Dr. Larry Cohen Therapist and Life Coach, voorhees NJ (856) 352-5428 Contact NJ Therapy and Life Coaching

The Problems with Skewed Ways of Thinking

One of the great pleasures I have as a therapist and life coach is talking with my clients about thinking errors, or ‘cognitive distortions’.  Pointing out a thinking error AND HAVING A CLIENT SEE AND UNDERSTAND THE ERROR is a moment when great change takes place.

Thinking errors lead us to see and understand reality incorrectly. How can that be possible? Reality is reality, after all. Not so fast. How we see and understand life events is based on our perspective. For example, let’s say you are taking a college course, and your final exam is the next morning.

Your partner is out of town, and they don’t call to wish you good luck on the exam. You think that this is terrible, that they are too busy, out having fun with friends, and forgot all about you and the exam. How inconsiderate – they’re never there for me.

Being passive-aggressive, you purposely don’t call either. The next morning, after the exam is over, you get a loving, congratulatory phone call. “Why didn’t you call to wish me good luck last night? Were you too busy with your friends?” “No, I didn’t want to bother you while you were studying. I was so anxious thinking about you that I had trouble sleeping.”

Hmmm. this is called ‘jumping to conclusions’. You negatively interpreted the situation even though there were no facts to support your conclusion.

Another thinking error is called ‘mind-reading.’ This is when you arbitrarily conclude that someone doesn’t like you, but you don’t bother to find out if it's really true. Or, you can make what's called a ‘fortune-teller’ thinking error. This is when you believe that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is already an established fact.

Shocking Truths

The big shockers come when you discover that something you believed your entire life, for example, that your father was never proud of you, turns out to be untrue. This is an example of ‘jumped to conclusions.’ This belief has had a lifelong negative impact on you. Then one day you find a letter your father had written in which he went on and on about how talented and special you are, and how proud he’s been of you.

Shock! This realization may change your life dramatically. You suddenly realize that deep-seated feelings of shame you’ve felt about yourself for most of your life - feelings that began in childhood when you felt you could never live up to your father’s expectations – were fiction.

This thinking error lead to years of personal pain. You had lived most of your life with the core belief that ‘you weren’t good enough,” and this belief had created your painful struggle with perfectionism. Imagine how this type of realization can affect you. In therapy, you can begin working on unraveling all of the shame you've felt for so long.

Thinking errors often occur when you feel down, or after you’ve failed at something. Thinking errors also create relationship problems. In relationships, we can make the mistake called mind reading, thinking that our partner is thinking something that they are not. I suggest you ask your partner if what you believe is happening is really happening.

For example, you might be convinced that an unexpected cancellation of date night means that your partner doesn’t care anymore. Later, you discover that your partner cancelled because their paycheck didn’t arrive on time, and they couldn’t afford to go out. They were embarrassed at not having money to pay for the date, and you thought they didn’t want to spend time with you. Sometimes we don’t see reality clearly, and this can have a huge impact on our thinking, our feelings, and how we live our lives.

10 of the Most Common Thinking Errors (Cognitive Distortions)

1.      All-or-nothing thinking: you see things in black and white. For example, if you don’t do things perfectly, you see yourself as a total failure.

2.      Overgeneralization: you see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. “I was passed over for the promotion iI had hoped to get. I’ll never get a promotion.”

3.      Mental filter: you pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality goes black.

4.      Disqualifying the positive: you reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. You stay stuck in a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5.      Jumping to conclusions: you make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. This includes: a) mind-reading - when you arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and you don’t take the time to investigate if it's really true. and b) fortune-telling - when you anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you are convinced that your prediction is already an established fact.

6.      Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: you exaggerate the importance of things (“I missed watching ‘the bachelor’ tonight. I think i'm going to die"), or you inappropriately make light of something important.

7.      Emotional reasoning: you assume that your negative emotions reflect the way things really are – “I feel it, so it must be true”.

8.      Should statements: you try to motivate yourself with should and should not statements, not taking responsibility for doing what is expected of you. The emotional consequence is guilt, and sometimes shame (I’m no good, I never get anything done).

9.      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 upsets you, you attach a negative label to him, “He’s a jerk.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is overly colorful and emotionally loaded.

10.   Personalization: you see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.

Thinking errors are so common that I work with my clients to correct them in almost every meeting we have. I can't stress enough the importance of correcting your thinking errors. Remember: thoughts lead to emotions, and emotions lead to behaviors. Thinking errors lead us to negative feelings when there is nothing to feel negatively about.

If your thoughts are off-base, or skewed, your emotional life and your subsequent behaviors will be based on a false view of reality. You will misunderstand the behavior of others, and you will not have a clear understanding of who you are and what you are capable of achieving.