- 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.
1. So I am doing all or nothing thinking. I am making progress but I self punish and attack myself even when I am doing better than I have ever before. It is not sensible. I am emotionally dysregulated and it is challenging at times.
2. I do see a single negative event as a never-ending defeat - I make a small mistake and I fall in to helplessness.
3. I do the mental filter thing. Not helpful but a solid habit from childhood.
4. Disqualifying the positive - being hard on myself
5. Jumping to conclusions - it certainly involves a lot of jumping to conclusions and mind reading and I do it so much. I get so anxious before I see people fearing what they might think of me. I didn't realise how much avoidance I was doing around this until yesterday. I feel like I have no real connection with anyone and that I am all on my own. I have no sense of self.
6. Oh the magnification and the minimisation - I was made to do this for my parents as a child and I still do it. Sometimes I lie about the weirdest things - to protect myself. But it doesn't really make sense.
7. I so go with emotional reasoning to a big way - but I am so grateful that I don't live in this anymore.
8. I do a few of the shoulds.
9. Not sure if I do this one.
10. Carried around all the family guilt for a very long time, starting to step away from this.
