I was driving down the highway when I saw him coming up behind me — an erratic driver, speeding, swerving between lanes, cutting people off without signaling. My jaw clenched. My hands tightened on the wheel.
When he veered directly in front of me, barely missing my bumper, I felt a surge of anger and adrenaline. How dare he? I’m trying to get somewhere too! What is wrong with this guy?
Then he slowed. Pulled off at an exit.
As I passed, I glanced over. The driver was clutching his chest, his face twisted in pain. And there, at the exit, was a large blue sign with a white H. Hospital.
In an instant, my anger evaporated. Suddenly, I felt concern, even compassion. I found myself hoping he’d make it, that he’d be okay.
Here’s what strikes me about this moment: The driver’s behavior hadn’t changed. The facts were exactly the same. But my emotional state shifted completely as soon as I had new information that changed my assumptions and perceptions.
I went from anger to concern in a heartbeat. Same situation. Different story in my head. Completely different emotional response.
This same dynamic plays out in our marriages every single day. We see our spouse’s behavior, we make assumptions about what it means, and we react based on our… interpretation. Not based on what’s actually happening, but our interpretation of what happened. And most of the time, we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
And that interpretation? It almost always means we personalized things.
What Is Personalization?
Personalization is when we take something that isn’t personal and make it about us. It’s when we interpret our spouse’s emotions, actions, or words as being directed at us or caused by us, when that may not be true at all.
It sounds simple when I put it that way. But in the moment, it feels absolutely real.
Your spouse comes home irritable, and you immediately think: I did something wrong. They’re mad at me.
Your spouse is quiet at dinner, and you assume: They don’t want to be around me. I’ve upset them somehow.
Your spouse forgets something you asked them to do, and you interpret: I don’t matter to them. They don’t care about what’s important to me.
Your spouse expresses any frustration about anything, and you hear: They’re criticizing me. This is about me.
The automatic questions we ask ourselves reveal the pattern:
What did I do wrong?
Why are they mad at me?
What does this mean about us?
Are they pulling away?
Every interaction becomes a potential referendum on your relationship, on your worth as a partner, on whether you’re loved and accepted. The emotional weight is exhausting.
Why We Personalize (And Why It’s Not Your Fault)
Before I go any further, I want to be clear: If you recognize yourself in these patterns, you’re not broken. You’re not damaged. You’re not “too sensitive” or “too anxious.”
Personalization is a deeply human response to vulnerability, and it gets amplified in intimate relationships for very good reasons.
First, marriage makes us emotionally exposed. In no other relationship do we have so much at stake. Our sense of security, our daily happiness, our future… all of it is tied up with this one person and how they feel about us. Of course we become hypervigilant to any signs of disconnection or rejection. The stakes are high, so our system is constantly scanning for threats.
Second, anxiety distorts our perception. When we’re anxious about our relationship, whether because of current struggles or past wounds, we interpret everything through that anxious lens. Anxiety doesn’t let us hold multiple possibilities. It jumps immediately to the worst interpretation.
Your spouse is quiet? They must be upset with you. Your spouse seems distant? They must be having doubts about the relationship. Anxiety demands certainty, and personalization provides it — even if the certainty is painful.
Third, past experience teaches us to expect patterns. If you’ve been hurt before, whether in this relationship or in previous ones, your nervous system learns to anticipate similar pain. When something in the present even slightly resembles the past, you’re not responding to what’s happening now. You’re responding to what happened before. Your spouse’s tone reminds you of a past conflict, and suddenly you’re back in that old pattern, reacting as if it’s happening again.
Here’s what many people don’t realize: Even people with generally secure attachment styles get rattled in the face of marital conflict. Research shows that relationship threat can temporarily destabilize even the most secure among us. So, this isn’t about having an “anxious attachment style.” This is about being human in an intimate relationship where you have everything to lose.
The Real Cost of Personalization
The problem with personalization isn’t that you are feeling things. Your emotions are real and valid. The problem is what happens when you act on interpretations that might be completely wrong.
You react to a story, not to reality. When you personalize, you’re responding to what you think is happening, not to what’s actually happening. This means your response is often wildly mismatched to the situation. Your spouse is preoccupied with a work crisis, but you’re hurt and withdrawing because you’ve decided they’re mad at you. The mismatch creates disconnection where none needed to exist.
You become defensive or hurt unnecessarily. If you believe your spouse is attacking you or rejecting you, you’ll defend yourself or pull away to protect yourself. This is a reasonable response to an actual attack or rejection. But if your interpretation is wrong… if your spouse is just dealing with their own stress, then your defensive response actually creates the conflict you were afraid of.
You can’t see what’s really going on with your spouse. This might be the most damaging cost of all. When everything is about you, you miss your spouse’s actual reality. Their stress becomes “they’re upset with me.” Their exhaustion becomes “they don’t want to be around me.” Their anxiety becomes “they’re having doubts about us.” You can’t be supportive or empathetic because you’re too busy being defensive. Their inner world becomes invisible to you, replaced by your anxious interpretations.
You lose the sense of being a team. Partnership requires the ability to see things from a “WE” perspective — us against the problem. But personalization turns everything into “me against you.” Every mood, every tension, every difficult moment becomes a conflict between the two of you rather than something you navigate together.
A Story From My Own Marriage
I learned about my own personalization pattern the hard way.
Early in my marriage, I had a clear default setting: If my wife was upset, I had done something wrong. I didn’t consciously think about it — it was just automatic. Anytime I sensed tension or frustration from her, my mind immediately went to: What did I do? How did I mess up? How do I fix this?
One day, my wife finally addressed it directly. She said something that surprised me: “I have my own stuff. You are not always on my mind.”
It was an interesting observation — and a humbling one. In my constant vigilance to figure out what I had done wrong, I was actually being somewhat egocentric. I was making her emotional life entirely about me. As if she didn’t have her own stresses, her own challenges, her own inner world that had nothing to do with me at all.
She made me an offer: “If I’m upset with you, I will let you know. Otherwise, you can assume it’s not about you.”
So I worked on it. I practiced the internal mantra: It isn’t me... unless she says so. I worked hard to rewire that automatic response, to give her the space to have her own feelings without me making them about me.
Some time passed. I was getting better at it, I thought.
Then one day, she was clearly upset. I could see it. But I deployed my new skill: It isn’t me. I gave her space. I went on with my day, feeling pretty good about my growth and my ability to not personalize.
Hours went by.
Finally, she came to me with frustration in her voice: “Hey, this IS about you.”
I had been so committed to not personalizing that I’d actually missed a time when her upset genuinely was about me. She had to process her feelings first before she could articulate it, and by the time she was ready to tell me, I’d mentally moved on completely.
Here’s what I learned from that moment: We both had to adjust. I had to stop automatically personalizing everything. But she also had to be explicit when something actually was about me. This wasn’t just me working on my own issue in isolation. This was us building a new system together.
And that’s the key insight I want you to hold onto: Even when you’re the one recognizing your pattern of personalization, changing it requires both people to adapt. It’s not all on you.
The Trap of Going Too Far the Other Way
Now, you might be thinking: Okay, so I should just assume nothing is about me. Problem solved.
Not quite.
There’s an equal and opposite danger: deciding that nothing your spouse feels or does has anything to do with you. That’s just avoidance wearing a different costume. It’s a way of dodging responsibility and disconnecting from your partner’s legitimate needs and concerns.
If I always assume “it’s not about me,” I can ignore times when I actually do need to take responsibility. I can dismiss my spouse’s hurt. I can avoid accountability. I can stay comfortable and never have to face difficult truths about my impact on the relationship.
The person who personalizes everything becomes hypervigilant and defensive, always on edge, always reacting. The person who personalizes nothing becomes dismissive and avoidant, checking out emotionally, never taking responsibility.
Both extremes destroy intimacy.
What we’re after is something more nuanced: the ability to hold both possibilities at the same time. This might be about me. This might not be about me. I don’t know yet, and that’s okay. Let me find out.
That capacity — to stay present with uncertainty, to be curious rather than defensive, to hold space for your spouse’s reality without immediately making it about yourself — that’s the skill that transforms relationships.
So What Now?
If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself, you might be feeling a bit of shame. Or frustration. Or maybe relief that someone finally named what you’ve been experiencing.
Whatever you’re feeling, I want you to know: Awareness is the first step. You can’t change a pattern you don’t see.
The fact that you can recognize personalization in yourself means you’re already on the path toward responding differently. The automatic nature of it starts to break down the moment you can name it.
Here’s what I want you to try this week:
Just notice. Don’t try to change anything yet. Just pay attention to when you find yourself personalizing. When does it happen? What triggers it? What does it feel like in your body? What thoughts run through your mind?
Maybe you catch it in the moment: Oh, I’m doing it again. I’m assuming this is about me.
Or maybe you reflect at the end of the day: When my spouse seemed stressed after work, I immediately thought I’d done something wrong. That was personalization.
Building awareness is powerful all by itself. Once you see the pattern, you create the possibility of choosing something different.
And choosing something different: responding instead of reacting, staying curious instead of defensive, holding space for multiple interpretations instead of jumping to the worst one. That’s what we’ll explore in the next article.
Because here’s the truth: Personalization might be automatic, but it’s not inevitable. You can learn to catch it. You can develop the skill of seeing your spouse’s emotions and behaviors as information rather than as threats. You can build the capacity to stay connected even when you’re uncertain about what something means.
You can learn to ask “What’s going on?” instead of “What did I do?”
And that question, that shift from defensiveness to curiosity, changes everything.
The good news is that you don’t have to wait for your spouse to change or to meet you halfway. You can start building this skill on your own. Even if you’re working on your marriage alone right now, changing your response changes the system. It models something different. It creates a new possibility.
In the next article, I’ll walk you through exactly how to make that shift — the specific steps you can take to move from personalization to partnership, from reaction to response, from defensiveness to curiosity.
For now, just notice. Pay attention to the pattern. See it clearly.
That’s where change begins.
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore the three-step process for responding to your spouse with care and curiosity instead of personalization and defensiveness — even when you’re anxious, even when trust is shaky, and even when you’re working on your marriage alone.
Dr. Lee H. Baucom is a marriage coach with over 30 years of experience helping couples save and restore their relationships. He is the creator of the Save The Marriage System and author of How To Save Your Marriage In 3 Simple Steps.