Disqualifying the positive: When you dismiss positive things that have happened, you are distorting the way things are.Īs somebody with a lot of training in therapy, I am constantly looking out for cognitive distortions in the language around me – including the words I say to myself.Should statements: Thoughts based on the idea that the world “should” or “shouldn’t” be a certain way are cognitive distortions, too.Personalization: The act of blaming yourself for events that you aren’t (fully) responsible for is called personalization.Overgeneralization: Similar to catastrophizing, overgeneralizing means expecting more bad things to happen because one negative event has occurred.Mental filtering: Cognitive distortions can be driven by focusing only on negative information and ignoring or devaluing positive information.Labeling: When you classify yourself as a categorically bad or unworthy person because of one event that happened, you are engaged in labeling.Emotional reasoning: We engage in emotional reasoning when our thoughts are driven by our emotions, not objective facts.Catastrophizing: When you create a disaster scenario in your head, based on little or no concrete evidence that the event will actually happen, you are catastrophizing.Anytime you’ve decided your partners, supervisor, or even just a person on the street is judging you – without consulting them to find out whether it’s true – you’re engaged in mindreading. Mindreading: When we mindread, we assume that somebody else is having certain thoughts, often negative, about us.All-or-nothing thinking: Remember the example in the opening paragraph of this article? All-or-nothing thoughts (sometimes called black-and-white thinking, too) categorize the world into absolutes, leaving out the possibility of any gray area.How many of these can you recognize from your own thinking? Here is a definitive list of ten types of thinking errors (Burns, 1980). We often carry these cognitive distortions from our childhoods into the present day. Do you remember all the “rules” you learned about gender roles growing up? If you were raised as a boy and knew that “boys don’t cry” – an example of all-or-nothing-thinking – then you probably felt shame or guilt when you did cry. This is especially true when our brains aren’t fully developed in fact, it is as children that we first develop these cognitive distortions (Beck, 1963). In other words, our brains evolved to bypass slow, logical thinking when immediate, gut reactions are required (Krebs & Denton, 1997). Most cognitive distortions are related to experiences of negative emotions, such as feeling threatened (Beck, 1963), and with good reason: we have evolved to make quick decisions about whether we are safe, so we can take quick action to protect ourselves. Emotions are generated by older and more primitive parts of the brain than the more cognition-oriented brain regions, and those older parts evolved not to be logical, but to keep us alive (Gilbert, 1998). While we can change our thoughts to change our emotions (more on that below), it is also natural and automatic for us to think after we feel. Experiencing a certain emotion, for example, can lead us to a thought that would not have been prompted by a different emotion.
Coming from a long tradition of philosophical traditions that have tried to understand how thinking and feeling interact (Ellis, 1962), cognitive therapy tells us that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are interrelated (Beck, 1964). The idea of cognitive distortions took its current form with the creation of cognitive therapy (Beck, 1963).
0 kommentar(er)
