Welcome back to the Insight Framework! In this episode, I want to talk about thinking errors. We all see the world from our own perspective…as a therapist, I’ll tell you that there are at least two versions of truth in an argument and sometimes even more than that! Your alligator brain will certainly remember events a whole lot differently than your “please pass the butter” brain!
What we know, though, about the way people often make assumptions is that it is pretty universal and predictable. I know, I know – you thought you were special! The truth is that there are about a dozen different types of thinking errors that we’ll cover today. Simply by increasing your awareness of them, you improve your chances of fending them off and staying in your upstairs brain under pressure. So, let’s get started.
Dr. David Burns wrote a book called Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. In it, he challenged the idea of how we treat depression and introduced the idea that our thoughts contribute to our emotions. When we change our thoughts, we can better control our emotions. You may have heard of this approach being called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is quite popular today. You’ll find his book and the workbook in the course materials sent to you.
Let’s jump right in.
The first thinking error is often called All or Nothing Thinking. This is a very rigid view of the world and reality. It requires that there be no gray areas, no compromises. Everything is all good or all bad. The tragedy of this type of thinking is that it eliminates our power of creative thinking to come up with interesting solutions using our frontal cortexes. Imagine negotiating a cross-country road trip with someone using this type of thinking. If you don’t agree that only Marriott hotels are suitable for staying overnight and yet you have a Motel 6 budget, you’re going to have a very hard time making the trip come together. Someone with this type of thinking would just rather not even go than to concede that there might be more than one way to solve problems. Internally, this thinking leads people to berate themselves constantly. If I wasn’t perfect, I must be a complete failure. This self-defeating talk is harsher than we would EVER consider speaking out loud, yet we don’t hesitate to use it on ourselves, some of us all day long.
You might also think of this as having a mental filter, where we only see the things that align with our beliefs and ignore any other evidence. For example, our spouse says something hurtful and now we suddenly only remember hurtful things they’ve said and struggle to name positive memories about them.
Just a note that you will recognize many overlapping themes among these cognitive distortions, so it is important to view them as a spectrum of thought patterns, individualized to each person based on their internal context.
The second thinking error is called Overgeneralization. In it, we take small bits of evidence and project them over a much larger set of data. For example, a cat scratched me when I was about 6 years old. I now think that most cats are plotting world domination and the end of humankind. Now, is that factually appropriate? Of course not, but you can see how pervasive these thinking errors are in our societal norms.
After September 11th, many Americans began a movement of discrimination against those who practice Islam. Now, most of those people couldn’t even name the sacred text of that faith, nor compare the similarities it has to other Western ideologies like Christianity. No, we decided that if there was a group of terrorists who crashed planes on US soil who were Muslim, all Muslims must be terrorists.
Racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry all find their foundations in these types of generalizations, which feed on our fears of things that are unfamiliar to us, rather than inspiring our sense of curiosity and acceptance.
Another cognitive distortion is called Discounting the Positive. This sounds like, “yeah, I got a good grade, but I didn’t really work hard. The test must’ve been easy.” “Yes, I got a positive review, but they are just saying that because they had to.” “Those people only pretend to like me.”
In this form, we simply take every bit of positive feedback we receive and attribute it to something outside our control, and therefore not safe to count on. Our new girlfriend says she likes long hair, but maybe she’s just telling us what we want to hear and she’ll really bring it up later and hold it against us. Your sister tells you that you look good in a dress, but you think she’s lying because she wants to wear the other one you bought. It looks like a belief that anything positive cannot possibly be the truth. This is a prime example of an overactive amygdala, telling us that our environment isn’t truly safe, so we’d better be on the lookout.
The next common error we make is Jumping to Conclusions. This looks like us taking a small bit of information and taking a leap to a conclusion from there. It means that we believe that we know what other people are thinking, especially when we think they’re being negative about us. I mean, everything is about us, naturally! ;>
One trick I use to reality check my assumptions is to ask the other party to rank their position 0-100. Here’s an example. Back in 2021 as the lockdowns were easing, I was able to visit my aging mother in California for the first time in 18 months. Her health had declined much more than I’d anticipated, and I thought I felt all this pressure to step up to help her. This would have been no easy feat, seeing as I had a full-time job, a son, a wife and 2 dogs in Chicago, Illinois. After losing sleep for a few nights about how I was going to pull this off, I finally checked in with her, saying “0-100, how much do you need me here to help you? 100 is don’t even fly home, move in the spare bedroom tonight and 0 is I love you, see you at Christmas.” Now, imagine my shock…and hurt… when she calmly said, “Oh, I’m probably a 25.”
Now, once I got past all my hurt feelings about how she didn’t appreciate the sacrifices I was willing to make for her, I felt incredibly relieved. Here I had planned to upend everything in my home life and she didn’t even want that from me. Ultimately, you even have to ask yourself the magical co-dependent question – am I taking care of you to actually take care of me?
The takeaway for this thinking error is that it pays to validate your assumptions, especially in relationships. We may think we know what someone needs or wants from us, but the real gift is in hearing where they actually are, even if we may not want to hear it.
A corollary to jumping to conclusions is Fortune Telling. This is a thinking error where we believe we know what is going to happen. You and I both know that we rarely have enough information to reliably predict the future. Look at the career of a meteorologist – they make a living being “close” to accurate and they have computer models and radar at their fingertips.
When we convince ourselves that a certain outcome is guaranteed, we generally manifest exactly that outcome. We shut down any opportunity for other outcomes or creative problem solving with this line of thinking. It might also be thought of as rigid thinking. I would also submit to you that this is probably indicative of limbic-dominant thinking. It is our amygdala’s trying to keep us safe by anticipating threats. If we know what is going to happen, we can prepare ourselves for it.
One recent example I saw of this was an extended family member asking a daughter of a man in hospice when she thought the death might occur. The daughter was horrified at the gall and thought the question was wholly inappropriate. That said, when you step away from her emotions of anticipatory grief and wanting to protect her father, you can see that the extended family member was trying to predict the outcome in order to anticipate the pain of the loss, hoping to lessen its effects. Socially appropriate – not so much, but when we consider alligator brains, you can absolutely see why his question made sense.
One of my most relatable thinking error is Emotional Reasoning. Essentially, this boils down to our brains tricking us into believing that because we feel something, it must be factually true. So, the cornered alligator who believes we are preparing to kill it likely will not understand that we really would just like him to get off our lawn and back into the pond. We might feel like we were intentionally excluded and feel hurt. From that, we might create an alternate reality where we believe we can claim that the other party meant to hurt us, that they had malicious intent, when the truth could be that it was an inadvertent error. Wars have been started for less.
The emotional intelligence required here is the ability to name our emotions and then separate ourselves from the emotions long enough to reconnect with our upstairs brains to gather evidence to support or deny our feelings and to make a measured response. This is not the work of the teenage brain! These are lifelong struggles to gain this level of zen and self-regulation.
Another thinking error we love to make are “should” statements. Honestly, we love to *should* all over ourselves. We imagine all sorts of restrictions and guidelines for our thoughts, behaviors and feelings, many of which have virtually no basis in reality.
In his book, “The Audacity to Be You: Learning to Love Your Horrible Rotten Self”, Dr. Brad Reedy talks about defending our “goodness.” In another lesson in this course, you will learn about jury analysis, where we examine the forces at play in our lives and how we change our behaviors in the perpetual struggle to be “good” enough, worthy of love. Should statements are the language of people pleasing and alert us to our need to be validated by those around us, rather than seeking internal alignment with our own truth.
One of the final thinking errors we will examine is the fallacy of control. We often believe we have much more control in situations than we actually may. Alternatively, we may claim to have little or no control over things when in fact all we’ve done is abdicate our own responsibility. My happiness is my responsibility and yours is your responsibility. In virtually every romantic relationship, there is the underlying myth that we can make other people happy. In my experience, we can do no such thing. If someone is intent on being miserable, they are generally wholly successful, no matter what we might try to change it.
Codependency is at its core a quest for safety through control of our environments and those around us. We assess our people for discomfort and seek to avoid any conflict and to “fix” the situations in order to make others “happy”. In truth, though, what we are seeking is safety, for ourselves. How could someone be angry with us or think us a failure if we devote ourselves to their happiness, especially when that comes at the expense of our own? Yet, the people codependents find to “fix” rarely appreciate that sacrifice and routinely come back for more, setting up a toxic merry go round.
To wrap all of this together, it is important that we understand how we’ve all learned some faulty habits when it comes to communication and understanding others. When we understand these patterns, we can begin to navigate around and straight through them in order to improve our lives. We can start to understand old neural pathways in our loved ones and start to counteract them to go from conflict to connection.