A little room for another view.

Distortion reference

Familiar thinking patterns, not labels for you. Use the names as a prompt for curiosity.

All-or-nothing thinking

Seeing things in two extremes with no middle ground. Something is either perfect or a total failure, and one slip can feel like the whole thing fell apart.

Overgeneralizing

Taking one event and seeing it as a never-ending pattern. A single setback turns into “this always happens to me.”

Mind-reading

Assuming you know what someone else is thinking, usually that they are judging you, without any real proof that it is true.

Fortune-telling

Predicting that things will turn out badly and accepting that guess as a fact, even though the future has not happened yet.

Catastrophizing

Jumping to the worst possible outcome and blowing it up, while shrinking your ability to cope with it if it did happen.

Emotional reasoning

Believing something must be true because it feels true. “I feel useless, so I must be useless,” even when the feeling is not the same as a fact.

“Should” statements

Holding yourself or others to rigid rules about how things ought to be. When reality falls short, it brings guilt, pressure, or frustration.

Labeling

Pinning a harsh, fixed label on yourself or someone else from a single action, like “I’m a loser,” instead of describing what actually happened.

Filtering out the positive

Zeroing in on the negatives while brushing past anything that went well, so the whole picture looks darker than it really is.

Personalizing

Taking the blame for things that were not fully in your control, or reading neutral events as being about you.