Distorted Thinking

It’s not surprising that people with addictions often have a skewed view of the world around them and—especially—of themselves. Whether pessimistic, exaggerated thinking causes addiction or is simply the result of addiction, addicts generally exhibit the following symptoms of distorted thinking (cognitive distortions). While all of us engage in distorted thinking some of the time, these negative thought patterns can grow to nearly insurmountable proportions for people suffering from addiction and depression. Learning to recognize these harmful, untrue thoughts and to replace them with thoughts that more truthfully reflect reality can improve your life in powerful ways.

1. Personalization.  When you engage in personalization, you assume responsibility for actions and events that are out of your control.  An addict may  blame themselves unreasonably for an event they had no control over—like getting laid off—or for  someone else’s poor choices—like the infidelity of a spouse—or even someone else’s evil actions—like the abuse they may have suffered as a child.      
2. Emotional reasoning. Closely related to personalization, emotional reasoning allows automatic, emotional responses to become your reality. Examples include feeling anxious about a test and concluding that you know absolutely nothing about a subject, or feeling overwhelmed when you look at your messy apartment and deciding that it is hopeless to even try to clean it up. 
3. Magnifying and minimizing.  We are all familiar with the saying, “making a mountain out of a molehill.”  When someone magnifies a memory or a situation, they blow it out of proportion.  Likewise, it is possible to unreasonably minimize an important event.  Like someone caught in a psychological house of mirrors, addicts tend to place an unreasonable amount of emphasis on some events and unreasonably dismiss other important events.
4. Labeling. This type of thinking falls into the trap of believing that assigning a label to something actually explains what happened in the past and predicts what will happen in the future.  Someone caught in the spiral of labeling may falsely think that just because they over-ate once, they are now a chronic over-eater who will never be able to have a healthy relationship with food. Over-eating once becomes an excuse to overeat again.  When that person starts to think, “I’m an over-eater; I can’t help it,” labeling has begun to function like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
5. “Should” statements.  You may have heard a counselor talk about the psychological trap of “shoulding on yourself.”  Thinking that you or someone else should or should not do something becomes a cognitive distortion when it is based on automatic thoughts that simply reflect a vague sense of guilt rather than thoughtful reasons.  We all have important, good things that we want to do or change about ourselves, but these should be based on carefully considering our selves and our situations, not just on involuntary feelings of guilt; and once we carefully determine that we want to do something, the healthy thing to do is to act.
6. Mental filter.  Very similar to another distortion called “disqualifying the positive,” this distortion occurs when someone allows a single negative event or thought to define a much more complex reality.  In a sense, they are viewing the world through a lens of pessimism or anxiety.  This is like allowing a single rainy morning to ruin an otherwise beautiful week at the beach or declaring a meal a disaster simply because you burned a side dish.

These and other similarly destructive thought patterns have been identified by a school of psychology called cognitive therapy.  Cognitive therapists can help people with addictions to examine their thoughts and guard their minds from unhealthy overgeneralizations.