Name that distorted cognition (thought/perception)

[Deleted member 12723]

I drew the worst case scenerios in my mind about an experience I was going to have and based my feelings on this tendancy to horrabilize. The outcome of my experience actually was a very good one not the one I had made up in my mind a mental construct. I need to become more aware of this one so I can catch myself doing it. The thoughts always precede the feelings for me. I believe I do this a lot in my life. I have to practice and gain skills to overcome this problem.

 

[barefoot]

This is such an interesting thread - thanks for starting it off @Ms Spock.

I think I probably do most of these. And that realisation has made me feel quite
:-( because in the past I always considered myself to be someone who was great at getting things in perspective. Not so much now. And that feels a bit rubbish. Sigh...

 

[ms spock]

So how do you get out of Emotional Reasoning? "This kind of reasoning is misleading because your feelings reflect your thoughts and beliefs. If they're distorted, as is quite often the case, your emotions will have no validity."

I am not entirely sure @stenni. I think if I could do that then I would probably spend a lot less time on these forums, and less time dissociated, derealised, depersonalised and generally spaced, fearful and out of my tree.

One thing I would suggest is reading the David Burns book - "feeling good" because he goes through people's emotional reasoning with them and I find that quite interesting and helpful. I am still on my L plates with this one - but I will give it a whirl and see what if I say makes any sense to you @stenni. I haven't replied because I was thinking about a good way to reply, but it could take to long to work that out, so I will get it a go.

"it's all my fault"

So (pretending to be David Burns or perhap, even a wise Vulcan ;) )

So everything - everything is ALL your fault? 100% all your fault? No one in the situation had even 1% responsibility? So all of it is your fault - world poverty - global climate change - all the child abuse in the world? So there is that way of challenging the emotional reasoning by pulling it apart literally.

Then in terms of the context of child abuse/early childhood trauma (I know you have written a thread and presume it is about this but I didn't read it - I skimmed a little bit of it.)

So it's all your fault - from the moment you were born you were in control and you through mind melding made the abusers abuse you?

So it's all your fault - like all children who were abused you internalised that feeling - it is a normal and natural feeling of abuse survivors to have - so let us look at that - the internalisation of "fault" and it being all you - what a smart and clever child to survive through those types of thinking so you didn't go crazy through the all the abuse.

I am guessing - and I am just doing my best here - that each bit of the fault would need to be broken down. Really exposed to the light of day and thoroughly pulled apart by logical and rational thinking. I aspire to logical and rational thinking, but I am not there yet.

The only thing is if you are really stuck in the emotional reasoning you may get trapped in it and stay there for years - well that is what has happened with me - hopefully things will or are different for you.

that's just a feeling, and you are feeling it because your thoughts and beliefs are wrong

This is really just more self persecution - you are punishing yourself for being human and having human frailties - that is not how it works in David Burns' book. But, I too, feel this as being real as well. So it is hard.

"It's all my fault that my thoughts and beliefs are wrong"

This is kind of an over simplication and victim blaming thing - not helpful but I feel it at times too. But hey I started this thread after thinking about it for quite some time - so we know I have struggles with this stuff.

Hope this is helpful in some way @stenni - being stuck in this is pretty difficult.

 

[The Albatross]

So how do you get out of Emotional Reasoning?

Some of the examples are odd but introspection and awareness are assistive:

 

[ms spock]

So my current primary cognitive distortions are:




Magical thinking is a distorted cognition as well. It is based on dissociation and checking out. Thinking it makes it so or think that it didn't happen makes it not having happened. It is the Black is White and White is Black mind warp of a dysfunctional family.

I have done this so much in my life that it is embarrassing - all the times I stuffed up and tried to start fresh somewhere else rather than sticking with the situation. I just kept chronically running away.




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.

This really is a very ingrained belief - and at least I guess I am seeing it more. I feel angry because I remember my mother mocking me about being all or nothing as a child and me feeling great resentment that she made me this way but knowing not to say anything.




Over-generalization -- You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

This one does amplify the helplessness and hopelessness - David Burns writes so well about this in his book. I need to reread it again - I was rereading it but I gave it to my sister, as it has helped me so much.




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.

I robbed myself of enjoying last night by focusing on a negative. I was scared as well, so I can have a small amount of compassion for myself.




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.

I am being aware of this and hopefully through awareness small incremental changes can occur.




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.)

Oh I so fear what other people are thinking of me - so much mind reading and fortune telling that I do or fear of they might think I am bad.




Magnification and minimization -- You exaggerate the importance of things, or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny.

It is really hard when I have so much distorted thinking, maybe focussing on one distorted thought might be the way to go? I am not so sure. I guess writing out the thinking and feeling and getting people to write back to me how they dispute their thoughts or asking people to be kind and generous enough to write out how to dispute my own thoughts?




Emotional reasoning -- You assume that your emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are, as in "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

I sincerely believe that I will die if I feel my feelings - obviously that is not true but I feel it is. Yes I am a terrible person and it is all my fault - and I appreciate @stenni for bringing this one up because it is difficult to pull apart when you were habituated to these thoughts and feelings from such a young age.




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.

This can be a problem - I am pretty tough on myself. It doesn't actually help either - it just makes me more stuck.




Labeling and mislabeling -- This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself.

Yes I am a terrible person and it is all my fault - and I appreciate @stenni for bringing this one up because it is really hard.




Personalization -- You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible for.

Yes I am well practiced with this one - I blame myself for all my traumas. It was all my fault. And it links to me @stenni with the emotional reasoning as well.

 

[ms spock]

Oh I do so much rationalising and I do so little reasoning!

Thanks @The Albatross

Dead Link Removed

and there might be some helpful information here as well @stenni. It is David Burns' website.

http://feelinggood.com/

 

[scout86]

@Ms Spock , something you said awhile back about "magical thinking" gave me a whole new insight. Thank you! According to my T, in my family of origin one of my roles was to be "wrong". Hard to explain. Not exactly the same as being a scapegoat, but similar. It was set up, especially with my mother, so there was some sort of "problem" I felt I was responsible for "fixing" things, but I could never get it "right". And yet I persisted in working at getting it "right". I still do that. My T was walked me through scenarios over the past months, to show me the flaw in my thinking. It's kind of funny, really, because I keep forgetting that the first rule of the game is "What ever Scout does it won't be the 'right' thing." I didn't see the connection between that and magical thinking until just now.

Yippee! First insight of the day!

 

[ms spock]

I am still really struggling with my distorted thinking.

I did kind of pull them apart much better today, in part thanks to @stenni, because trying to think about how clever your distorted thoughts are - I was able to see how mine were too, and it helped me get a bit more on top of them. So that helped.

 

[rainy_daze]

For me magical thinking is

any suggestions on how to refine this one would be greatly appreciated

I think it is good to define these things for ourselves. I'm so glad that we [sufferers due to trauma] can take a theory from psychology or wherever and use it to better understand what has happened to the way we think/feel/act. Thank you Ms Spock for explaining what it means to you :tup:.

Engaging in this as a child saved my life. Engaging in this as an adult means I have not had a life

When I was first reading the Official Sounding [:laugh:] definition, I was unsure how it related to my thinking as an adult, in the here and now. However, I don't think I was interpreting the information you had posted properly.

**I can see the ways I did this as a child before, during and after the abuse incidents. It is very saddening, but has added another level of understanding for me, as well as a sense of forgiving little me. I don't expect that other children could have prevented their abuse, so why would I have thought I could have prevented my own? Why hate who I am now, and who I was as a child, when I was developing, and it was not my job to ensure my own safety, especially at such a young age? [Cognitive distortions?]

Sometimes it is easy to take on the blame, shame and guilt of being abused, when it is in fact the abuser that should own those feelings. Also the thoughts, because it is unfair to have matured into adulthood having been cognitively stunted due to the actions of others.

Now I have read the Piaget and others definition again, I can see how sometimes I will go back to being stuck in a certain developmental stage, due to when the abuse was occurring. I understand all too well that engaging in magical thinking as an adult simply wastes so much time. It is not living presently, but finding a way to numb feelings through fantasies of what life could be.

Children who evidence magical thinking often feel that they are responsible for an event or events occurring, or are capable of reversing an event simply by thinking about it and wishing for a change.[28] Make-believe and fantasy are an integral part of life at this age and are often used to explain the unexplainable.[29][30]

^ This. This. This.

:hug: thank you for the honest thread @Ms Spock and adding magical thinking to the list, it has been an eye opener for me.

@stenni I think it is like trying to peel back lots of layers of an onion, and you will eventually get to the core of the problem. With possible tears along the way.

So how do you get out of Emotional Reasoning?

I'm no expert of course, but trying to ground the issue with some logic perhaps? My T often said in therapy I was intellectualising a lot, and said she was relieved one day when I connected with my emotions :eek: I told her of course I feel things, I'm just good at hiding or blocking the feelings out. But I'm not a robot.

So is there a way you can think about this emotional reasoning in another way? Like I maybe managed to do when talking about the abuse [see above**]? This might not make much sense stenni, but I wish you well in your healing. It can be so painful and confusing on the journey.

I have not yet read Ms Spock replying to you stenni, so I hope I am not repeating her.

[Just a thought: Maybe removing confusion and working on cognitive distortions is a way to make life less painful or easier to cope with, either when having to face the past or for living in the present moment]

 

[rainy_daze]

what a smart and clever child to survive through those types of thinking so you didn't go crazy through the all the abuse

Very good post and point, I wish I could have liked it more.

I will stop now before I type too much, but well done everyone on the thread for identifying the distortions and starting to tackle them :tup:.

 

[ms spock]

I understand all too well that engaging in magical thinking as an adult simply wastes so much time. It is not living presently, but finding a way to numb feelings through fantasies of what life could be.

I spent so much time here today - it is a little bit sad. I have spent so much time avoiding the shame and pain - but I am slowly improving, so that is positive.

 

[Deleted member 12723]

The realization that I let things go on before I set a boundry. It takes me getting triggered badly before I realize the solution. I got myself out of a highly toxic situation today and feel tons better