Care In Counseling Podcast: Recent Episodes
Rev. Robert Wilson Clinical Psychotherapist (LMHC)
Podcast about Dysfunctional Thinking and how to restructure your thinking for better living. “You will live better when you think better” Having problems addiction, dieting, anxiety, depression, panic.
16 - The good American: Who is my neighbor. Addressing the culture with the love of Christ in a time of Crisis.
Using critical words like 'should', 'must', or 'ought' can make us feel guilty, or like we have already failed. If we apply 'should' to other people the result is often frustration.
Assuming that because we feel a certain way what we think must be true. I feel embarrassed so I must be an idiot.
The cognitive distortion of catastrophizing is pretty much what you might think it is: making something into a catastrophe when it's not. When we catastrophize, we tell ourselves that something is so awful, so terrible, that we won't be able to handle it. That we would fall apart, or die. The more we tell ourselves the problem we are facing is a catastrophe, the more hopeless and helpless we will feel to effectively cope with it. Catastrophizing can result in increased anxiety and depression, and can make difficult situations feel even worse than they already are. There are several ways of rethinking catastrophic thinking to help you better handle adversity.
When you recognize catastrophizing, first ask yourself what about this situation is so terrible? Have you dealt with similar situations in the past? If so, did you survive? If you did survive, (and presumably you did) how? What did you do to weather the difficulty?
Jumping to conclusions is a common type of error or fallacy in reasoning or thinking, in which a person draws conclusions which are not warranted from available information. In the language of cognitive behavioral therapy, jumping to conclusions is one of the common cognitive distortions characteristic of depression and anxiety. In depression or anxiety, a person often falsely concludes that things are going to go wrong, or that they have done something wrong. However, people can also jump to false conclusions in ways that introduce positive bias, or other sorts of bias.
When jumping to conclusions, a person skips the step of considering possible interpretations for a situation, and instead jumps right to accepting whatever interpretation seems most plausible to them. In general, when people jump to conclusions, they tend to pick interpretations that fit their own existing view of the world. Jumping to conclusions, when it becomes a chronic problem, thus tends to lead to people getting stuck in their own viewpoint, even when it does not fit with reality.
Disqualifying the Positive can be difficult to identify sometimes, because you have the pretense of weighing both sides, and then making what seems to be a rationale decision before settling on your pre analysis conclusion.
The “Disqualifying the Positive” cognitive distortion acknowledges positive experiences but rejects them. For example, a person who receives a positive review at work may reject the idea that he is a competent employee and attribute the positive review to political correctness or to his boss simply not wanting to talk to you about what you have already deemed to be subpar performance. This is an especially malignant distortion since it can facilitate the continuance of negative thought patterns even in the face of a lot of evidence to the contrary.
In the area of dating and relationships It is important that we do our own work as individuals and ensure we are showing up in a relationship with an understanding of how we make decisions, our biases, and our habits. If we rely only on relationships, intimate partners, or sexual experiences to enhance our positive self-image, we may be more susceptible to this thought distortion and attracting the wrong person
Mental filter is a term used to describe one type of cognitive distortion, or faulty thought pattern, that can often lead to higher levels of anxiety and depression. When thinking through a mental filter, a person is focusing only on the negative aspects of a situation and filtering out all of the positive ones. People with this form of negative thinking often see their glass as being half empty rather than half full in any situation.
People diagnosed with panic disorder frequently use a mental filter to sift out all of the pleasant and fulfilling parts of their lives, while bringing more attention to their inadequacies and dissatisfaction. They may center on their feelings of loneliness and avoidance behaviors, failing to notice ways in which they have actually learned to cope with panic disorder. Anxiety levels will continue to rise as positivity continues to be filtered out, while the self-defeating thoughts are intensified.
Overgeneralizing is a cognitive distortion that results in some pretty significant errors in thinking and has the potential to cause emotional pain resulting in diminished quality of life. When we draw a faulty conclusion about something based on just one example, we are overgeneralizing. This can take many forms. We may, for example, predict the outcome of something based on just one previous instance of it.
Overgeneralizing is ineffective mainly because it is usually highly inaccurate, and it is very limiting. Take another example, going out on a date and not being asked for a second date. Were we to use distorted thinking and overgeneralize, we may come to the conclusion that we will never successfully find a romantic partner.; because I wasn't asked on a second date, I will never be asked on a second date. If you really believe this, it might feel demoralizing, and perhaps devastating. Even worse, believing the distortion to be true, it would be unlikely that you would put forth any effort toward achieving your goal of romance. You might stop chatting casually with people you don’t know, delete your dating site profile, and even turn down future invitations of dates. Then your prediction would turn out to be true!
A cognitive distortion is an automatic and subjective way of interpreting a situation based on preconditioned beliefs as opposed to objective reality. Such an erroneous interpretation precipitates negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, or anger. All-or-nothing thinking is one such distortion.
All-or-nothing thinking refers to thinking in extremes. You are either a success or a failure. Your performance was totally good or totally bad. If you are not perfect, then you are a failure. This binary way of thinking does not account nuances, and gives rise to a great deal of negative evaluations of ourselves and others.
Take for example something is right or it’s wrong, something is good or it’s bad. You are either perfect or a failure. It is thinking in terms of extremes without any nuance. An example in Scripture is Moses because he didn’t consider himself to have good oratorical skills he considered the mission God had called him too, mission impossible! Then Moses said to the LORD, "Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since You have spoken to Your servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue."(Ex4:10, NASB)
I can almost guarantee that at least one of these erroneous thinking applies to you! Listen and See….