Hello families!
Recently, I auditioned and acquired a very small part in a local play. It’s something I’ve wanted to do my entire life and I’m finally putting my feet where my dreams are! As I rehearsed with these amazing and talented cast members, my anxiety would show up and my thoughts would sometimes turn on me. Feelings can do weird things to our thoughts sometimes, and we can start to create statements about ourselves or our situations that simply aren’t true (like, “I can’t do this” or “I just know the director regrets picking me”). I have to “practice what I preach” and keep a healthy habit of watching these thoughts and “taking the heat out of them” using my own DBT tools.
One of the most important things students can learn is to observe their thinking. If one can observe what they are thinking, then there becomes an opportunity to introduce new thoughts and quite literally “change our minds”.
Without awareness, our thoughts can become “the man behind the curtain” and lead us into believing our distorted thinking as facts. These “cognitive distortions” happen in all of us! When our emotions get intense, our prefrontal cortex can short out a bit and thoughts easily get twisted into things that don’t have a lot of logic involved.
Sometimes we judge someone for a mistake they made and then overgeneralize them to be a “bad person”, or do the same thing to ourselves! Other people might receive lots of feedback after a performance and one negative can outweigh or even cancel out all of the positives. We might make assumptions that people do or don’t like us with very little real evidence to support this. Or, we may think our mistakes are much bigger and more impactful than they really are! More often than not, students come to me with a grievance that began with some form of a cognitive distortion. Sometimes it feeds upon itself and causes suffering for multiple people.
Some examples of cognitive distortions are:
- Magnification and Minimization: Exaggerating or minimizing the importance of events.
- Catastrophizing: Seeing only the worst possible outcomes of a situation
- Overgeneralization: Make broad interpretations from a single or few events
- Magical Thinking: The belief that acts will influence unrelated situations.
- Personalization: The belief that one is responsible for events outside of their own control.
- Jumping to Conclusions: Interpreting the meaning of a situation with little or no evidence
- Mind Reading: Interpreting the thoughts and beliefs of others without adequate evidence.
- Fortune Telling: The expectation that a situation will turn out badly without adequate evidence
- Disqualifying the Positive: Recognizing only the negative aspects of a situation while ignoring the positive.
- “Should” Statements: The belief that things should be a certain way.
- All-or-Nothing Thinking: Thinking in absolutes such as “always,” “never”, or “every”.
It takes some detective work to determine if a thought you or a loved one is experiencing a cognitive distortion. Here are some questions to help break the distortion down.
Answer the following questions to assess your thought:
- Is there SUBSTANTIAL evidence for my thought?
- Is there evidencd contrary to my thought?
- Am I attempting to interpret the situation without all the evidence?
- What would a friend think about this situation?
- If I look at the situation positively, how is it different?
- Will this matter a year from now? How about five years from now?
This takes practice. Don’t be too discouraged if it doesn’t “fix things” the first time! But, it’s a practice worth pursuing because the reward is great. Freedom from our harmful thoughts opens our minds to new possibilities and perspectives we might not have had access to before.
Robin Bates, LMFT