identify my cognitive distortions

Conception in absolute terms, like “always”, “every”, “never”, and “there is no alternative”. (See also “false dilemma” or “false dichotomy”.)

Level: High

I do this regularly, particularly when feeling stressed or unhappy. In general, I can be a good problem-solver, but I find this to be the case more when it comes to dealing with either a) non-people-centric problems, or b) third-party problems (i.e. that I’m not involved in, but does involve people).

I would say that this ability to look at other people’s problems and figure out solutions, yet failing to do so when looking at one’s own problems is very common, so I don’t think this is in any way peculiar to me.

The times where I am more likely to think in all-or-nothing terms are probably when I feel that my values are being challenged / violated or my character criticised. I think I’m also prone to this when dealing with authority figures. I expect authority figures to be somehow exempt from many of the foibles that lay people are prone to, which is clearly unreasonable.

Here are a few examples of all-or-nothing thinking from my personal experience, which I’ve generalised for this exercise:

1. My boss is high up in the hierarchy of the company I work for, so they should be responsible, accountable for their own actions (why else do they get paid so much?), listen to their staff’s needs and act in their interests and the interests of the company instead of their own personal interests. I expect them to be patient, understanding, a good listener, magnanimous, decisive, honest, and principled.
2. My counsellor needs to be non-judgemental in order to do her job, listening to my problems and advising without judging. She should be empathetic, symapthetic, and of course, when she listens to all the problems I have, and why, she’ll see that everything I do makes sense even though it clearly doesn’t result in my own happiness and good mental health, but that’s more the state of the world, than a judgement on my capacity to deal with it!
3. A spiritual leader, as representative, of their religion, should be a perfect example of its tenets, and always be loving, kind, patient, forgiving, understanding, happy, calm, wise (.... etc.) and never be angry, hostile, rude, tired, unhappy, stressed, disagreeable (... etc.).

These are generalised examples which have happened in my life, but I’ve taken out any specifics, or rolled together multiple similar examples.

When I write these, I realise that they just don’t make sense, and that I’m being irrational and seeing things through distorted lenses.

So, now I’m going to come back to these examples and point out why they don’t make sense.

1. My boss is a person, who has quirks and foibles, the same as the rest of us. They have personal preferences, personal working styles, and will relate better to some people than others. They may have clear values, but may place certain values at a higher or lower level of importance than I would. For example, they may have to deny a request I feel is fair and reasonable, in the interests of the company, even if they don’t like having to deny it. They may even agree with me, but my personal happiness is of lesser importance to them than the success of the business. Their level of responsibility means that they see more of what’s going on in the company than I do, so they may know things I don’t, which factor into decisions I don’t like. They may be very good at the kinds of things that got them their job, but they still have weaknesses and preferences that hinder them. Being a little too obsessed with orderliness may mean that staff end up doing tasks that seem inefficient when there are other more important things to be doing in the grand scheme of things, but although it is frustrating being in this position, it impacts on what the company thinks of them as a manager, rather than the staff wasting their time on such tasks in simply following orders.
2. My counsellor needs to appear non-judgemental, not be non-judgemental. If I detect some emotion that suggests she doesn’t like what I’m saying, then perhaps they’re not very good at appearing non-judgemental, or perhaps the emotion is there but for different reasons to what I expect (see mind-reading later). After all, many facial expressions are involuntary, and we can mask them to some extent, but not always. It’s a little unrealistic to expect even a professional to never ever fail in maintaining perfect non-judgemental composure in the face of whatever I’m saying, especially when very emotional. She will also be a person with her own values, preferences, views on the world, and she could possibly disagree with much of what I’m saying. It is her job to help me with mental health problems, not to affirm every opinion I hold. She can understand my position and disagree with it. Clearly, the disagreement or even disapproval won’t help in a clinical setting, but even if she fails to completely hide those feelings when doing her job, that just means that she’s human and fallible, and if she manages to remain professional and tuck those feelings away most of the time, then she’s trying, and that’s really what most of us expect – do your best. Maybe she’s having a bad day; maybe she’s not a good counsellor and is thinking she’s made a bad career choice; maybe she’s been reminded of something that she doesn’t like in herself. There could be all sorts of reasons for her reactions, but they don’t necessarily mean that she thinks you’re a useless, fucked-up, contemptible person, who is beyond hope. That would be a bit of a leap.
3. A spiritual leader is not a divine being. They are human and fallible, and sometimes have bad days, and bad moods. They have weaknesses and personal preferences, and they may be apparent when interacting with them, even if they try to avoid them for most of the time. A patient person can still sometimes be provoked into saying a harsh word; a fair person can still be unreasonable on occasion when they feel particularly strong about a certain value and put it before someone else’s values; a selfless person can still need to do something for themselves and refuse demands on them when they have to put themselves first. Chances are, that they are probably kinder, more forgiving, more empathetic… than most lay people, because they devote their lives to practising and trying to be a good, moral person. Doesn’t mean they get it 100% right all the time, and you may catch them at an off moment. Doesn’t mean you should reject everything they say or do, just because you saw them get a bit ratty, or they seemed tired and unhappy when giving that talk, or they couldn’t spare you the time that one time you really needed them to, because they needed to do something else they thought was more important.

When I write these corrections to my original all-or-nothing thinking, they seem obvious, but it’s when I feel stressed or unhappy, that I forget these things and revert to the views I expressed at the top.

I need to find a way to keep a hold of these more realistic expectations even in stressful or unhappy times.

I’ll be working through the rest of the cognitive distortions on my list first, and then looking at practices I can incorporate to help me avoid them.

I’m going to look through this list from Wikipedia and see which ones I am most guilty of, and see if I can address them:

• All-or-nothing thinking (splitting) – Conception in absolute terms, like “always”, “every”, “never”, and “there is no alternative”. (See also “false dilemma” or “false dichotomy”.)
• Overgeneralization – Extrapolating limited experiences and evidence to broad generalizations. (See also faulty generalization and misleading vividness.)
• Magical thinking – Expectation of certain outcomes based on performance of unrelated acts or utterances. (See also wishful thinking.)
• Mental filter – Inability to to view positive or negative features of an experience, for example, noticing only tiny imperfection in a piece of otherwise useful clothing.
• Disqualifying the positive – Discounting positive experiences for arbitrary, ad hoc reasons.
• Jumping to conclusions – Reaching conclusions (usually negative) from little (if any) evidence. Two specific subtypes are also identified:
  
  • Mind reading – Sense of access to special knowledge of the intentions or thoughts of others.
  • Fortune telling – Inflexible expectations for how things will turn out before they happen.
• Magnification and minimization – Magnifying or minimizing a memory or situation such that they no longer correspond to objective reality. This is common enough in the normal population to popularize idioms such as “make a mountain out of a molehill.” In depressed clients, often the positive characteristics of other people are exaggerated and negative characteristics are understated. There is one subtype of magnification:
  
  • Catastrophizing – Inability to foresee anything other than the worst possible outcome, however unlikely, or experiencing a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just uncomfortable.
• Emotional reasoning – Experiencing reality as a reflection of emotions, e.g. “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
• Should statements – Patterns of thought which imply the way things “should” or “ought” to be rather than the actual situation the person is faced with, or having rigid rules which the person believes will “always apply” no matter what the circumstances are. Albert Ellis termed this “Musturbation”.
• Labeling and mislabeling – Limited thinking about behaviors or events due to reliance on names; related to overgeneralization. Rather than describing the specific behavior, the person assigns a label to someone or himself that implies absolute and unalterable terms. Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
• Personalization – Attribution of personal responsibility (or causal role or blame) for events over which a person has no control.