Branching out a little.

I'm the Wednesday blogger over at the Cascade Literary Agency blog. This week is everyone's introductions.

Not my strength, but I did get to indulge my love of parenthetical statements.

Brain stuff.

Yeah, yeah, we all know I have issues around worrying and over-thinking. I've done lots of good brain work, and I've found ten cognitive fallacies that contribute to my tendencies.


(swiped shamelessly from Feeling Good by David Burns, MD)

1. All-or-nothing thinking aka dichotomous thinking:
A tendency to evaluate things in black & white, absolute categories. Either you get straight A's, or you're a failure. Either the room is spotless, or it is a sty.

2. Overgeneralization:
"You arbitrarily conclude that one thing that happened to you once will occur over and over again....The pain of rejection is generated almost entirely from overgeneralization. In its absence, a personal affront is temporarily disappointing, but cannot be seriously disturbing."

3. Mental Filter aka: selective abstraction:
"You pick out a negative detail from a situation, and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative."

4. Disqualifying the positive
For example - how most of us respond to compliments.

5. Jumping to conclusions by
a. Mind Reading and
b. Fortune telling
What, you mean I *can't* read people's minds and foresee the future??? Dammit!

6. Magnification and Minimization aka catastrophic thinking
OH MY GOD!

7. Emotional Reasoning
You feel it, therefore, it must be a fact.

8. Should statements
Motivation via shoulds sucks.

9. Labeling and Mislabeling
"I'm a ____" fill in the blank.

10.Personalization
The Mother of Guilt - you assume responsibility for a negative even when there is no basis for doing so.