Chatting with ourselves, distorted thoughts

Chatting with ourselves, distorted thoughts

Surely you do not realize, but sometimes distorted thoughts may appear in your mind. Everyone, throughout the day, we have a thousand talks with ourselves. Most of the time we ruminate a concern by giving us different reasoning about one solution or another.

The psychologist Albert Ellis called these spoken thoughts autocharlas since they form a spice of internal dialogue. However, Aaron Beck won the game by calling them automatic thoughts. The problem appears when these automatic thoughts become distorted thoughts, affecting us negatively.

We can define distorted thoughts as those that are rigid, inflexible, absolutist, limiting, and that do not conform to reality.

Obviously, taking these automatic thoughts into consideration will not only lead to a certain degree of suffering, but it will also limit our lives.

What are automatic thoughts?

It is a nomenclature that referring to something very concrete. These are messages that we send ourselves trying to justify and reason everyday situations. That is automatic thoughts.

They are called automatic because they appear spontaneously, they cannot be controlled, but they burst into the mind and, however absurd they may be, they are fully believed even if they do not resist the slightest rational analysis.

It is very easy to realize what automatic thinking really is with an example: we have faced a job interview from which we have come out with a positive feeling, despite not having been able to answer one of the many questions that they made us.

Throughout the day, we will probably not be able to avoid the automatic thought that just that question we did not answer was the most important and that, therefore, we will not be the ones chosen for the job.

When automatic thoughts become distorted thoughts

All people learn to live with our own thoughts, even if they are distorted and irrational.

However, sometimes these distorted thoughts can do us a lot of harm and influence excessively certain aspects of our life by becoming distorted thoughts. The main types of distorted thoughts are the following:

Filtered: negative details are taken and magnified, which minimizes the positive aspects of the situation. For example the previous case about the job interview.

Polarized: things are white or black, or there is a successor there is a failure. The average terms are not taken into account. For example today the food went wrong, I am a disaster, I will never put myself in the kitchen because I am not worth it for that.

Overgeneralized: from a simple incident, a conclusion is drawn that gives it a general character. For example, I have suspended the driving license exam, I will never take it out.

Interpreted outside thoughts: without a word, it is believed to guess what others think, always from an individual perspective. For example, that boy has looked at me as he passes, that is that he likes me a lot.

Catastrophic: disaster is expected. For example: what if I go on that trip and the plane falls?

Guilty: others are always responsible for our failures: For example, I do not pass the exam because the teacher has a mania.

"You should": there are always rigid rules that we must meet. For example, I should exercise more, so I will never lose weight.

How to escape from distorted thoughts?

So that distorted thoughts are not the ones that control our lives, it is necessary to acquire a good management in introspection and self-control techniques.

In the first place, therefore, we have to learn to analyze our cars and distinguish between them which distorted thoughts appear most frequently, making us aware of how we act in one way or another by letting ourselves be led by such distorted thoughts.

Secondly, it is advisable to resort to cognitive psychology techniques that allow us to fight against these distorted thoughts.

For example, it is effective to create a phrase that serves as a talisman against negative thinking. That is, every time in our mind we get distorted thinking, answer with a phrase that contains a rational and logical thought about it.

The mirror technique is also effective. When distorted thinking arises we imagine ourselves as if we were reflected in a mirror, having overcome the negative situation that this bad thought leads us to.