COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS



Suffolk Cognitive-Behavioral, PLLC

*COGNITIVE PATTERNS

Below is a list of common thinking patterns and processes. These patterns or distortions are common to all who feel and think. They can be a useful shorthand for our thinking and actions if they are used flexibly, but become problematic when used excessively or rigidly. Each individual tends to have their own particular patterns. Can you identify yours? How aware are you of your thought processes? Do you take them at face value? Do you trust your thought patterns? Do you always act on them?

1. MENTAL FILTER: Our minds are not unbiased passive receivers of information. Our attention, like radar, is set to look for and screen the information coming in so that we often only see what we are looking for. We tend to confirm our pre-existing assumptions. What ever information doesn’t fit with our beliefs is screened or filtered out, ignored or explained away as insignificant. This “Mental Filter” the most general of all the patterns and often the most invisible to our selves. Mental filtering along with the next two patterns below, are some of the most pervasive.

1A: DISQUALIFYING: A specific type of “mental filtering”. Even if information that doesn’t fit makes it past your mental filter radar, it is disqualified, or explained away, rationalized away or otherwise minimized.

2. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: A pattern of making premature conclusions based on incomplete or ambiguous information. Can also be a tendency to live in and react to an imagined future. More specifically it tends to occur in two forms;

2A: FORTUNE TELLING: Anticipating, predicting and otherwise trying to imagine and control all the ways that something might go wrong in the future.

2B: MIND READING: Hyper-Focusing on what (you perceive) to be what others think of you, or what they want from you. Believing conclusively you see what they see about you.

3. EMOTIONAL REASONING: This is thinking based on emotions. Mistaking feelings for facts. Taking what your emotions seem to be telling you as literal fact. Another variation is taking actions based on our emotions or urges.

4. ALL OR NOTHING THINKING: Also goes by several different names, DICHOTOMOUS THINKING, or BLACK & WHITE THINKING. Pattern of seeing only one TRUTH as valid, no room for two sides to a story, no moderation or grey areas, and context is made irrelevant. Rigid, analytic and inflexible, type reasoning, similar to “absolute thinking”.

Suffolk Cognitive-Behavioral, PLLC

“Cognitive Patterns” Page 2

5. ABSOLUTE THINKING: Compulsive and perfectionistic type expectations. Demanding & insisting (perhaps only to ourselves) that things must be a certain way, e.g., the one way, the right way or the fair way. Often seen with “high achievers” and “type A” personalities. May take the form of; oughts, shoulds, musts, have-to’s or can’t.

6. PERSONALIZATION: Causes of events (usually “bad” events) are attributed to ourselves rather than to contexts and situations, etc. This is often oversimplified thinking since we see events as having only one cause and ourselves as being one-sided. We disqualify the multiple causes of events and the multiple aspects of ourselves. “Blaming” & “Labeling” are two additional variations on “Personalization”.

6A: BLAMING: sort of the mirror image of personalizing, believing that it is others that are causing things to happen, while overlooking additional causes & influences, including your own.

6B: LABELING: Often “Labeling” follows “personalization” or “blaming”. Often “Labeling” takes the form of “name calling” ourselves or others. Complex human beings are taken out of context and reduced to an overgeneralized characteristic. On a deeper level it is a reductionistic and mechanistic way of understanding what “self” or “others” is. Labeling is not seeing a person in context and not seeing them as an ongoing, developing, multi-sided entity. Instead a person is reduced to a permanent, stagnant; name, word, caricature, image or type of behavior.

7. OVERGENERALIZATION: Drawing broad and general conclusions from a specific, particular or generally limited amount of information. Particular events in time may be seen as permanent situations, rather than ongoing, developing and changing.

8. MAGNIFICATION or MINIMIZING: Forgetting to be aware that our minds act like binoculars. Depending on the end you look through things can seem either much bigger or much smaller than is warranted. Reacting to imagined “worst case scenarios” as if they were actually happening. Sometimes called “catastrophizing”.

* Reference: To learn more about these “patterns”; See original work on “Cognitive Distortions” by Cognitive Therapy of Depression by Aaron Beck MD; or Feeling Good, by David Burns MD.

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