Common Cognitive Distortions

In the article on the DBT Chain Analysis I mentioned labeling cognitive distortions. To give you a better idea of what I am talking about, and to clarify what the more common ones are, I have listed them below. If you require further clarification, I have also included the source cited.

1. Filtering

   – filtering out the positives of any situation and focusing instead on the negatives.

2. Polarized/Black-and-White thinking

   – there is no middle ground; everything is ‘either/or’. For example, if we make a mistake at something, we are failures, not simply people who have made a mistake.

3. Overgeneralization

   – coming to a conclusion based on a single piece of information or a single incident; if something bad happens once, we expect it to keep happening again and again.

4. Jumping to conclusions

   – assuming we know or understand what people are feeling or why they are acting the way they are.

5. Catastrophizing

   – expecting disaster to strike no matter what.

6. Personalization

   – assuming that something/everything another person does is a direct reaction to something we have done. It can also manifest as taking responsibility for events or occurrences that we are not actually responsible for. Additionally, it can be the constant comparison of ourselves to others in terms of looks, intelligence, etc., trying to determine who comes out on top.

7. Control fallacies

   – feeling controlled by outside circumstances or people; coming from a ‘victim of fate’ stance.

8. Fallacy of fairness

   – feeling let down because we think we know what is fair but others do not share the same views.

9. Blaming

   – holding others (or ourselves) responsible for my pain.

10. Shoulds

    – harboring a list of rules about how we or others ‘should’ behave or what ‘should’ happen, and allowing little or no leeway in any given direction outside of that.

11. Emotional Reasoning

    – believing what we feel must be the truth.

12. Fallacy of change

    – believing other people will change if we can pressure or convince them enough.

13. Global labeling

    – taking one or two qualities of a person, place or thing and giving it an overall negative judgment.

14. Always being right

    – being continually on trial to prove that our opinions and actions are correct.

15. Heaven’s reward fallacy

    – the assumption that our sacrifice and self-denial will pay off at some point, and then the bitterness when that day never arrives.

Work cited:

Grohol, John, Psy D. ’15 Common Cognitive Distortions’ http://psychcentral.com/lib/2009/15-common-cognitive-distortions/