Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Testing Faulty Thinking

By  | 

We have talked about how maladaptive thinking leads to psychological and emotional distress. Faulty thinking is devious because it usually occurs on a subconscious level. You feel ruled in your life based on a set of objective realities that seem like they do not even need to be brought out into the light because they are so obvious.

However, these realities might actually be your subjective vision of the world. We become scientists together and search for hard data points that will prove whether your theses about yourself and the world are correct. Perhaps they can be adjusted slightly to more accurately reflect actual conditions. We test the evidence from your life and in the process you get to ponder whether you are content with your perception of yourself.

In narrative therapy we often talk about how a dominant story about you was created by others in your life, and it probably doesn’t reflect who you really are. In this exercise we look at how you have created an internal narrative about yourself that might not accurately reflect how the community sees you. The following are some questions you can ask yourself to help test the evidence. What would my husband or wife say if he or she heard my thought? What would my best friend say if he or she heard my thought? What data exists to support the validity of this thought? What data exists to challenge the validity of this thought? What would someone close to me say or do if he or she had this same thought? How does this thought help me in my life? How does this thought hold me back in my life?

This exercise is highly effective because it helps you draw more definite lines between your subjective experience of the world and the objective world. The state where your internal world is experienced as objective reality is called insanity. The state where you are not at all in touch with your internal world and see things objectively is called schizoid personality disorder. Most of us fall somewhere in between. Faulty thinking usually involves a subjectively held belief with lots of external evidence to the contrary.

Related posts:

  1. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Explained Cognitive behavioral therapy doesn’t discount the power or importance of the emotional apparatus in human life but it does choose to put the emphasis on cognition, on challenging and correcting faulty thinking patterns, in order to effect therapeutic change. In this sense from the CBT point of view the way you feel is a direct […]...
  2. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy For Depression Depression as a syndrome includes ways of seeing Self, others, and the future that could be categorized as faulty thinking patterns. By challenging these cognitive distortions and replacing them with more adaptive responses you give depression less of a chance to take root. You don’t necessarily need to be depressed to be guilty of invoking […]...
  3. Combating Low Self-Esteem The challenge in combating low self-esteem is that self-esteem is itself ephemeral. It’s a feeling, a state of mind, an orientation towards people and the world that might be very real but remains difficult to pin down, difficult to define. But what is not difficult to pin down or define is the automatic negative thinking, […]...
  4. Replacing Negative Self-Talk With Positive Self-Talk The antidote for negative self-talk is positive self-talk. Simple, right? Objectively speaking it is simple, but the problem is that people mistake their subjective biases for objective reality. In the context of this article they mistake their negative self-talk for fact. They think of it like an incontrovertible report from an outside authority rather than […]...
  5. Overgeneralizing A Global Conclusion Based on a Specific Example Overgeneralizing is a common faulty thinking pattern where we draw a global conclusion about something based on a specific example. To use a funny anecdote, we know a few people who were considering moving to Seattle and came to visit for a weekend in the summer. The […]...
  6. What Is Catastrophizing Catastrophizing is the faulty thinking pattern where the worst case scenario, which exists only in imagination, is transformed into a supposedly objective fact. When people are catastrophizing, they act as if that catastrophic outcome had already occurred so for all intents and purposes it has. Sometimes catastrophizing is an extreme negative reaction to a concrete […]...
  7. Mind Reading and Resentment Seeing the Worst in People Many of us carry around a lot of resentment and hostility towards intimates in our lives and it’s not just due to the tangible behaviors they enact that we believe to be unjust. In fact probably more important than the behaviors themselves are the thoughts and motivations we believe are […]...
  8. Depression CBT A proven model for helping people overcome depression is cognitive restructuring using cognitive behavioral therapy. We will discuss some of the philosophical components for treatment using CBT and the practical application of its principles. Aaron Beck, the creator of CBT, discovered in his work with patients that whether they were consciously aware of the fact […]...
  9. Mind Reading Faulty Thinking Pattern Mind Reading is a faulty thinking pattern that we are all guilty of engaging in sometimes. It’s when we are sure of the thoughts of those around us without any concrete evidence. Mind reading is turning speculation, an educated guess, into an ironclad truth. Trying to put ourselves in the shoes of others, to guess […]...
  10. Faulty Thinking Patterns A Prison of Our Own Making We get stuck in our lives and relationships because, with various entrenched patterns of thought taken to be objective truth in place, there really aren’t any good options for movement available. We get trapped in prisons of our own making without realizing it. We can’t or won’t see the […]...
  11. Faulty Thinking And Distress Your conscious thoughts are not what cause you distress. It’s the conclusions you come to about yourself, others, and the world based on these thoughts that cause you distress. It’s an endless feedback loop actually where you have beliefs, then some activating event, then a thought, and then a value judgment on that thought, all […]...
  12. If You Need Help Ask For It When people are struggling with some life issue it’s easy for them to start to feel alone in their suffering, to feel like nobody else really cares. Especially when depression, with its associated feelings of worthlessness and unlovability, creeps into the picture a vicious cycle is born where coworkers, acquaintances, friends, and family members are […]...
  13. Improving a Distressed Relationship Actively Questioning Taken For Granted Biases Improving a distressed relationship starts with actively questioning the taken for granted underlying biases towards the person with whom you’re upset. Longstanding conflict and bad experiences have probably led you to paint this person in a globally negative light where their intentions and motivations are always malicious, where they […]...
  14. Internal Police Officer We live by all these unspoken rules and values, telling ourselves what we should and shouldn’t do without even really considering where these ideas came from. If they were universally valid then everyone would think, talk, and act the same way but obviously they don’t. It’s bad enough to have to deal with the external […]...
  15. Depression And Negative Self-Appraisals Negative self-appraisals are a common feature of depression. Most people who are depressed report feelings of guilt, worthlessness, low self esteem, and deficient abilities and intelligence. The question is whether the depression causes these beliefs or these beliefs cause the depression. It’s the classic paradox of what came first between the chicken and the egg. The […]...
  16. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy In A Nutshell Here is a useful diagram to understand the underlying premise of cognitive behavioral therapy: Most of us don’t think in terms of the above schematic. We don’t factor our beliefs about the world, our hidden biases, into the equation. We’re all narcissists to a greater or lesser degree, and what this narcissism causes us to […]...
  17. Magical Thinking Cognitive Behavioral Therapy addresses thought patterns that are believed to be responsible for many mental health issues. One of these patterns is called magical thinking. We will explain it using concepts from existential thought and then discuss the idea of locus of control. Magical thinking occurs any time that you attribute to an inanimate object, […]...
  18. Changing Automatic Negative Thinking Automatic negative thinking could be said to occur unconsciously if we were working within in a psychoanalytic framework but this article channels CBT so we’ll just say that it happens so fast and seems so natural as it’s occurring that it doesn’t feel like thinking at all, it just feels like the way things are. […]...
  19. Automatic Negative Thinking And Depression Arguing about the cause of depression is a little bit like arguing about what came first between the chicken and the egg. On one hand you have psychologists who believe that changes in mood cause negative thoughts about the self, world, and future while on the other hand you have psychologists who believe that negative […]...
  20. Bud Light Commercials And Magical Thinking Bud light has an advertising campaign going that targets NFL fans. It highlights some of the superstitious behavior that people engage in during the season like crossing fingers, tapping signs, or wearing different colored socks. One commercial features a group of friends teaching a new initiate about how to face the logo out in order […]...
Related Items