*waves a CBT flag around happily*

[mousme]

CBT, before you ask, is the acronym for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, developed by David D. Burns. I have vaunted its merits in this space before, but never really in detail. Since I have a number of new friends on my list of late who have struggled or are struggling with depression (and other mental illnesses), I thought I'd spread the joy.

So here's a copy of the post I made earlier to Bodies Under Siege, the self-injury posting board I moderate along with Deb Martinson and several others.

This Public Service Announcement has been brought to by the letters C, T, and the number 5. ;)

A lot of you may have noticed that when Deb and the rest of us monitors answer posts, we often try to reframe the situation or ask "helpful" questions and make suggestions about how to feel better.

Well, in the same spirit I'd like to share a little bit of information I gathered over the course of time, which will eventually (if people find it useful) go into the Sourcebook area.

I thought I'd start with 10 Basic Cognitive Distortions that can contribute significantly to making depression worse. Or, put another way, 10 ways of thinking that make us feel like crap. ;)

I'm going to be quoting almost word-for-word from a book by David Burns called "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy." This is the second edition of the book, which has been out since the eighties, and outlines the precepts of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (a therapy he came up with and developed with other psychiatrists and psychologists over the past years).

Since this therapy helped me so much, I figure it can't hurt to pass on some of the information. :)


Definitions of Cognitive Distortions:

1- 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.

2- OVERGENERALISATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. (i.e. You drop a cup and break it and say to yourself: "That's typical! I'm always breaking stuff!" when in fact you haven't broken a dish in years)

3- 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 colours the entire beaker of water.

4- DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5- 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 you don't bother to check this out.
b) ]The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

6- 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."

7- EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are. "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

8- 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 at others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

9- 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 behaviour rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "He's a goddamn louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly coloured and emotionally loaded.

10- PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for. (i.e. a loved one's bad mood, a tragic loss, an argument between other people)



I hope everyone finds this useful. It helped me a lot to figure out what was going wrong in my thinking, in any case. :D