lurkette

I've been doing cognitive behavior therapy for the last year or so, and one of the most useful things I've gotten out of it is the concept of "cognitive distortions." There are a handful of very common "thinking mistakes" that people make that tend to make them unhappy. I was looking at them today (I think I'm stuck in at least a few of them right now - the trick is accepting that they are MISTAKES and NOT TRUE!!!) and thought, hey, why don't I share these with folks - I'll bet a lot of people will recognize themselves. So here goes:

ALL OR NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
A. MIND READING: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this out.
B. THE FORTUNETELLER ERROR: You can anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other person's imperfections). This is also called "the binocular trick."

EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with should and shouldn't, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequences are guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: For example, "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him. Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event, which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

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Do you recognize yourself doing these things? When you see yourself doing them, how do you stop doing them?

The big ones that seem to be indelible habits for me are "all or nothing thinking,"(I'm not where I want to be, therefore I'm a failure); "emotional reasoning" (I feel anxious, so there must be something to be anxious about...now if I worry enough about it, I can figure out what it is and keep it from happening); and "disqualifying the positive," (sure, so-and-so says she loves me, but she can't really mean it).

__________________
"If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

- Anatole France