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ALWAYS BEING RIGHT

 

People with this faulty thinking process will go to great lengths to prove they are right at all times. They will become irritated and even irate if someone confronts them with facts that contradict them. Being wrong at any level is not acceptable to them and they will demonstrate high anxiety from the inner turmoil if challenged.

 

 

"Always being right" thinkers believe their behaviors, ideas and opinions are absolutely correct and they will continue to prove it until they feel they have some thread of ‘correctness’ to the discussion. Once they believe they have proven their ‘correctness,’ whether or not others acknowledge it, they find intrapersonal peace until the next time someone disagrees with them. People who have this cognitive distortion will not let disagreements end and will not agree to disagree if it hints they are wrong. They will continuously ‘dig’ until they find something, anything, that will prove them at least partially right, then they are satisfied.
 

What to do?
 

• Listen! Recognise and accept that you may not have all the answers, moreover there isn't always one right answer.

• Focus on what you can learn from someone else's opinion.

• Remember that you are a human being, accept your vulnerable humaneness.

•  Be open minded and respect other people's views, choices, opinions.

•  Accept that there are many thing that you don't know and it's OK if you don't know everything.

• Can you tell to yourself that "Doesn't matter who's right"?

Being right is addictive, it stops you from listening, exploring and learning, so don't trap yourself in your own mindset.

EMOTIVE LANGUAGE

Words are powerful things, and certain words have an emotional influence that can colour our thinking - very often in unhelpful ways. We can describe events to ourselves in terms that can either inflame our reactions or calm them down.

 

Emotive words are used to provoke emotion and sometimes to obscure rationality. It can cloud our thinking with emotion or steer us onto a side path. If I said that "this girl is unbelievably rude" instead of "she's not always very friendly" I will instantly feel defensive when the next time we meet or I will try to avoid this person altogether. My language might affect other peoples opinions too. If I told someone "that girl is unbelievably rude" I might plant a negative attitude and create a prejudice in that persons mind, so when he will meet the girl I was talking about he might see her as unbelievably rude without a question.

Emotive language is one of the main reasons why people end up convincing themselves that they will be unable to tolerate situations that they perfectly capable to cope with. It' important to remember that analogies and metaphors do not constitute proof.



How to stop yourself from using emotive language?

• When thinking or talking about emotionally inflammatory scenarios check your vocabulary and make sure you are not throwing fuel on the fire of your negative thoughts.

• Strive to achieve the most neutral, objective tone that you can.

•  When recalling a distressing situation try to look at in in detached way.

Of course it is very hard to think objectively about a scenario that has had a strong emotional impact and it might be difficult to accept that it is often our language that colours our perceptions and feeds our anxieties and low moods.

FORTUNE TELLING

I'm pretty sure you are very familiar with this one. It's when you know how something's going to turn out. Let's say you're revising for your exam and in your mind you're already telling yourself that you're going to fail. Here predictions turn facts, a possibility is turned into a probability.

This is why so many of us hold ourselves back in life. You might avoid going to the social gathering just because we think there won't be anything that will interest you, you decide not to book an outdoor holiday because you predict that it will rain anyway, you might decide not to apply for this job, because you think you won't get it anyway. We can get stuck in this vicious circle and never move on, if we let our thoughts being taken as facts and develop a really low-self esteem.

How to challenge this?

• Identify exactly what your prediction is — exactly what will happen and when and where it will happen;

•  Examine evidence for and against your fortune telling.

• Ask yourself: 

1. How many times your predictions never happened?
2. How can you prove that your thought is right or wrong?
3. Are your fears responsible for fortune telling? 

•  Identify your fears and check what really happens when you embrace them. 

We direct this kind of thinking not only to ourselves but also to others, especially when we don't agree with other people's choices, lifestyle, etc. We might say to them "your relationship is not going to work" or "with a haircut like that you will only get laughed at". What I want to say here is that we simply can't predict anything, so it's not fair to put other people down. Life is not that simple, so why would we impose our opinions on other people (and ourselves) when there's very little chance the things we predict will ever happen. Accept that you just don't know and stay open to various of possibilities. 

EMOTIONAL REASONING

This thinking pattern has become a habit for us that we might not be even aware of doing this. Emotional reasoning happens when our feelings tell us what reality is about situations, ourselves, and others. Here feelings become facts. 

You feel guilty, 'you must've done something wrong', 'you feel attacked, he must be getting at you', 'you feel scared, something awful is about to happen', 'If you feel fat, that means you're fat', etc..We treat our feelings as if they were evidence for the truth of our negative thoughts, when the truth is that our emotions cloud out judgement and make it hard for us to see things clearly.




How to escape from this thinking pattern?

• Recognise that your emotions are not necessarily accurate guides when it comes to establishing the facts and the truth.

• Set your feelings to one side and consider what hard evidence there may be that supports your conclusions.

• Consider other possible explanations.

• Ask yourself: "Would someone else be reacting to this situation in the same way?"

Of course emotions are important for the information they provide, but they have to be interpreted in an objective way to understand what they mean.

MIND READING

In my opinion mind-reading is the most common thinking errors in which we engage almost every day. You probably recognise statements like 'She thinks I'm an idiot", "They thought I am useless", "He thinks he is the center of attention" etc. We are simply making assumptions about other people, their thoughts and intentions all the time. The problem is that most of the time we make assumptions that people are forming negative conclusions about us.

We leap to conclusions about other people's motives and attitudes on the basis of very little hard evidence. We are especially inclined to do this when those motives and attitudes affect us directly. People who's self-esteem is not that high especially engage in this kind of thinking pattern.

Lets look at the examples like these:

A thought: "She completely ignored me in the shop today" - we are quick to jump to these kind of conclusions when a person we know didn't acknowledge us in a public place for example.
True reason: She never saw you in the shop. Why can't we just seek for reasons instead of assuming the worst and causing ourselves all sorts of problems?

A thought: "He thinks I'm unattractive, because my teeth are crooked."
True reason: "Nice woman - if only I wasn't married.."

We take our own negative opinions about ourselves (which we define as facts) and we believe that others are in agreement with us. The trouble here is that when we make these kind of assumptions we leave ourselves exposed to all kinds of misunderstandings and paranoid projections.

The fact of the matter is that we have no way of thinking for certain what another person is thinking unless they choose to tell us! 

BLACK & WHITE or ALL OR NOTHING THINKING

 

 

It won't be difficult to recognise this thinking error. It is characterised by a tendency to view things in extremes - either good or bad; right or wrong; best or worst etc. When black & white thinking dominates in our heads we don't see any shades of grey or any middle ground in between. This applies to ourselves, other people, events and situations.

Black & White, All or Nothing or in other terms Polarised thinking would insist that if you're not thin, you must be fat; if you're not a winner, then you're a loser; if it's not the best, then it's rubish, etc. For some it is very convenient to classify reality in convenient boxes and these thinkers usually spend a great deal of time and energy to impose their classification system on other people. But life isn't that simple!
Many people with 'perfectionist' type tendencies will think in this way and often set up unrealistically high standards for themselves to which they can't live up.

What are the dangers of this distorted process of thinking?

This kind of thinking goes hand in hand with strong moral judgements and self-evaluations that can cause a great deal of unnecessary distress. People who think in rigid ways put themselves and others under intense pressure.
Black & White thinkers tolerate no dissent - after all, in their eyes there is only one right way. This kind of polarised thinking leads to a great many evils in society including racism, bigotry, sexism and political extremism.
When applied to oneself the result of this thinking is an inevitable reduction in self-esteem as the person experiences a negative self-image.


What to do before falling into this extreme polarised thinking?

• It's important to recognise that people can see and experience things in different ways.

• Remember that perceiving a question, or situation in more flexible, sophisticated ways are likely to be better for your mental health.

• Watch out for terms in your speech and thinking such as 'should', 'ought to' and 'must' that may indicate the presence of unhelpfully rigid assumptions about yourself and the world. 

• Try to embrace the grey, try to find and recognise that the middle ground also exists.

• Learn to see that your values and convictions as a matter of personal choice rather than obligatory for everyone.

• Expose yourself to other views that don't necessarily fit in with your own and see if you can find any common ground with those who told them.

Remember that the belief that perfection is possible and the belief that a person's worth is determined by achievement are two irrational beliefs that feed this kind of thinking. It only limits our perspective, increases chances for depression, makes us less willing to compromise, and makes us less adaptive. So next time when you hear someone saying that "Children should be seen and not heard" recognise that this is an extreme opinion which can be challenged.