One of the best counters to that line of thought is fairly simple... reverse it.
Would you be better off if your kids committed suicide?
Similarly, you can look at each of the distortions below & reverse them to see if your logic holds water.
- Mom would be fine, if not better off.
- Mom has surrogate kids in her life, good kids, that deserve to be loved and sent to college and cared for. She doesn’t need
me to be the one she loves on.
- I’m just a burden, Imwant her to have kids she can be proud of, the best kids. Not me.
Etc.
Hint : That’s not the same! = "Disqualifying the Positive” (insisting they don’t count for whatever specious reason)
It’s exactly the same. You don’t get to decide that they’d be better off with you dead, the same way they don’t get to decide how you feel about their deaths (or their lives).
As parents it’s very natural to overreach, because we spend
years deciding (and agonizing over) what’s best for our kids. But that doesn’t mean we can actually exert godlike influence over their hearts/minds/futures and not only dictate what they think, how they feel, but also what their future will be. You know this. You can send them to the best schools, and that doesn’t guarantee an A, or a popular kid, or an athlete. No matter how much you set them
up for success, you can’t make success happen just by wanting it. So... why would the rules suddenly change and all you have to do is
want it, for suicide to be any different?
***
As to which cognitive distortions are involved? Just from the paragraph in your OP (and I’m fairly certain there’s more, also being a mom)
- MASSIVE Minimizing (they’d be fine, if not better off)
- Mind Reading (deciding how they’d think & feel about your suicide)
- Disqualifying the positive (you don’t count, they have surrogate parents // ditto not seeing the positive in looking for reasons to justify
- Emotional Reasoning (feeling they’d be better off, feeling unnecessary. // I feel it, must be true.)
- Labeling (I want what is best ie NOT me)
Should be noted here... there are dozens and dozens of cognitive distortions.
The top 10 are just that.
The 10 primary cognitive distortions are:
- 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.
- Over-generalization -- 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 so exclusively that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors 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 even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. (Involves mind-reading and fortune-telling.)
- Magnification and minimization -- You exaggerate the importance of things, or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny.
- Emotional reasoning -- You assume that your emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are, as in "I feel it, therefore it must be true."
- Should statements -- You try to motivate yourself with "should" and "should not," as if you have to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything.
- Labeling and mislabeling -- This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself.
- Personalization -- You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible for.
