Cognitive Distortions: “Is Turquoise, Green or Blue?”
When we ask what color the ocean is in the Maldives, some people say blue and some say green. If someone has a broader perspective on colors, the answer we get will be turquoise. Turquoise is a greenish blue color and it depends on how you see it. Just like perceiving that perfect tone in the color palette, everyone can interpret life and events differently. There are many situations where we perceive our thoughts differently, especially when we are under stress. For example, when you are in a good period when you are in a good mood and after a bad presentation one day, you can say, "It could have been better, but that's the way it is now, I'll try harder next time." Or, when you are in a bad period after a sleepless night, the same presentation makes you feel like you have come to the end of your business life. can give. Even though you are normally a very good driver, when you break up with your lover and you crash your car, you may say "I am the worst driver in the world."
We humans are thinking beings and the thoughts in our minds create our emotions. A thought arises in our mind, and we experience an emotion in line with that thought. We act according to that feeling. In other words, your circumstances shape your thoughts; Those thoughts can also affect your current mood. As a result, you can act according to that feeling. This cycle can be positive or negative, and when it is negative, it affects your life deeply. Because your thoughts create your perception. If you have started to perceive situations and yourself more negatively than they actually are, thoughts that we call "cognitive distortions" may have surrounded your mind. In other words, you perceive the facts differently than they actually are. To explain with an example; If you are a student and you have passed a very difficult exam and you say "the exam was not difficult, I was not smart enough to solve the questions", this is cognitive distortion. Because the problem is not whether you are smart or not. The exam is difficult.
Cognitive distortions may not be as simple or superficial as mentioned here; They may appear in different ways in different problems. The underlying problems are different They can go beyond the limits and be serious, but most of us live stressful lives, so we can make cognitive distortions when we are under stress. To name a few general ones, we can list the following:
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Mind Reading: Mind reading is the super power that most of us want to have, but unfortunately, none of us have it. If you do cognitive distortion in this way, you "assume" what is going on in the other person's mind and make negative inferences accordingly. An example of this is to say "he doesn't want to see me, that's why he's lingering" when a friend you've agreed to meet is delayed because he's stuck in traffic.
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Ignoring the Positive (Magnification-Minimizing): When something positive happens, you consider it a chance When something negative happens, even if it is not caused by you, blaming yourself is ignoring the positive. When a presentation at work goes well, you can attribute it to the good will of the audience and think of saying "the presentation was bad but they liked it" as ignoring your own effort.
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Arbitrary Inference: There is enough significant evidence against a situation. It is called making a subjective inference without any information. For example, 'only the student who works hard will be successful, even though I am smart, I am a failure unless I work hard.' means. While a student who works hard may fail, a student who does not work but is intelligent may be successful.
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Selective Abstraction: Life consists of a whole and it would be wrong to consider the events that happen to us from a single perspective. Because they also have an integrity within themselves. If you focus only on a negative aspect of a situation you experience and attribute it to the general situation, you will engage in selective abstraction. When you spill coffee on yourself at breakfast, the spilled coffee is not the reason your entire day is miserable. Starting from there, you describe that day as bad, and this makes the day bad.
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Personalization: It is when you find an unrealistic relationship between yourself and an event that is not actually related to you and blame yourself. When a child catches measles at school, his mother says, "If I were a good mother, my child wouldn't get measles." is an example of this.
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Overgeneralization: Generalizing a situation that happened to you to your entire life. You are welcome. In the first exam you took, you said, "I failed the math exam, I will never be successful in math." So, it is your cognitive distortion that prevents you from succeeding.
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All or Nothing Thoughts: The situation where everything in your life is black or white means not leaving room for gray. You have no middle ground in interpreting events. Everything is separated by sharp lines. A comment that comes to the definitive conclusion, "If I fail to get this job, I will be unemployed for the rest of my life," is one of those all-or-nothing thoughts.
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Should Sentences: You have everything against yourself They are sentences that form expectations, indicating a necessity and necessity. They always create pressure on you from yourself. Setting unrealistic goals is an example of this, and "if I want to be happy, I need to have a good spouse and a job where I earn a lot and am successful." You can make a sentence like this.
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Catastrophizing: As the name suggests, it is creating disaster scenarios that are far beyond the effects of the event and believing in them. You fight with your partner and say, "At the end of this fight, we will definitely break up, I will die alone and unhappy because I will not be with anyone else." When you say this, maybe you can turn a small fight into an end.
So, is there a way to deal with cognitive distortions? Of course there is. If you manage to find the roots from which all these negative thoughts come, you can also manage to change those thoughts. We make cognitive distortions ourselves. An incident happens. As a result, negative thoughts fill your mind. You feel bad. You experience an emotion such as anger, sadness, worry, or anxiety. You increase your expectations from yourself and begin to see the facts differently than they are. Stopping and thinking twice, calmly reconsidering your experiences, finding connections and exploring your emotions will help you overcome your cognitive distortions. Of course, you don't have to be alone on this journey. With the help of a professional, you can learn not to be harsh on yourself and change your perception. Because the hard part is discovering the problem. When you're ready to solve, the process It becomes a long but instructive journey for permission.
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