{"id":132,"date":"2007-03-08T11:30:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-08T11:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/beyondblue\/2007\/03\/ten-forms-of-twisted-thinking.html"},"modified":"2007-03-08T11:30:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-08T11:30:00","slug":"ten-forms-of-twisted-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/beyondblue\/2007\/03\/ten-forms-of-twisted-thinking.html","title":{"rendered":"Ten Forms of Twisted Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Both David Burns<\/a> (bestselling author of “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy<\/a>” and Abraham Low<\/a> (founder of Recovery, Inc.<\/a>) teach techniques to analyze negative thoughts (or identify distorted thinking) so to be able to disarm and defeat them.<\/p>\n

Since Low’s language is a bit out-dated, I list below Burns’ “Ten Forms of Twisted Thinking,” (adapted from “Feeling Good<\/a>“) categories of dangerous ruminations, that when identified and brought into your consciousness, lose their power over you.<\/p>\n

1. All-or-nothing thinking (a.k.a. my brain and the Vatican’s): You look at things in absolute, black-and-white categories.<\/p>\n

2. Overgeneralization (also a favorite): You view a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.<\/p>\n

3. Mental filter: You dwell on the negatives and ignore the positives.<\/p>\n

4. Discounting the positives: You insist that your accomplishments or positive qualities don’t count (my college diploma was stroke of luck…really, it was).<\/p>\n

5. Jumping to conclusions (loves alcoholic families): You conclude things are bad without any definite evidence. These include mind-reading (assuming that people are reacting negatively to you) and fortune-telling (predicting that things will turn out badly).<\/p>\n

6. Magnification or minimization: You blow things way out of proportion or you shrink their importance.<\/p>\n

7. Emotional reasoning: You reason from how you feel: “I feel like an idiot, so I must be one.”<\/p>\n

8. “Should” statements (every other word for me): You criticize yourself or other people with “shoulds,” “shouldn’ts,” “musts,” “oughts,” and “have-tos.”<\/p>\n

9. Labeling: Instead of saying, “I made a mistake,” you tell yourself, “I’m a jerk” or “I’m a loser.”<\/p>\n

10. Blame: You blame yourself for something you weren’t entirely responsible for, or you blame other people and overlook ways that you contributed to a problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Both David Burns (bestselling author of “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy” and Abraham Low (founder of Recovery, Inc.) teach techniques to analyze negative thoughts (or identify distorted thinking) so to be able to disarm and defeat them. 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