Psychology

I'm in Psychology and we are talking about Therapy. There are a lot of different kinds. We have a handout about Cognitive Distortions that has a list that contains ten common cognitive distortions that people use. They 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.
• Overgeneralization: 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 exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like a drop of ink that discolors 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 believe that is contradicted by tour everyday experiences.
• Jumping to Conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
• Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things, or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny. This is also caled binocular trick.
• Emotional Reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the ways you really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."
• Should Statements: You try to motivate yourself with should and shouldn't, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequences are guilt. When you direct should statements towards others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
  
• Labeling and Mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself. "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to them. Mislabeling involves describing an event with landuage that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
  
• Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event, which in face you were not primarily responsible for.