Cognitive Distortions

My daughter put me onto a book called Feeling Good by David D. Burns. The chapter on cognitive distortions particularly interested me, because I think a lot of my raging over the years has started with distorted thoughts. Here they are, quoted from the book, with my own additional tidbits. Check 'em out. Maybe you'll find yourself there somewhere. If you do, you're the winner, cuz you have one more insight into overcoming your destructive habit.

1. 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. Your thinking may include words like "never," "always," "total," "completely," "absolutely." The problem with this kind of thinking is that you will set yourself up for discrediting yourself because you can't meet your own expectations. What's more, you'll be frustrated because your thinking won't conform to reality, so you won't be able to fix the problems you see.

2. OVER GENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. My son once asked 16 girls out on a date before he got a yes answer. It could have been devastating to him if he had overgeneralized and told himself "No girl will ever want a date with me." But he didn't. Instead, he made a list of the girls and the reasons they offered for not going with him. As we looked at the list, it did appear that one girl may not have had a valid reason for turning him down, but the others all had legitimate time conflicts. Burns warns, "The pain of rejection is generated almost entirely from overgeneralization." This happens a lot to me after I've verbally abused someone. My family will here me say, "Everybody hates me." That thought doesn't exactly bring out my friendlier side.

3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water. You wear a pair of eyeglasses with special lenses that filter out anything positive. All that you allow to enter your conscious mind is negative. Because you are not aware of this "filtering process," you conclude that everything is negative. I have focused my mental filter on myself, causing depression, as well as on others, causing harsh criticism where, in reality, praise would have been appropriate.

4. 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. Two examples from my children's lives exemplify this distortion. I remember watching my daughter, who supposed no one in her church youth group liked her. One night I watched as another young woman stood right in front of my daughter and said, "Hi." My daughter didn't reply. The girl said hi again, this time calling her by name. My daughter never responded. I was surprised and chagrined that she would reject this girl so blatantly and later talked with my daughter about it. She had no idea what I was referring to. In her consciousness, this girl hadn't said one word to her. On two other occasions a daughter was trying for a scholarship. When I tried to encourage her that she could get the scholarships, she assured me she wouldn't. These were hard scholarships, that very few people got. She did, indeed, receive the scholarships. When I congratulated her, she poo-pooed them, saying they were easy, that anyone could get them. Disqualifying the positive removes much of life's richness and makes things appear needlessly bleak.

5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. Jumping to conclusions comes in two forms:
a. Mind Reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this out. You may respond to these imagined negative reactions by withdrawal or counterattack. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've done this, but I can tell you I do it more with certain people than with others. Keeping this in mind, when I'm interacting with those people, I keep a weather eye out for my own storm signals, and can talk myself down before I react irrationally.
b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact. In our family we call this a "dark fantasy." For instance, my husband has been working out in the back lot the entire morning of the first day of his vacation. My dark fantasy is that he'll be out there the whole vacation and I'll never get to see him. It really ticks me off that he would do that! But wait! It's still the first day of vacation, and he hasn't done that yet! So I told him, "This is my dark fantasy..." It helps us understand each other, and makes the ranting and raving unnecessary.

6. MAGNIFICATION AND MINIMILIZATION: 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 fellow's imperfections). I see this one a lot in my sons' baseball games. A kid strikes out and he chokes for the rest of the season cuz he's got it figured that he's a terrible ball player. The other kid who got struck out doesn't matter, cuz he's usually a really good hitter. On the other hand, if he makes a home run, it was just lucky, while if the other kid makes a home run, he's totally awesome!

7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are. "I feel it, therefore it must be true." One day in April one of my sons was feeling about as miserable as he could. It was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day! When he gets in that mood, it seems only time will get him out of it. But that day, everyone in the family seemed to be feeling the same way. We all went around hissing and spitting at each other. I had to take a step back and ask, "What the heck is really going on here?" The instant I asked the question I knew the answer. CABIN FEVER! As soon as I recognized we made plans to escape. Our emotions said, "There's no escape from this long, hard winter," but the reality was that it was spring! Yay!

8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, 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 consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. Frankly, I feel anger, frustration, and resentment even when I direct should statements toward myself. As the mother of seven, I have a lot on my plate, and I resent the notion in my mind that somehow I'm falling short when I'm running as fast as I can. How many distortions can I combine in one thought? That was several, at least.

9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of over generalization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "He's a louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded. I don't know if this one was easy for me to overcome, or if I've just been working on it for a long time. The Bible tells us in Matthew 5:37, "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." When I read that I realized I needed to be very precise in my communication, particularly when I'm angry. Instead of saying, "You're such a jerk!" I need to say, "I didn't like that." Instead of threatening, "If you don't take the trash out, you'll have dishes for a week," I need to tell the truth, "If you don't take the trash out, I'll have to stop cooking dinner to take it out myself." It's a simple statement of fact that shows my real reasoning, and interestingly, it gets a much better team effort than the more colorful option.

10. PERSONALIZATION: you see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for. One of my daughters does this. If I'm having a bad day when she shows up at my house, she figures it's because she showed up. A friend did this when he became a leader of a young men's group shortly before one of the young men killed himself. He figured there must have been something he could have done to stop the tragedy, but the truth is he hardly even knew the boy! This distortion is the mother of crippling guilt. Sense the reality is that you have little to no control over the situation, you can't fix it, and you're stuck living with the guilt. I don't know about you, but living like that would make me very hard to get along with.

Burns assures, "You can learn to correct the distortions that fool you when you are upset." He adds, "Once you have learned how to perceive life more realistically you will experience an enhanced emotional life with a greater appreciation for genuine sadness--which lacks distortion--as well as joy." I believe it. I've seen it in my own life in piece parts, and I keep checking, especially early when I feel myself getting angry, before my rage meter shoots sky high: "Is this feeling based on a distorted cognition?"