Anxious or Depressed? Free coaching: info@wamkuipers.nl

I.M. Indignant 31 Mar 2021

By times I am indignant. Usually I fall in the trap of over-responding. It goes together with serious misjudgment of the actual situation. In more technical words, a cognitive distortion. David Burns gives a nice list in his book "Feeling Good".

Cognitive Distortions

Or in other words: wrong thinking. Here is a list.

1. All-Or-Nothing-Thinking: There is nothing between bad and good.
2. Over-Generalization: a single unpleasant occurrence is explained as if it happens always.
3. Mental-Filter: I choose a specific detail among others and will only talk about that detail. Only seeing a tiny black spot on a large white paper.
4. Disqualifying-the-positive: Not seeing and counting the positive aspects certainly draws me to a negative conclusion.
5. Jumping-To-Conclusions: concluding something bad before you really can know it. a) Mind-Reading = assuming that you know it, but not verifying it. b) Fortune-Telling = Assuming someone will respond in a certain way while perhaps the person may respond different.
6. Exaggeration: Gravely minimizing or maximizing. Comparing to not relevant things.
7. Emotional Reasoning: "I feel it and then it must be true."
8. Should-Statements: it produces guilt. I do not meet the expectations.
9. (Mis-)Labeling: blaming. E.g. "I am a loser."
10. Personalization: I am (always) the cause this event, even when I am not personal responsible for it.

Prayer

Friend Jesus, I come to you with all the misjudgments that cause indignation. Especially I present my wrong-thinking. Please Holy Spirit, renew my heart. I ask for purity and humility to see the reality of the 'simple-facts-of-life'.