
This is
list of things we tell ourselves to make us depressed, anxious, guilty
or angry.
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 discolors the entire beaker of water.
4.DISQUALIFYING
THE POSITIVE:
You
reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count"
for some reason or another. 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.
Mind
Reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively
to you, and you don't bother to check this out.
The
Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly,
and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already established
fact.
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 the cause of some negative external event which in
fact you were not primarily responsible for.
From
Feeling Good, by David D. Burns, M.D.