Trapped In Negative Thoughts?
Negative Self-Talk
Do You Do Any of These?
Look at what distorts your thinking, by translating the following categories into your own life.
Filtering: This is a process where you take the negative detail and magnifies it while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation.
Polarised thinking: Things are black or white; good or bad. You’re either perfect or a failure, there is no middle ground. If something is not perfect then it is worthless and the same goes for people in their lives.
Over generalising: You arrive at a general conclusion based on a single incident or flimsy evidence. Looking back, you see patterns of difficult experiences span your whole life. Failing in something produces a belief of a lifetime of failure.
Mind reading: Without people telling you more than they have, you know what they are feeling and why they behave and act the way they do and you are able to guess how people are feeling towards you.
Catastrophising: You expect disaster to happen. You notice or anticipate a problem and are always concerned with the “what-ifs.” For instance, what if tragedy strikes again; or what if it happens to me.
Personalisation: When you think that everything people say or do, is necessarily related to you or that they react to you. You constantly compare yourself to others and always evaluate yourself to find out how you fare.
Control Fallacies: This is when you feel controlled by outside sources, thus feeling helpless and a total victim of fate and circumstances. Here the fallacy is internal control holds you responsible for the pain and unhappiness of everybody around you.
Fallacy of Fairness: Illustrated in an example where you may feel resentful because you may have your own standards of what is fair and yet you may not be in agreement with others.
Blaming: Refusing to take responsibility and blaming others for your pain.
Blaming yourself: This is where you have a belief that you are personally responsible for what goes on around you no matter how unrealistic this might be. You tend to blame yourself for every problem.
Shoulds/Oughts/Should nots/Ought nots: This refers to the tendency to see the world as a place where there are rules of behaviour and achievement that must never be broken. Blame of self and others is the currency here.
Emotional Reasoning: Believing that what you feel must be true automatically. If you feel stupid or boring, then you must be stupid or boring.
Fallacy of Change: You expect that other people will change to suit you if you just keep pressuring them or cajole them enough. In this case you feel a need to change people because your hopes for happiness depend entirely on them.
Global Labelling: This one generalises one or more qualities into a negative overall judgment. For instance, a statement such as “he was a born loser and I could tell that from the very first day that he showed up here.”
Being Right: You are continuously proving that your opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and you will go to any lengths to demonstrate that you are right.
Heaven’s Reward Fallacy: You expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to be rewarded as though it is essential that they should be. You feel very bitter, angry, overly disappointed when the reward does not come.