Shadow Beliefs

In Giving Ourselves Permission, I wrote about shadow beliefs, those habitual beliefs that block our access to happiness. Today I read an excellent post on Dandy’s blog The Reflective Self about cognitive distortions. (That term sounds a bit like a space/time anomaly from Star Trek.) Cognitive distortions are like shadow beliefs. Dandy lists the 10 most common cognitive distortions. Here is the list from her post.

1. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

2. 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.

3. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

4. 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 don’t bother to check it out.

b. The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

5. 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.”

6. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”

7. 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.

8. 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 damn louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

9. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.

10. 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.

I don’t know about you, but when I read this list, I recognized each one of these as something I have done. Yep, every one. Do any of these sound familiar to you?

So the question is, if I do this, how do I stop it? I think the answer is in substituting counter beliefs until the counter beliefs become habitual. Counter beliefs, as I wrote earlier, interrupt habitual negative thoughts and create positive thought habits. Several people have asked me to say more about counter beliefs, so I will do that in the next post.