To challenge this cognitive distortion, perhaps break it down a bit.
@Lilac98 … This. ^^^^
For example? ONE of the cognitive distortions probably in play here, and there are likely to be at least a few, is : jumping to conclusions.
(See below for a list to 10 primary / most common cognitive distortions found with PTSD, including that one)
This is a PTSD site. Which means that the people here have been raped, gang raped, sexually assaulted, abused, tortured, kidnapped, imprisoned, trapped in wreckage & rubble, witnessed the brutal deaths of strangers, held loved ones as they bled out screaming, inhaled the oily mist of the brains of the person next to them, watched helpless as a toddler carried a live grenade into a crowd, seen the bloody remains and wailing parents as children are used as mine sweepers or object lessons or are rounded up to become soldiers, gang violence, police violence, K&R, acts of terrorism, car bombs, been waist deep in mass graves, starved to the point of being excited to find maggots, watched their children die, been betrayed and left to die… and countless other things. As ^that^? Was just my early 20s / a smallish piece of my own trauma history.
This is a place where we can discuss trauma & the consequences of trauma.
People aren’t -typically- going to freak out when trauma is mentioned. Because that’s just what we DO, here. We’ve all lived it. We’re all living it. Whether a one off trauma, or decades of thousands of trauma; whether it happened last year or 50 years ago; makes little difference with PTSD. ….SO IF… one of the ways you define “taking seriously” is acting like how people
without trauma histories act when trauma is mentioned? (IE freaking out in various different ways. OMG!!!
) You’re not likely to find that, here.
Doesn’t mean that people here don’t take trauma seriously. The opposite.
***
Similarly? People with trauma have nightmares about trauma, AND giant planet eating Panda-Squids, AND everything in between. (Depends on the person. Some people don’t dream at all.) People without trauma
may blow off all nightmares as fiction, not to be believed; but when people with trauma are telling you that their own nightmares span the range from true, partially true partially fictitious, and totally fictitious? They’re sharing their own experience. And how they deal with that experience. That most people have told you their nightmares are unreliable? Often containing pieces of truth, but jumbled up amongst fears/expectations/planet eating panda squids? They’re not telling you they don’t believe you. Or which parts of your dreams can be believed. Or which parts of your dreams are truth/fiction. They’re telling you they’ve learned not to believe everything they themselves dream. You may find the same thing is true for yourself. You may not.
Personally, I don’t take anyone’s nightmares seriously, least of all my own. All of my trauma happened in my adulthood, so I can very easily tell you which aspects of my dreams are real, which are a blend of fiction & reality, and which are total fiction. None of that matters to ME. What matters to ME is how to sleep better & recover faster. Sometimes thrashing out themes helps. (ah, so we appear to be doing the transitions are dangerous thing, again. Roger.) Most of the time it doesn’t. Shrug. <<<< NONE of which has any bearing on whether or not I believe someone is having nightmares, or their trauma history, or anything else.
***
So, for ME, both your premise & conclusions are totally invalid. Which is why I can speak to your jumping to conclusions. As I don’t meet the criteria you’ve laid out. At all.
But for YOU, that may be the least important -or totally unimportant- piece of breaking down the core beliefs &/or cognitive distortions in play. No way for me to know… as I’m not in your head & don’t know what causes you the most problems.
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
Cognitive distortion forms the backbone of PTSD. Whether you know it or not, all moods and behavioral patterns originate from your cognitions-- your thoughts. The first thing that happens is a thought, and then a mood or behavior occurs. When you allow an area of your life to become dominated...
www.myptsd.com
