesn't mean that in action it's actually happening in the day to day.

When we lack theory of mind, when we believe the illusion of transparency, and we have been conditioned into naive realism, the big habit that women develop — that I've noticed — is minimization. They minimize the actual evidence that is in front of them. They minimize things that they see. They minimize red flags that come up. They minimize patterns that they start to recognize, or what their intuition tells them. They don't take a good look at what is happening and address it, because that would require them to potentially do things that they don't want to do, to see things that they don't want to see.

So there's the first part where you've been conditioned, possibly, to not even see. But even when you do see, there are other factors — things like, "Oh my God, I'm being a mean person. I'm being too judgmental. I would have to leave the relationship. I would have to do something about this. I don't want to have to set boundaries." All of those things can cause us to minimize. We don't want to own our reality or look closer because we don't want to do something about it.

And I get that, because for a lot of women, there's just so much emotional labor, so much poor treatment from their partner, that they're holding so much together. They don't even have the time to dig deeper. They don't have the time, they don't have the bandwidth. Maybe they're caring for the kids. Maybe you're caring for multiple children. If you have children with special needs, you're running them to appointments, you're doing school runs, you're talking to the teachers, you're dealing with their medical appointments while working — all of those things.

So when your partner is scrolling in a weird way on his phone and that raises a red flag, I get it. You might just want to minimize that in the moment and just move on because there's a kid throwing a tantrum who doesn't want to go to bed, and you've got to deal with that in the moment. However, that situation doesn't mean that what you are experiencing or seeing in that moment isn't going to have an effect in the future, that it isn't going to turn into something that you are still going to have to deal with. So minimizing it and ignoring it is still not the answer. Avoiding it is not the answer.

But let's just say, if you are experiencing any of the things that I've talked about today, just give yourself some self-compassion. You didn't create the world that we're in and the systems that we're in that have made all of these things necessary. You didn't create your conditioning. If you were a kid who was the truth teller in your family and you got labeled too much, dramatic, troublemaker — all those things — it makes sense that right now you've really trained yourself not to call things out because you got into way too much trouble as a young person for calling things out. You got punished. You got excluded. People didn't like you because you called out things that you saw. And so that makes sense.

Really, don't blame or shame yourself for being this person. There's a reason that you are this person. You're not doing it to be stupid or weird or whatever. These are all coping mechanisms for this insane world that we find ourselves in. You might be over-functioning because your partner is too passive. Your partner will just let everyone and everything in your family fall apart if you don't hold it together. So you don't have the time to do this. It makes sense that you haven't wanted to take a look at it, or you're just keeping the peace. There's been way too much conflict. You might have grown up with conflict. Conflict escalates and gets out of hand. So you're just like, "I just don't want any trouble." Of course that makes sense. It makes sense that you don't want to raise a ruckus that might be harmful to your children or that your partner might harm you.

However, you don't also have to let things keep building up, because they are building up. The goal is to say, "How do I safely take a look at what's really happening in my relationship? How do I safely make space to think about this, to look at the signs, to correct my own thinking and my own patterns of ignoring things?" To deal with that alone is work. Opening your body and your experience to feelings of anxiety or grief or dread that might come up — just opening that up is a bit of a process, so that you can safely and calmly and still function in your life while taking a look at these things.

The goal is to walk through it and process these things safely, not to just throw caution to the wind. These patterns have taken decades to build up. It doesn't take decades to unwind them, but you do need to do it consciously and thoughtfully.

If that's something you would like support with, definitely reach out to me. My link will be in the show notes or in the bio if you're seeing this on social media, and we can do a free consultation where I can show you how you can start to do that work — to open up yourself so that you can know what you know. It's another thing I tell my clients: let's know what we know. What are the things that we know? What are the things that we don't know? You don't have to build things on what you don't know, but allow yourself to know what you know about your situation and your life, because you are the adult in your life. You are the boss now. You're a big girl, and you've got to handle your own stuff.

If you find yourself constantly blindsided in any relationship — any friendship, family relationship, in your marriage, or during the divorce — reach out to me. Let's do a free consultation call. Let's talk about your next steps in unwinding some of these challenges.

Thank you for your time and attention today. I appreciate you hanging in there with me for a little deep dive into psychology today. I'll see you on the next episode.