3. Mental Filter. You pick out a negative detail in any situation and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative. For example, a depressed college student heard some other students making fun of her best friend. She became furious because she was thinking, “That’s what the human race is basically like—cruel and insensitive!” She was overlooking the fact that in the previous months few people, if any, had been cruel or insensitive to her! On another occasion when she completed her first midterm exam, she felt certain she had missed approximately seventeen questions out of a hundred. She thought exclusively about those seventeen questions and concluded she would flunk out of college. When she got the paper back there was a note attached that read, “You got 83 out of 100 correct. This was by far the highest grade of any student this year. A +”
When you are depressed, you wear a pair of eyeglasses with special lenses that filter out anything positive. All that you allow to enter your conscious mind is negative. Because you are not aware of this “filtering process,” you conclude that everything is negative. The technical name for this process is “selective abstraction.” It is a bad habit that can cause you to suffer much needless anguish.
4. Disqualifying the Positive. An even more spectacular mental illusion is the persistent tendency of some depressed individuals to transform neutral or even positive experiences into negative ones. You don’t just ignore positive experiences, you cleverly and swiftly turn them into their nightmarish opposite. I call this “reverse alchemy.” The medieval alchemists dreamed of finding some method for transmuting the baser metals into gold. If you have been depressed, you may have developed the talent for doing the exact opposite—you can instantly transform golden joy into emotional lead. Not intentionally, however—you’re probably not even aware of what you’re doing to yourself.
An everyday example of this would be the way most of us have been conditioned to respond to compliments. When someone praises your appearance or your work, you might automatically tell yourself, “They’re just being nice.” With one swift blow you mentally disqualify their compliment. You do the same thing to them when you tell them, “Oh, it was nothing, really.” If you constantly throw cold water on the good things that happen, no wonder life seems damp and chilly to you!
Disqualifying the positive is one of the most destructive forms of cognitive distortion. You’re like a scientist intent on finding evidence to support some pet hypothesis. The hypothesis that dominates your depressive thinking is usually some version of “I’m second-rate.” Whenever you have a negative experience, you dwell on it and conclude, “That proves what I’ve known all along.” In contrast, when you have a positive experience, you tell yourself, “That was a fluke. It doesn’t count.” The price you pay for this tendency is intense misery and an inability to appreciate the good things that happen.
While this type of cognitive distortion is commonplace, it can also form the basis for some of the most extreme and intractable forms of depression. For example, a young woman hospitalized during a severe depressive episode told me, “No one could possibly care about me because I’m such an awful person. I’m a complete loner. Not one person on earth gives a damn about me.” When she was discharged from the hospital, many patients and staff members expressed great fondness for her. Can you guess how she negated all this? “They don’t count because they don’t see me in the real world. A real person outside a hospital could never care about me.” I then asked her how she reconciled this with the fact that she had numerous friends and family outside the hospital who did care about her. She replied, “They don’t count because they don’t know the real me. You see Dr. Burns, inside I’m absolutely rotten. I’m the worst person in the world. It would be impossible for anyone to really like me for even one moment!” By disqualifying positive experiences in this manner, she can maintain a negative belief which is clearly unrealistic and inconsistent with her everyday experiences.
While your negative thinking is probably not as extreme as hers, there may be many times every day when you do inadvertently ignore genuinely positive things that have happened to you. This removes much of life’s richness and makes things appear needlessly bleak.
5. Jumping to Conclusions. You arbitrarily jump to a negative conclusion that is not justified by the facts of the situation. Two examples of this are “mind reading” and “the fortune teller error.”
MIND READING: You make the assumption that other people are looking down on you, and you’re so convinced about this that you don’t even bother to check it out. Suppose you are giving an excellent lecture, and you notice that a man in the front row is nodding off. He was up most of the night on a wild fling, but you of course don’t know this. You might have the thought,’ ‘This audience thinks I’m a bore.” Suppose a friend passes you on the street and fails to say hello because he is so absorbed in his thoughts he doesn’t notice you. You might erroneously conclude, “He is ignoring me so he must not like me anymore.” Perhaps your spouse is unresponsive one evening because he or she was criticized at work and is too upset to want to talk about it. Your heart sinks because of the way you interpret the silence: “He (or she) is mad at me. What did I do wrong?”
You may then respond to these imagined negative reactions by withdrawal or counterattack. This self-defeating behavior pattern may act as a self-fulfilling prophecy and set up a negative interaction in a relationship when none exists in the first place.
THE FORTUNE TELLER ERROR: It’s as if you had a crystal ball that foretold only misery for you. You imagine that something bad is about to happen, and you take this prediction as a fact even though it is unrealistic. A high-school librarian repeatedly told herself during anxiety attacks, “I’m going to pass out or go crazy.” These predictions were unrealistic because she had never once passed out (or gone crazy!) in her entire life. Nor did she have any serious symptoms to suggest impending insanity. During a therapy session an acutely depressed physician explained to me why he was giving up his practice: “I realize I’ll be depressed forever. My misery will go on and on, and I’m absolutely convinced that this or any treatment will be doomed to failure.” This negative prediction about his prognosis caused him to feel hopeless. His symptomatic improvement soon after initiating therapy indicated just how off-base his fortune telling had been.
Do you ever find yourself jumping to conclusions like these? Suppose you telephone a friend who fails to return your call after a reasonable time. You then feel depressed when you tell yourself that your friend probably got the message but wasn’t interested enough to call you back. Your distorton?—mind reading. You then feel bitter, and decide not to call back and check this out because you say to yourself, “He’ll think I’m being obnoxious if I call him back again. I’ll only make a fool of myself.” Because of these negative predictions (the fortune teller error), you avoid your friend and feel put down. Three weeks later you learn that your friend never got your message. All that stewing, it rums out, was just a lot of self-imposed hokum. Another painful product of your mental magic!
6. Magnification and Minimization. Another thinking trap you might fall into is called “magnification” and “minimization,” but I like to think of it as the “binocular trick” because you are either blowing things up out of proportion or shrinking them. Magnification commonly occurs when you look at your own errors, fears, or imperfections and exaggerate their importance: “My God—I made a mistake. How terrible! How awful! The word will spread like wildfire! My reputation is ruined!” You’re looking at your faults through the end of the binoculars that makes them appear gigantic and grotesque. This has also been called “catas-trophizing” because you turn commonplace negative events into nightmarish monsters.
When you think about your strengths, you may do the opposite—look through the wrong end of the binoculars so that things look small and unimportant. If you magnify your imperfections and minimize your good points, you’re guaranteed to feel inferior. But the problem isn�
�t you—it’s the crazy lenses you’re wearing!
7. Emotional Reasoning. You take your emotions as evidence for the truth. Your logic: “I feel like a dud, therefore I am a dud.” This kind of reasoning is misleading because your feelings reflect your thoughts and beliefs. If they are distorted—as is quite often the case—your emotions will have no validity. Examples of emotional reasoning include “I feel guilty. Therefore, I must have done something bad”; “I feel overwhelmed and hopeless. Therefore, my problems must be impossible to solve”; “I feel inadequate. Therefore, I must be a worthless person”; “I’m not in the mood to do anything. Therefore, I might as well just lie in bed”; or “I’m mad at you. This proves that you’ve been acting rotten and trying to take advantage of me.”
Emotional reasoning plays a role in nearly all your depressions. Because things feel so negative to you, you assume they truly are. It doesn’t occur to you to challenge the validity of the perceptions that create your feelings.
One usual side effect of emotional reasoning is procrastination. You avoid cleaning up your desk because you tell yourself, “I feel so lousy when I think about that messy desk, cleaning it will be impossible.” Six months later you finally give yourself a little push and do it. It turns out to be quite gratifying and not so tough at all. You were fooling yourself all along because you are in the habit of letting your negative feelings guide the way you act.
8. Should Statements. You try to motivate yourself by saying, “I should do this” or “I must do that.” These statements cause you to feel pressured and resentful. Paradoxically, you end up feeling apathetic and unmotivated. Albert Ellis calls this “musturbation.” I call it the “shouldy” approach to life.
When you direct should statements toward others, you will usually feel frustrated. When an emergency caused me to be five minutes late for the first therapy session, the new patient thought, “He shouldn’t be so self-centered and thoughtless. He ought to be prompt.” This thought caused her to feel sour and resentful.
Should statements generate a lot of unnecessary emotional turmoil in your daily life. When the reality of your own behavior falls short of your standards, your shoulds and shouldn’ts create self-loathing, shame, and guilt. When the all-too-human performance of other people falls short of your expectations, as will inevitably happen from time to time, you’ll feel bitter and self-righteous. You’ll either have to change your expectations to approximate reality or always feel let down by human behavior. If you recognize this bad should habit in yourself, I have outlined many effective “should and shouldn’t” removal methods in later chapters on guilt and anger.
9. Labeling and Mislabeling. Personal labeling means creating a completely negative self-image based on your errors. It is an extreme form of overgeneralization. The philosophy behind it is “The measure of a man is the mistakes he makes.” There is a good chance you are involved in a personal labeling whenever you describe your mistakes with sentences beginning with “I’m a …” For example, when you miss your putt on the eighteenth hole, you might say, “I’m a born loser” instead of “I goofed up on my putt.” Similarly, when the stock you invested in goes down instead of up, you might think, “I’m a failure” instead of “I made a mistake.”
Labeling yourself is not only self-defeating, it is irrational. Your self cannot be equated with any one thing you do. Your life is a complex and ever-changing flow of thoughts, emotions, and actions. To put it another way, you are more like a river than a statue. Stop trying to define yourself with negative labels—they are overly simplistic and wrong. Would you think of yourself exclusively as an “eater” just because you eat, or a “breather” just because you breathe? This is nonsense, but such nonsense becomes painful when you label yourself out of a sense of your own inadequacies.
When you label other people, you will invariably generate hostility. A common example is the boss who sees his occasionally irritable secretary as “an uncooperative bitch.” Because of this label, he resents her and jumps at every chance to criticize her. She, in turn, labels him an “insensitive chauvinist” and complains about him at every opportunity. So, around and around they go at each other’s throats, focusing on every weakness or imperfection as proof of the other’s worthlessness.
Mislabeling involves describing an event with words that are inaccurate and emotionally heavily loaded. For example, a woman on a diet ate a dish of ice cream and thought, “How disgusting and repulsive of me. I’m a pig.” These thoughts made her so upset she ate the whole quart of ice cream!
10. Personalization. This distortion is the mother of guilt! You assume responsibility for a negative even when there is no basis for doing so. You arbitrarily conclude that what happened was your fault or reflects your inadequacy, even when you were not responsible for it. For example, when a patient didn’t do a self-help assignment I had suggested, I felt guilty because of my thought, “I must be a lousy therapist. It’s my fault that she isn’t working harder to help herself. It’s my responsibility to make sure she gets well.” When a mother saw her child’s report card, there was a note from the teacher indicating the child was not working well. She immediately decided, “I must be a bad mother. This shows how I’ve failed.”
Personalization causes you to feel crippling guilt. You suffer from a paralyzing and burdensome sense of responsibility that forces you to carry the whole world on your shoulders. You have confused influence with control over others. In your role as a teacher, counselor, parent, physician, salesman, executive, you will certainly influence the people you interact with, but no one could reasonably expect you to control them. What the other person does is ultimately his or her responsibility, not yours. Methods to help you overcome your tendency to personalize and trim your sense of responsibility down to manageable, realistic proportions will be discussed later on in this book.
The ten forms of cognitive distortions cause many, if not all, of your depressed states. They are summarized in Table 3–1 on page 42. Study this table and master these concepts; try to become as familiar with them as with your phone number. Refer to Table 3–1 over and over again as you learn about the various methods for mood modification. When you become familiar with these ten forms of distortion, you will benefit from this knowledge all your life.
I have prepared a simple self-assessment quiz to help you test and strengthen your understanding of the ten distortions. As you read each of the following brief vignettes, imagine you are the person who is being described. Circle one or more answers which indicate the distortions contained in the negative thoughts. I will explain the answer to the first question. The answer key to subsequent questions is given at the end of this chapter. But don’t look ahead! I’m certain you will be able to identify at least one distortion in the first question—and that will be a start!
* * *
Table 3–1. Definitions of Cognitive Distortions
1. 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.
2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water.
4. 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.
5. 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.
&nbs
p; 6. 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 the “binocular trick.”
7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, 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.
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 rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as me cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.
* * *
1. You are a housewife, and your heart sinks when your husband has just complained disgruntledly that the roast beef was overdone. The following thought crosses your mind: “I’m a total failure. I can’t stand it! I never do anything right. I work like a slave and this is all the thanks I get! The jerk!” These thoughts cause you to feel sad and angry. Your distortions include one or more of the following:
a. all-or-nothing thinking;
b. overgeneralization;
c. magnification;
d. labeling;
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Page 5