The 20 primary cognitive distortions (according to Vulcan Logic) 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.
Add Ons:
No 11.
Magical thinking is a distorted cognition as well. It is a big one for Developmental Trauma/Complex Trauma from childhood abuse. Well it is for me anyway.
12. Another form of
Magical thinking as an adult simply fills up so much time. It is an avoidance strategy. It is not living presently, but finding a way to numb feelings through fantasies of what life could be.
13.
You have to make everyone happy, or you will die or be punished or tortured.
14.
It is all your fault - you are to blame for the problems in your family - even when you were one years old!
15.
Hopelessness (Burns, p88) when you are so depressed you get so frozen in the pain of the moment moment that you forget entirely that you ever felt better in the past and find it inconceivable that you might feel better in the future.
16.
Helplessness (also p88) You can't possibly do anything that will make yourself feel any better because you are convinced that your moods are caused by factors outside your control, such as fate, hormone cycles, dietary factors, luck, and other people's evaluations of you.
17.
Overwhelming your self (also p88)There are several ways that you may overwhelm yourself into doing nothing. You may magnify a task to the degree that it seems impossible to tackle. You may assume you must do everything at once instead of breaking each job down into small, discrete, manageable units which you can complete one step at a time. You might also inadvertently distract yourself from the task at hand by obsessing about endless other things you haven't gotten around to doing yet. To illustrate how irrational this is, imagine every time you sit down to eat, you thought about all the food you have to eat durig your life time. Just imagine for a moment all that food piled up in front of you - kilograms and kilograms of food - and you thought each mean you have to eat all this food over a life time so you just stop eating because you feel like you will never get it done!
18. Distorted cognition:
Binge thinking is helpful. (Thanks for that term
@Spiderallis! Yes I do believe this. Of course it is not. But I didn't learn regulated thought patterns as a child. I was mostly dissociated, derealised and depersonalised. It is a close cousin with Rumination! Oh How I Love Rumination - NOT!
19. Distorted cognition:
Rumination will help you work things out - well no, it doesn't but I didn't get rumination was a thing until 2013. People actually know that rumination doesn't help and makes your decision making processes much worse. I missed that memo until 2013.
20. Distorted cognition:
That I must talk incessantly to keep the space filled up so I can manage to stay alive. This is not true. No one will kill me for not entertaining or Wowing them. So I have this distorted cognition that I have to talk all the time to keep myself - to stop the poison from getting through, to stop the jabs and the horrible attacks from getting inside. I don't have to babble to keep myself safe. No one is going for me right now. It is okay. I don't have to entertain or win people over so they don't kill me. No one is going to kill me or wants to kill me right now. I don't have to talk all the time to feel up the space to be safe. I am safe. It is okay.
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So the magical thinking of how life could be - I probably spend more time on that each day than anything else at times.
Rumination - if it worked I would have been better in my early teens. Yep not helpful or productive.
