Create Change in your life

Continued from part 1

• Magnification or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your mistake or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other person’s imperfections). This is also called the ‘binocular trick’.

• Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’

• ‘Should’ statements: You try to motivate yourself with ’should’s’ and ’shouldn’ts’, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. ‘Musts’ and ‘oughts’ are also offenders. The emotional consequences are guilt. When you direct ’should’ statements towards others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

• Labeling and Mislabeling: This is an extreme form of over generalization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself. ‘I’m a loser’. When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label onto him. ‘He’s a stupid idiot.’ Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

• Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which in fact you were not primarily responsible.

• Maladaptive thought: Any thoughts that are not useful to you in a given situation and do not help reach your goal.

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