The cognitive distortions that I engage in at times are:
Even my own Mother used to taunt me about my all or nothing thinking, and I did seethe with resentment thinking you have made me this way - everything you do to me has made me like this I think I was about 11 or 12 at the time. So yes I see myself as a total failure. This is not helpful.
Over-generalization -- I sometimes see a single event as a never-ending pattern of defeat at times, and you know this is not working for me. Particularly when I am being so negative towards myself that I fail to notice people taking advantage of me or my partner, and how are actually behaving pretty badly towards me
Yes the mental filter: the dwelling and dwelling I have wasted years on this and seriously given what cards I got dealt I have done damn well, not in societal terms but in terms of actually running with what I got and trying really, really, really hard to get well - unfortunately I fell into the hands of unscrupluous psychologists. Many of the people I went through school etc, are not alive today.
Yes I disqualify the positive: so constantly I am rejecting positive experiences as not counting for some pathetic emotional reasoning or personalising maladaptive thinking in my head. And really I am standing on my own back so much that I am not noticing people ripping me off or using me, or generally f*cking me over. I am so bad, that really no good should come to me! It is great how I doing the self fulfililng prophecy thing to myself. ***sighs***
All that mind-reading and fortune-telling and jumping to conclusions means I have let some people treat me very poorly indeed, because I kept thinking that they were judging me but in reality, given their own behaviours, it really didn't matter at all. And they were manipulating me, and whilst vaguely aware something was not right I couldn't connect with it.
Magnification and minimization because I do these I get stuck in corrosive self doubt and freeze and fawn, fawn and freeze and occasionally run away and also from time to time really lash out and fight back. So I exaggerate the importance of things, because of the feelings of terror that no one will ever listen to me, and yeah as a kid no one ever did listen to me, but I am not a kid anymore, or I inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny, and yes so I am ripe for picking on, scapegoating and recently being lied to by a bunch of people, going for gullible idiot award of the year! And I got terribly used and manipulated because I don't check in to see how I am thinking and feeling. Ah shit feelings always seem to come into it. Then when I finally feel something I am scared it is too over the top, so I don't say anything and really both variations are not working for me.
"I feel it, therefore it must be true." I am getting better at this one. Though recently someone told me that they didn't feel they were shoving their ideas down my throat, and really I found that incredibly funny, but I was smart enough to just give up and detach. I wasn't playing that game of denial.
Yeah I wish motivating yourself with "should" and "should not", yes I do feel that I should be whipped and punished before I can be expected to do anything. I go back to doing nothing so I don't get attacked in whatever form I fear at that time. Back to freeze, fawn, flight and fight - because yeah that has really been working for me. But recently I actually stayed with it all, and it didn't work out as badly as I thought it would - so progress though I am still in bounceback at this time.
I am consistent with labeling and mislabeling every negative label hey somehow I can attach that negative label to myself. And this is me improved! Oh YAY!
Recently I have come to a stop with personalization as much, couldn't control my family, couldn't control unethical psychologists. So I am seeing myself less as the cause of some negative external event which, in fact, I was not primarily responsible for, as I was a toddler, a kid, a and a vulnerable teenager at the time. Yeah this has helped a lot.
But on the whole I am not doing so well at this time.
