Cognitive Distortions
Teaching our teens about cognitive distortions is important. As our teens separate from childhood and start interacting more with their friends, we need to help them watch out for misinformation. I see so many of these distortions online every day and knowing what they are helps me avoid falling into the same traps.
Cognitive distortions are thought patterns that cause us to see reality inaccurately. We all have them and the more we recognize them, the healthier we will be. When the patterns are reinforced often enough, they can lead to mental illness (like depression and anxiety), relationship problems, and all sorts of other complications. They also get harder and harder to change the longer we use them. Here are some of the most common ones.
Personalization or blame - you blame yourself for something you weren’t entirely responsible for, or you blame other people for things you did.
Emotional reasoning- You reason from how you feel. You think that if you feel something, it must be true. You allow your emotions to overtake your thoughts and reasoning.
Jumping to conclusions - You try to read other people’s minds or you fortune tell about the future.
Polarized thinking - you see things in extremes and use a lot of either/or thinking.
Filtering - you focus on the negative and ignore the positive. You pick one negative detail and dwell on it until it distorts your vision of reality.
Personalization (this one is really common with teens because of their brain development) - you assume that the things other people do are because of you. You take things personally when they aren’t, frequently compare yourself to others, and see yourself as the cause of things you weren’t responsible for.
Fallacy of fairness - you feel resentful because you know what is fair and other people don’t agree with you. My tween REALLY struggles with this one. :)
Catastrophizing - when something is unknown you jump to the negative instead of the positive. You automatically assume the worst will happen.
Control fallacies - you either see yourself as a victim of fate or you assume responsibility for the emotions of the people around you.
Overgeneralization - you view a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. You come to conclusions based off of a single piece of evidence.
I created a beautiful PDF that explains these (and more) and gives some positive thoughts we can think instead. It is in the files section of my Facebook group, Raising Inspired Teens, if you are interested in sharing it with your teen!