Thinking Errors

So this is the list of “thinking errors” that I’m suppose to go through and figure out which one(s) that I have. Personally, isn’t this what I pay the psychologist to diagnose. Anyway, I think that all of these apply to me,. but I’ll let those of you that know me decide which one(s) apply to me.


1. All-Or-Nothing Thinking: You see things in black-or-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event, such as a romantic rejection or a career reversal as a never-ending pattern of defeat by using words such as “always” or “never” when you think about it.
3. Mental Filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively, so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors a beaker of water. Example: You recieve many positive comments about your presentation to a group of associates at work, but one of them says something mildly critical. You obsess about his reaction for days and ignore all of the positive feedback.
4. Discounting The Positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count.” If you do a good job, you may tell yourself that it wasn’t good enough or that anyone could have done as well. Discounting the positive takes the joy life and makes you feel inadequate and unrewarded.
5. Jumping To Conclusions: You interpret things negatively when there are no facts to support your conclusion.
a) Mind Reading: Without checking it out, you arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you.
b)Fortune-Telling: You predict that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
6) Magnification Or Minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your problems or shortcomings), or you inappropriately shrink things down until they appear tiny (the importance of your desirable qualities or your progress in theropy). This is also called the binocular trick.
7) Emotional Reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.” Example: “I feel guilty. I must be a rotten person.”
8) Should Statements: You try to motivate yourself with “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts,” as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. Or, you tell yourself that things “should” be the way you hoped or expected them to be. “Should Statements” that are directed against yourself lead to guilt and frustration. Should statements that are directed against other people or the world lead to anger and frustration.
9) Labeling: Labeling is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking. Instead of saying “I made a mistake,” you attach a negative label to yourself. “I’m a loser.” You might also label yourself “a fool” or “a failure” or “a jerk.” Labeling is quite irrational because you are not the same thing as what you do. Human beings exist, but “fools,” “losers,” and “jerks” do not. These labels are just useless abstractions that lead to anger, anxiety, frustration, and low self-esteem.
10)Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event that isn’t entirely under your control. When a woman recieved a note that her child was having diffficulties at school, she told herself, “This shows what a bad mother I am,” instead of trying to pinpoint the cause of the problem so that she could be helpful to the child.

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