The Cognitive Distortion Which Severely Hinders Recovery
By: Chandrayan Gupta
Tags: Self Improvement, Psychology, Life, This Happened To Me, Mental Health

What to Look Out for and How to Overcome It

Cognitive distortions are like anything else you have to do in life. The first time you do it, it’s awkward and clunky. But the more you keep doing it, the better you get at it. Eventually, it becomes second nature.

The first time a relationship falls through, you’re disappointed but still hopeful. The second time, you start getting a little cynical. The third time, you become completely jaded. You give up. After the first damaging event, every subsequent occurrence is known as a reinforcing event, and it does just that — it reinforces the erroneous belief.

When you should really sit up and take notice is when you start using terms like “all”, “everyone”, “never”, “all the time”, and similar extremes. When you notice yourself not only thinking in such a way but also acting (or not acting) based solely on it.

Unfortunately, there’s no surefire way to stop overgeneralizing. Once you’ve gotten past a certain point, it’s second nature to you. It’d be like quitting smoking or any other “bad habit” out there. It’ll take time and sustained conscious effort.

Whatever little progress I’ve made has been by manually overriding my schemas. What does that look like practically? Like getting close to a girl even though similar relationships haven’t worked out in the past, or trusting someone objectively trustworthy even though every fiber in my body is screaming at me not to, or starting a fresh dosage of medication even though medication hasn’t worked out in the past.

Getting out of the habit of overgeneralizing requires a substantial shift in the ideology of a person. On a spectrum from “there’s no point; everyone’s the same” to “every case is different because not everyone is the same”, I myself still lean toward the former. Years spent on cultivating these overgeneralizations and watching them be reinforced time and time again can’t be negated in merely a month, or even a year. Sometimes, it takes a lifetime.

All a person can realistically be expected to do is try to rebuild these beliefs from the ground up. Which is to say, focus on the small things first.

Once you’ve identified the areas in which you tend to overgeneralize, be on the lookout for future instances of that area. Let’s take confiding in people as an example. People with clinical depression often don’t confide in anyone because they’ve been misunderstood more than once in the past. Over time, this bitterness can take the form of everyone is bad or everyone lies and everyone betrays. They become schemas.

What you can do is confide in someone. Not just anyone, though. There has to be someone in your life you have an unexplainable feeling about. Someone you just know, or even reasonably think, you can trust. Confide in them. It can be anything, from sharing that you feel a little down to specific past events you still mull over.

That’s where you start. Hopefully, in time (two years and counting for me), you’ll start seeing progress. The ultimate aim of this exercise is not to take a complete 180 degree turn, however. It’s to get you back to thinking how a reasonable, prudent man would.

Once you start consciously ignoring your erroneous beliefs and trying something new, you’ll begin taking concrete steps toward recovering from your mental illness.