I am going through some steps for myself to continue my spiritual healing as a woman, and in one of the chapters I am going through there was a section about distorted thinking, and I thought some of you might find this useful.
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David M Burns, MD has created a list of thinking patterns that are guaranteed to create an unhealthy feeling response. As you examine the list, ask yourself whether you regularly think in these destructive ways.
1. All or nothing thinking: You look at things in absolute, black-and-white catagories.
2. Overgeneralization: You view a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. Mental Filter: You dwell on the negative and ignore the positive.
4. Discounting the Positives: You insist that your accomplishments or postitive qualities don't count.
5. Jumping to Conclusions: You conclude things are bad without any definate evidence
6. Mind Readings: You assume that people are reacting negatively to you
7. Fortune-Telling: You predict that things will turn out badly.
8. Magnification or minimization: You blow things way out of proportion or you shrink their importance.
9. Emotional Reasoning: You reason from how you feel: " I feel like an idiot, so I must be one."
10. "Should" statements: You critisize yourself or other people with "shoulds", "shouldn'ts", "musts", "oughts", and "have-tos".
11. Labeling: Instead of saying, "I made a mistake," you tell yourself, "I am the mistake, I'm a jerk or a loser."
12. Blame: You blame yourself for something you weren't entirely resposible for, or you blame other people and overlook ways that you have personally contributed to a problem.
If we are creating our own misery by harboring any or all of these thoughts, we find ourselves feeling hopeless, hurt, inferior, depressed, anxious, angry and miserable. We will effectively zap most of the energy we need to creatively deal with whatever life hands us. If we have made it a habit to hold these distorted beliefs, then they will come automatically.
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