Post by Hieronymous707LOL. And so it's like always one extreme or the other with you,
and so there's no such thing as simply being straight forward
for you, and so it's always like you're pretending to be bipolar.
well, i do seem to do a lot of, if not ALL the cognitive distortions, as presented by (hold on, i gotta get it)(from the book upon my shelf, ha ha :-///) Feeling GOOD, the new mood therapy, by david burns.
i didn't read the book (that i recall???) but this one section, they actually photocopied a list for us, from the book. i thought it was really helpful. oh, not just the list, but the whole theory, that your thinking influences your feelings, and if you can monitor your thoughts, you can alter your feelings. you don't just let your mind run free (umm.....), and practice mental hygiene (my words).
so yeah, i do ALL this shit!
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 event and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the 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 belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
jumping to conclusions - you make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
a. mind reading - you arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this out.
b. the fortune teller error - you anticipate that things will turn out badly and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already established fact.
magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization - you exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). this is also called "binocular trick."
emotional reasoning - you assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "i feel it, therefore it must be true."
should statements - you try to motivate yourself with should's and shouldnt's, 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 consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. (ps my journal of shoulds and oughts i made that up, figured that out myself :-/// i barely read anything. :-/// :-D?)
labeling and mislabeling - this is an extreme form of overgeneralization. instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: i am a *loser.* when someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "he's a goddamn louse." mislabeling involves describing an even with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
personalization - you see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.
*****
numerous times, my anal-yst has said i do this. i remember when he said something would take a lot of work, or something, and i go, helplessly, forget it, it's hopeless, and he goes, more to himself, this was closer to the beginning of our sessions, "i can see this is going to be difficult." i wish we would work on my cognition more. i feel like we're really getting sloppy in our work. :-((( (i wonder if this relates to my sloppy mental constitution, due to lack of acuity from exercise, and monitoring my eating, although i am doing okayyy....just not as great as when i was dieting, so very much more vegetable/greens/fruit.
seriously, maybe i better go back on the green smoothie. i think i will. great idea! thanks, hi! :-D ;-)
xoxoxox,
rach
ps what do you think of this list. my anal-yst poo-pooed this guy, like not quite a charlatan, but a hack or is that the same thing, i forget the word, but just because he has an MD, he still wasn't impressed with him. not that i'm impressed cause of the MD, i'm NOT, but i loved this list. they gave it to me at ucla in the late '90s at the really cool day program, with cool functional interesting intelligent healthy people.
