How to Recognize 5 Common Thinking Distortions

CBT
How to Recognize 5 Common Thinking Distortions

CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) always starts with identifying a client’s most common cognitive distortions.  Clients must ask themselves: how exactly does my brain warp reality and undermine my happiness?

While CBT literature features about 15 identified distortions, these are the 5 that I most encounter in my practice: 

  1. Catastrophization

    Anxious or depressed minds tend to overestimate danger and drag our brains down a worst-case scenario rabbit hole.  Catastrophization makes us focus on this worst potential outcome rather than think in a balanced way about the more probable, less horrible possibilities.  

  2. Disqualifying the Positive

    People tend to see positive outcomes as unsustainable and fuel continued anxiety by clinging to a negative lens.  In comparison to individuals seeking treatment at the Free Clinic, my private practice clients tend to feel and express more fear and stress around money.  Objectively, these clients have a positive and stable financial situation; but their brains are telling them otherwise.  

  3. Emotional Reasoning

    People believe that just because they feel something, it must be real.  For example, if they feel dread around a public speaking engagement, then they must be about to humiliate themselves. The emotion is the evidence.  

    Emotional reasoning can be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Sometimes my clients feel unworthy in adulthood due to a traumatic childhood.  My clients’ emotions of unworthiness become a belief that can lead to self-sabotage.  

  4. Mental Filter

    Mental Filter is similar to “disqualifying the positive,” and often leads to anxiety and depression.  If the ever-churning mind is a sieve, then everything left in the basket is problematic, dangerous, or just bad.  All that negative information can be overwhelming for our brains.  Instead of seeing the situation more wholly, we only see the bad and this can easily trigger a panic reaction.  

  5. Overgeneralization 

    Our brains are not great at taking a step back and recognizing that one bad experience can simply just be one bad experience.  We want to see patterns, especially negative ones.  I once treated a 19-year-old who told me after a breakup that she no longer believes in love. 

    In addition to being a pretty noxious distortion on an individual level, overgeneralization can also lead to prejudice on a societal level.

Learn more about how CBT therapy at Kairos Wellness Collective can help you here.

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