In Sep­tem­ber 2014 we had Carl­ton Craig, PhD, LCSW, DCSW  from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tuck­y’s Col­lege of Social Work present to us on Cog­ni­tive Behav­ioral Ther­a­py.  (See post on Prin­ci­ples of CBT here).

He pre­sent­ed these fre­quent­ly seen “cog­ni­tive dis­tor­tions”, or ways peo­ple think auto­mat­i­cal­ly. CBT encour­ages the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and acknowl­edge­ment of these thought patterns.

Com­mon Cog­ni­tive Distortions

1. Dis­qual­i­fy­ing or dis­count­ing the pos­i­tive. You unrea­son­ably tell your­self that pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences, deeds or qual­i­ties do not count. e.g. “I did that project well, but that does­n’t mean I’m com­pe­tent; I just got lucky.”
2. Emo­tion­al rea­son­ing. You think some­thing must be true because you “feel” (actu­al­ly believe) it so strong­ly, ignor­ing or dis­count­ing evi­dence to the con­trary. e.g. “I know I do a lot of things okay at work, but I still feel like I’m a failure.”
3. Label­ing. You put a fixed, glob­al label on your­self or oth­ers with­out con­sid­er­ing that the evi­dence might more rea­son­ably lead to a less dis­as­trous con­clu­sion. e.g. “I’m a los­er.” “He’s no good.”
4. Magnification/Minimization When you eval­u­ate your­self, anoth­er per­son, or a sit­u­a­tion, you unrea­son­ably mag­ni­fy the neg­a­tive and/or min­i­mize the pos­i­tive. e.g. “Get­ting a mediocre eval­u­a­tion proves how inad­e­quate I am.” “Get­ting high marks does­n’t mean I’m smart.”
5. Men­tal Fil­ter You pay undue atten­tion to one neg­a­tive detail instead of see­ing the whole pic­ture. e.g. “Because I got one low rat­ing on my eval­u­a­tion [which also con­tained sev­er­al high rat­ings], it means I am doing a lousy job.”
6. Mind Read­ing You believe you know what oth­ers are think­ing, fail­ing to con­sid­er oth­er, more like­ly pos­si­bil­i­ties. e.g. ” He thinks that I don’t know the first thing about this project.”
7. Over­gen­er­al­iza­tion You make a sweep­ing neg­a­tive con­clu­sion that goes far beyond the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. e.g. “Because I felt uncom­fort­able at the meet­ing I don’t have what it takes to make friends.”
8. Per­son­al­iza­tion You believe oth­ers are behav­ing neg­a­tive­ly because of you, with­out con­sid­er­ing more plau­si­ble expla­na­tions for their behav­ior. e.g. “The repair­man was curt to me because I did some­thing wrong.”
9. Should and Must State­ments You have a pre­cise, fixed idea of how you or oth­ers should behave, and you over­es­ti­mate how bad it is that these expec­ta­tions are not met.  e.g. “It’s ter­ri­ble that I made a mis­take; I should always do my best.”
10. Tun­nel Vision You only see the neg­a­tive aspects of a sit­u­a­tion. e.g. “My son’s teacher can’t do any­thing right. He’s crit­i­cal and insen­si­tive and lousy at teaching.”
11. All-or-Noth­ing Think­ing You view a sit­u­a­tion in only two cat­e­gories instead of a con­tin­u­um. e.g. “If I’m not a total suscess, I’m a fail­ure.”  This is also called polar­ized, black-and-white, or dichoto­mous thinking.
12. Cat­a­stro­phiz­ing You pre­dict the future neg­a­tive­ly with­out con­sid­er­ing oth­er, more like­ly out­comes. e.g. “I’ll be so upset, I own’t be able to func­tion at all.”  This is also called for­tune-telling sometimes.

Do some of these sound famil­iar to you? Do you resem­ble them? Does some­one else you know? Share this and talk about ways to pre­vent these thought processes.

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