Cognitive Distortions: How Your Brain Can Turn Love into Conflict

A cognitive distortion is your brain’s way of bending reality to protect you. The problem is those cognitive distortions often leave your relationship terribly wounded.

Do you ever use your resentment (or your doubt, or your fear) to write the history of your relationship?

Two weeks ago, I told you about how I discovered what I called my Kitchen Sink Voice. The Kitchen Sink Voice is the voice that was resentful and judgmental and managed to find fault with almost everything my husband did.

My Kitchen Sink Voice kept score in my relationship and spent its time gathering mounds of evidence to turn my small complaints into character assassinations of my husband.

It was so comforting to learn a few things about that Kitchen Sink Voice:

1. First of all, I wasn’t the only one who had a Kitchen Sink Voice capable of annihilating the person I loved most
2. And, secondly, I didn’t have to believe everything that Voice told me, even though it felt so, so true.

 

The question I learned to ask was simple, “Is that true? Really true?”

Byron Katie is the teacher who introduced me to that question and, if you don’t know her work, I invite you to explore her website where you’ll find tons of videos of people questioning their Kitchen Sink Voices.

But here’s the question that comes up for all my clients, “Why is that voice so convincing?” or they’ll say to me, “But Rebecca, everything my Kitchen Sink Voice says feels sooooo true!”

I hear from people’s Kitchen Sink Voices all the time. I actually invite their Kitchen Sink Voice to get louder because the louder your Kitchen Sink Voice is, the better you can identify the cognitive distortion at work.

All of us are susceptible to some common distortions of the information we take in every day. The identification of cognitive distortions came from Aaron Beck and his colleagues in 1979, and later David Burns expanded the list of cognitive distortions and brought the concept into everyday language.

The essence of their discovery is that our thoughts aren’t a reliable reflection of reality. What?! I can’t rely on my thoughts to tell me the truth about reality??

 

It’s not that your brain is broken.

Here’s what’s great: when you recognize these predictable cognitive distortions, you don’t have to believe every story your brain tells you. Because when you recognize patterns that trip you up, you can learn to avoid them, right? Or at least lessen their impact.

I’m introducing you to five of these cognitive distortions today. The five most common that I see in myself and in my clients. They are:

• Mindreading
• Catastrophizing
• All-or-nothing thinking
• Personalizing
• Disqualifying the positive

We’ll take them one by one, and my hope is that you can see your Kitchen Sink Voice isn’t trying to be mean, it’s just operating with bad information. Sort of like the results you might get from AI these days. You ask a simple question like “What’s a good restaurant near me?” and you get a diatribe about the risks of food poisoning.

 

Mindreading

First up: mindreading. This is when you know what your partner is thinking. “He forgot to pick up ice cream at the store because he thinks I’m fat.”

Mindreading turns a blank space into a certainty.

I had a client once talk for four straight minutes about all the ways she was sure her husband despised her, thought she was ugly, and he was sending coded messages with his ice-cream-less faux pas at the grocery store.

The words she used to describe how her husband felt were flat out mean. I knew this man as well and asked her to narrate what she was sure he thought in front of him so he could hear her thoughts too.

He looked stunned. His face went blank. He had absolutely no words.

After a moment, I said, “Did you have any idea that’s what she was thinking when she got so sulky about the forgotten ice cream?”

His response, “How could you possibly think I’d want to say those horrible things to you? Don’t you know me at all? Don’t you trust my love? I forgot the ice cream because I’m a bozo.”

Thankfully, as she saw the shocked look on his face, that was enough for her to doubt the veracity of her Kitchen Sink Voice.

But, because most of us keep our “mindreading” inside our own head where it remains unquestioned and unchallenged, your Kitchen Sink Voice begins to sew doubt and fear into your relationship. It all comes from a distortion: you cannot know what your partner is thinking.

The trick is to catch it when your Kitchen Sink Voice begins to read to your partner’s mind. If you are certain that you know what your partner is thinking, pause.

Use my favorite phrase to wake up your curiosity, “Is that true?” Can you be absolutely certain you know what your partner is thinking?

And then I love the phrase, “Here’s the story I’m telling myself…” or even, “Here’s the story my Kitchen Sink Voice is telling me…” I like that even better because it’s a sort of signal to your partner that you’re already suspicious of the story yourself.

Many a conflict can be avoided if you just give voice to the mindreader inside your head.
When I give voice to my *mindreading skills,* my husband inevitably laughs. “You’re crazy, Wife,” he says. But then he usually hugs me. His hug is louder than my Kitchen Sink Voice, but I’d never get to feel it if I didn’t question the voice first.

 

Catastrophizing

Next up is catastrophizing.

Catastrophizing is when you immediately jump to the worst-case-scenario.

When my children were growing up we laughed about this one a lot. My father, who was a hungry boy during the depression, and an emergency room physician during his career had seen some bad stuff. He was famous for his worst-case-scenarios.

I actually remember, as a child, driving in the car with him and he’d say, “What would you do if, at the next stoplight two people leaped into our car and pulled guns on us?” I was 7 years old. This is ridiculous, right?

But has your partner ever run late, forgotten to call and, when they finally got home you say, “This is what our marriage has devolved to. You don’t consider my feelings. You never call. I always have to care more than you. I’m going to spend the rest of my life feeling all alone.”

One forgotten phone call becomes a prediction about the entirety of your marital future.

Can you see how that cognitive distortion of catastrophizing and worst-case-scenario-izing fools your Kitchen Sink Voice into telling a ridiculous story?

In our house we learned to name it: Oh. Hello worst-case-scenario. Then we tease the catastrophizer by trying to name an even worse case scenario, which makes us all laugh.

When you get curious about your Kitchen Sink Voice, you take away its omniscient and omnipotent power. You expose the wizard behind the curtain.

This is just another tool to turn criticism > curiosity > compassion > connection.

It doesn’t work to kill off your Kitchen Sink Voice. The goal is simply to sew a little bit of doubt into that Kitchen Sink Certainty.

This week’s habit then is to identify which of these five cognitive distortions are most likely to fuel the certainty of your Kitchen Sink Voice?

Once you find the culprit, what helps you peek behind to curtain to see the wizard pulling levers and sew that seed of doubt?

 

All-or-Nothing Thinking

All-or-nothing thinking is the tendency to see experiences in extremes rather than along a continuum. Something is right or wrong, success or failure, helpful or useless.

A big clue to alert you to the all-or-nothing cognitive distortion is superlative language. Always and never are big red flags, but so is any accusation that implies an extreme:

• You don’t know how to communicate
• I’m a terrible wife
• This is impossible to figure out

Your all-or-nothing Kitchen Sink Voice loves to evaluate the world on the basis of complete perfection. And if a situation isn’t completely perfect, it’s completely wrong. There’s no room for nuance.

I like to disarm this part of your Kitchen Sink Voice by questioning the absolute perspective:

• So he’s never been able to communicate anything?
• So why did he pick you if you’re such a terrible wife?
• Impossible?

The all-or-nothing voice is vulnerable to the tiniest exception.

• Well, I guess he was able to communicate about when he would cook dinner this week.
• Oh. I guess he did pick me.
• Well, maybe…

Because this voice is based on the ALL or the NOTHING truths, all you need to do to disempower that cognitive distortion is to provide a single exception and the whole case seems to implode.

• Suddenly you’re able to see all kinds of ways he communicates, it’s just different than the way you communicate.
• You see a thousand examples of how you’re a wonderful wife.
• And then, slowly, several options begin to surface about how to deal with that impossible task.

If you suffer from all-or-nothing distortions, you can quiet your Kitchen Sink Voice with the exception to the rule. It’s like popping a balloon. Once you find that first exception, your all-or-nothing thought will no longer hold air.

 

Personalizing

We’ve talked about mindreading, catastrophizing, and all-or-nothing thinking. Our fourth cognitive distortion is personalizing. This happens to be one of my favorites: it’s all my fault.

“It’s all my fault” is the mantra of personalizing.

• Your teenager got a D on her math test. It’s all my fault.
• Your mom is getting scammed on her phone. It’s all my fault.
• Your best friend is getting a divorce. It’s all my fault.

If you suffer from this cognitive distortion, your Kitchen Sink Voice will tell you all the ways everything that’s bad in the world is your fault.

• You didn’t help your teen study.
• You should have urged your mom to get stronger safeguards on her phone.
• You should have called your friend more to offer support.

Personalizing is seductive and shiny because it looks like responsibility. You’re being helpful, right? But it’s actually an attempt to control the uncontrollable.

If everything has a fix, then everything bad can be mended. Can you see how it’s an attempt to sidestep all the sadness and hardship in the world?

But what happens when you make yourself responsible for everyone else’s emotions? Can you see the hidden narcissism in this cognitive distortion? Everyone else’s experience is somehow, someway ultimately about you.

What if you were able to stay in your own business?

What happens when you let other people live their own lives and you simply show that you care? How will your relationships shift if caring is more important than fixing?

 

Disqualifying the Positive

Our last cognitive distortion is disqualifying the positive. No matter how much great stuff happens, you erase it when you find the singular exception. This is the heart of disqualifying the positive.

I had a client who complained about crumbs on the counter. Her husband threw up his hands, “It doesn’t matter many times I wipe up crumbs, she will see the one crumb I missed.”

Our brains are wired to notice what’s wrong. Consequently, we often overlook all the positive in the life we share with our partner. David used to say to me, “No matter how hard I try, you raise the bar. So, I can never please you.”

Ugh. You can imagine how helpless it feels to live with someone who disqualifies the positive and focuses in on that one minute detail. I think I did this because I’m in love with improvement, but once I saw what my desire for improvement was doing to him, I realized it was very counter-productive.

Fortunately, the fix for this cognitive distortion is super straightforward: ask yourself to look for the positive. There is an astounding amount of positivity floating about in the universe, but it takes practice to see it.

As I mentioned, our brains are wired to see what’s wrong. This is because our Lizard Brain wants to keep us protected. What’s funny though is that disqualifying the positive things in our life is a horrible strategy for feeling safe and secure.

If you suffer from this one, make it your mission to find three positive things each day. Find a place to report those positives—either in a journal, to your partner, or just mentioning them aloud when they happen.

The miracle of this practice is that seeing the positive things in life is like a muscle. The more you exercise that habit, the more positivity will leap into your field of vision.

Here’s an example:

“The story I’m telling myself is that when you forget ice cream at the store, you are sending me a secret coded message to go on a diet.

“ I have a hunch the real story is more about your desire to eat cake and your lack of obsession with ice cream. I’ll never understand how it is that you don’t love ice cream.”

Relationship communication doesn’t need to be heavy. It doesn’t need to be intense. In fact, the more laughter and light you can infuse into your communication the more buoyant your love life will be.

Let me know how it goes. You can reach me at 970-210-4480.

Want more?

• Discover another cognitive distortion: compare and despair