My DISTORTED COGNITIONS
The 12 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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My eating is not good. My head/thoughts are lying to me that if I don't stuff myself full of food I will be overwhelmed and die? or something drastic? because I will feel overwhelming and unbearable feelings.
My feelings might be intense but they are not unbearable.
So as suggested before -
Magnification is a factor. I am over exaggerating the importance of things. I am also doing
emotional reasoning - it feels like I need to eat to keep myself alive (but really aside from the three meals per day with some snacks) I really don't need to continually comfort eat to keep myself alive - it gets much worse once it gets dark and becomes marked at the time I think about going to bed - so it is related to childhood sexual abuse I think. So much fear.
But that was the past and it is not now.
Eating at dinner time each night was so stressful because of all the emotional abuse and the being needled, put down, harassed and tortured if you didn't say the right things that they wanted to hear.
So I am indulging in other types of distorted thinking as well. I am doing
magical thinking in terms of imaging how life could be in the present once I get to a certain level of wellness. I also am engaging in
magical thinking that comfort eating and binge eating is actually helping me manage my emotions - I am numbing them but I am not managing them.
So quite a lot of distorted thinking going on for me, probably others as well but I can't identify them right now. Sometimes I am aware that the thinking is not quite right but I feel unable to identify what distortions they are - and that is such great progress for me - because I used to believe my thoughts and feelings like they were all the truth in this world.
