Examples of Cognitive Distortions:

• Emotional Reasoning – seeing feelings as facts. E.g., “I feel anxious about the exam, so I know that I’ll fail”

• Catastrophizing – taking a relatively minor event and imagining the worst possible outcome. E.g., “I got a ‘C’ on an assignment which means I’ll fail the class, which means I won’t get into university, which means I won’t be able to achieve my dream of becoming a doctor, etc.”

• All-or-Nothing Thinking/Black or White Thinking – thinking in only extremes with a failure to appreciate the ‘grey’ inherent to life.  It is a tendency to view the world and experiences as all good or all bad. E.g:

o “My piano recital was a disaster because I made one error”

o “My dad yelled at me, so he hates me”

o “The teacher didn’t pick me to answer the question, so I am not one of the best students”

(note that these last two are also examples of mind reading – see below)

• Mind Reading* – assuming that you know what others are thinking.  We all do this but people with depression and anxiety often make inaccurate predictions and do not consider other options.  Take the last thought above.  The student has not considered that there are many other possibilities including that the teacher may think she is a strong student and be picking on the weaker ones to try to help them along (this is similar to Harry’s error with Lupin and the boggart which we will see in Chapter 7).  Another common example is a teenager texting someone, not immediately getting a reply and assuming the other person is angry with them.

• Fortune Telling* – making predictions about the future, which are often negative.  The problem with this one is that if you assume a future is set, you may not take action to create the future you want.  This can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. E.g., if you are convinced you will never make the school hockey team, you may not give a good effort at the tryout resulting in you not making the team.

• Overgeneralizing – taking the outcome of a single event and drawing the conclusion that all other events will follow the same pattern.  This often includes the idea that something is ‘always’ or ‘never’ true.  E.g., “Joshua doesn’t get along with me so I will never have any friends”

• Mental Filter – selecting information that fits with our preconceived negative ideas.  E.g., if you think a classmate does not like you, you may pick out the one negative thing he has said as evidence of that and ignore the 10 nice things.

• Magnification – Making a mountain out of a molehill.  E.g., “I felt sick at the party.  Now I’ll probably feel sick at every party and no one will like me.”

• Minimization – This often goes with magnification.  While negative events are magnified, personal achievements and abilities are minimized.  This is a route to not valuing oneself.  E.g., “Who cares about my A+ in English?  I didn’t do well in math and that proves I am stupid.”

• Labelling – The last example (“I am stupid”) is also an example of broadly labelling oneself.  People who are depressed or anxious often think they are “bad”, “stupid”, “fat”, “ugly” and “unlovable”.  This can be thought of as a form of “inner bullying”.  People may also label others in ways that are not constructive.

• Personalization – assuming that what others say or do is a direct reaction to you or something you have done.  E.g., youth will often blame themselves for parental fighting/divorce or deaths which they had no control over.

• Should Statements – thoughts that include expectations and negative judgments like “I should have been able to come in first at the dance competition” or “I ought to have more friends”.  The statements generally position desires (“I’d like to have more friends”) as imperatives that are taken as personal failures.

*Note that both Mind Reading and Fortune Telling are examples of a broader distortion – Jumping to Conclusions – which Harry does in this chapter and throughout the early part of the book.  Later, he will spend more time gathering evidence in order to avoid incorrect, snap judgments.

The thinking errors above are often taken at face value which leads to more negative thinking as well as behaviour and negative moods.  The good news is that we do have the ability to step back and take another look at the way we are thinking which can help us get back on track.  In fact, the common “active ingredient” in all talk therapies delivered by mental health professionals is encouraging people to take a look at their thoughts and see if they can think about them in a different way.  CBT has a very specific method of doing this which is outlined below.

CBT Core Principle #2

Thoughts are just ideas. Just because you think something, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.

 We all think thousands of thoughts every day.  Many of them will map well onto reality (“My birthday is tomorrow”) but some of them will not (“No one cares that it’s my birthday”).  Therefore, Cognitive Distortions affect everyone – we all experience them repeatedly through life.  It is important to normalize this fact with students so that they know that they are not alone in their struggles.  Many youth (and adults) assume that their thoughts must be true (e.g., “she didn’t look at me when I passed by her in the hall, so she must be mad at me!”).  The key point is that this is not so.  Thoughts are just thoughts.  We can see that by picking some extreme examples.  If someone thinks: “There is a 100% chance a bolt of lightning is going to hit me” or “I am guaranteed to win the lottery” or “I wrote William Shakespeare’s plays”, those thoughts are obviously false and thinking them does not make them any more true.

The Importance of Evidence

 If some of our thoughts are true and some of them are not, we need to be open to thinking flexibly and to considering the possibility that some thoughts could use tweaking before we conclude they are correct.  In CBT, we do this by gathering evidence to see how much support there is for a thought and how much evidence there is that does not support it.  Note: Because thoughts are just ideas, they cannot be used as evidence. 

Take the thought “No one cares it’s my birthday”.  Helpful evidence would include:

• past experience – my family always does something special for my birthday; every year I receive at least 5 cards/emails/texts; several people have always wished me a happy birthday and they appeared to genuinely mean it

• current events/experience – my best friend said she was excited for tomorrow; my father has planned a party for Saturday

• surveying people/getting other people’s perspectives – I shared my thought with my mother and my sister who were both confused by the question and reassured me that everyone cares about me and my birthday

The example/table below, illustrates how this process works in Chapter 6. 

Results:

Harry has gotten his first taste of cognitive restructuring (that is, challenging cognitive distortions)

He feels better: “It was harder to feel scared of a lump of tea leaves away from the dim red light and befuddling perfume of Professor Trelawney’s classroom”

Harry ignores the tea leaves and volunteers to try approaching the hippogriff

He finds the courage to face his fear of Buckbeak and expose the back of his neck (making himself vulnerable).

Although flying is a challenge, Harry succeeds.

This experience with Buckbeak illustrates CBT Core Principle #3:

CBT Core Principle #3

It’s not the situation that matters, it’s how you think about it

Practicing approaching Buckbeak is, by far, the most objectively dangerous scenario faced by Harry in this chapter.  Yet, because Professor McGonagall and Hermione have helped him challenge his cognitive distortions, Harry is able to approaches the situation calmly and with an open mind.  And that mindset is the key that allows him to be successful.  It wasn’t the situation that mattered, it was how he thought about it.