Identifying Your Cognitive Distortions

Identifying Your Cognitive Distortions

 Tunnel Vision: When you filter out all the positive aspects of your partner’s behavior /intentions or the relationship itself and focus exclusively on the parts that feel hurtful or deficient. It is a kind of selective attention where some parts of the picture receive intensive obsession while other parts drop from awareness

 Assumed intent: This is mind reading what you think are, the other motives and intention without any direct knowledge
You form an opinion and negative assumption that explains why your partner acts the way they do.

 Magnification/Awfulizing: You exaggerate the effects of your partner’s behavior or you focus on future catastrophic possibilities.

 Global labeling: Here you place a negative nametag on your partner, a label that acts like a global indictment of their personality or performance. Global labels not only criticize behavior, they tar the identity of the spouse. Example he is lazy, she is negative, a complainer, neurotic, crazy, a nagger, a liar etc

 Good/ Bad Dichotomizing: You sense reality in simple back and white. Your partner’s behavior is good or bad, wrong or right. Good means that it meets your need bad means it does not. Once these labels are attached, it is hard to see all the complex motivations and needs that influence every interpersonal event.

 Fractured Logic/Complex Equivalence: This is when you take an event or behavior and attach an unsubstantiated explanation on it. He is late that means he does‘t love me .We are not getting along that means we are heading for a divorce. She is upset that means she hates me.

 Control Fallacies: Here your thoughts pull to one of two extremes. Either you see yourself as very responsible for your partner’s needs, feelings and happiness (and therefore a failure if there are any problems in these areas) or you feel out of control and helpless to make positive changes for your self or your partner either end of the controlling continuum gets you in trouble. Either you are to blame for everything or you feel powerless because you feel your partner is in control.