The Be-Carefuls

The Be-Carefuls

1. Its all or it’s nothing thinking……..If it is not perfect for you then you perceive yourself as a failure..

2. Over generalise: Seeing a single negative event as the proof to yourself that you are a failure!!!

3. Mind Filling: picking a single negative event a dwelling on it exclusively and excluding everything else.

4. Rejecting Positive Thoughts: You reject positive experiences by insisting ‘they don’t count’ for some reason or another.  In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5. Jump to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

(a)  Mind reading:  You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t   bother to check this out.

(b)  Fortune teller error:  You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and then feel convinced that your prediction is an already established fact.

6. Catastraphocation/ minimising: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as mistakes or someone else’s achievement) or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities).  This is the ‘binocular trick’, looking through one end at the positives and through the other at the negatives.

7. Feeling the Emotion: you feel the way you do so therefore you must act that way. For e.g. I feel depressed so that is how I must act.

8. Musts and Shoulds,: You turn everything into an emergency with the use of these words, instead of keeping them for when they are truly necessary
9. Labelling: you label yourself because of what has gone wrong, instead of realising that mistakes happen, it becomes a label…