Cognitive Distortions Flashcards
All or Nothing Thinking
To perceive things at the extremes by removing the middle ground or room for mistakes. You may think of yourself or others as being either great or awful, hard-working or lazy, delightful or intolerable.
Blaming Others
Holding other people entirely accountable for a negative outcome. If a bad situation must be the fault of someone else, then you are Other-Blaming.
Catastrophizing
Thinking about disastrous possibilities based on a relatively small observation or event: it can lead to believing that the worst case scenario is the one that will play out.
Emotional Reasoning
“If I feel that way, then it must be true.”
You accept your emotional reaction as an automatic indicator of reality. In other words, emotional reasoning occurs when you believe that something is true because of your feelings about it.
Fortune Telling
Making dramatic predictions about the future with little or no evidence. Overestimating our ability to know what will happen in the future.
Labelling
An extension of overgeneralization that involves assigning negative global judgement (entire groups or people) based on a small amount of evidence. These labels create inaccurate views of the people, places, and things around us.
Mind Reading
It involves making assumptions about what others are thinking and feeling based on limited evidence. It’s possible to have an idea of what others may be thinking, though these intuitions are often inaccurate because there are so many factors that influence the thoughts and feelings of others that we are not aware of.
Magnifying the Negative
Magnifying the negative fixates our thoughts on only the negative parts of a situation. This results in amplifying fears, losses, and irritations and the positive parts of the situation are not given fair consideration.
Minimizing the Positive
Actively reduces the volume of anything good. Ignoring the value or importance of the positive parts of a situation.
Overgeneralization
You draw broad conclusions based on just one piece of evidence. This thoughts pattern is often based on the assumption that one bad experience means that whenever you’re in a similar situation, the bad experience will repeat itself.
Self-Blaming
Aka “Personalization.” Believing that you are entirely responsible for a negative situation, even for factors that are outside of your control. What other people do or say is a reaction to you.
Should Statements
Creating narrow and inflexible rules about how you and other people should behave. People “should” or “act” a certain way and if they do not, they are judged as faulty or wrong in some way.
