Distorted Thoughts... How many do you have?

How and why do we damage ourselves by inflicting problems like Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) onto ourselves?

A combination of bad experiences and learned childhood survival techniques affect our perception of the environment and events as adults. Reality is skewed and distorted in some way.

"We have trains of irrational thoughts that lead to many distorted views and prevent us from seeing the bigger picture."

It’s similar to the expression about someone

 ‘seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses’

 where they see only the pleasant things about a situation and not notice the things that are unpleasant.

But conversely in a negative way, there are many colours and shades of glasses through which we look at things, and these colours depend on the assumptions and beliefs we have about ourselves, others and the world around us.

Examples of Distorted Thinking

How many of these styles of thinking have you found yourself doing?

·        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.

·       OVERGENERALISATION: 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 all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolours 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 though there are no definite facts that convincingly support conclusion.

• Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and you don't bother to check this out.
• The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

·       MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHISlNG) OR MINIMISATION: 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). 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 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.

·       LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralisation. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I'm a loser.” When someone else’s behaviour rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He's a goddamn idiot.” Mislabelling involves describing an event with language that is highly coloured and emotionally loaded.

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

·       SELF-WORTH: You make an arbitrary decision that in order to accept yourself as worthy, okay, or to simply feel good about yourself, you have to perform in a certain way; usually most or all the time.

It's very difficult to be aware of ourselves when having these negative thoughts. But counselling is the best way to find out what's going on and why you seem to be trapped in a negative cycle. 

Believe it or not, it only takes small changes to make a BIG difference. 

If you think you or someone you know may be suffering from irrational thinking and its causing problems, please contact Sam at Therapy forLife.