Cognitive Distortions
What's Your Diagnosis?
Let's Get Clinical! Clincal!
Helping Waldo Find Himself
Does "Pavlov" Ring a Bell?
100
This distortion involves expectations that the worst will happen or has happened, based on a slight incident that is nowhere near the tragedy that it is made out to be.
What is Catastrophizing / Magnifying
100
This diagnosis is characterized by disorganized speech or behavior, psychotic delusions or hallucinations, or bizarre or catatonic presentation.
What is Schizophrenia
100
This clinical intervention is employed to immediately connect and reorient a person to the present moment in reality, to regain mental focus from an intensely emotional state.  This technique is often used to manage panic attacks, dissociation, flashbacks, and other PTSD symptoms.
What is Grounding
100
This therapeutic approach entails identifying and developing discrepancies and exploring ambivalence in order to activate change by utilizing Open-ended questions, Affirmations, Reflective listening, and Summarizing.
What is Motivational Interviewing
100
This simple Mindfulness technique entails bringing regularity to your breath, to allow you to approach your problems from a place of calm balance, facilitating more effective and rational decision-making. This technique can help those suffering from a range of afflictions, from Panic Attacks to Bay Bridge traffic.
What is Relaxed Breathing
200
This distortion makes us think we must always appear correct, and that being wrong or not knowing the answer to something is unacceptable. This may come at the cost of the feelings of others, not being able to admit when we’ve made a mistake, or an impaired ability to make fair, objective, or informed decisions.
What is Always Being Right or Omnipotence Fallacy
200
This subtype of psychotic delusion is characterized by a belief by the client that they (or another) are being malevolently targeted in some way. This client may believe that they are being drugged, followed, spied upon, harassed or is in imminent danger, and may seek "justice" by contacting police, taking court action or even out acting violently. (The answer is not paranoid personality disorder or schizophrenia)
What are "Persecutory Delusions?" (commonly misnamed Paranoid Delusions, because, well, they are...)
200
This form of Therapy conceptualizes Thoughts, Behaviors, and Feelings as mutually reinforcing components of one system, wherein targeting change in one area induces change in another.
What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
200
This CBT tactic entails identifying cognitive distortions and harmful core beliefs, learning how and why they took root in your belief system, and challenging or changing them.
What is Cognitive Restructuring
200
This CBT technique entails exposing yourself to a situation that triggers a compulsive behavior, while doing your best to refrain from the behavior, in order to retrain your thoughts, feelings, and response behaviors. It is specifically effective for treatment of (OCD).
What is Exposure Response Prevention Therapy
300
This cognitive distortion refers to the tendency to prematurely adopt a belief without first examining the evidence.
What is Jumping to Conclusions
300
With this disorder, sufferers feel uncontrollable urges to perform behaviors, often referred to as "rituals," to reduce the anxiety they feel when they encounter triggers.
What is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
300
This therapeutic approach targets poor emotional by teaching Distress Tolerance, Emotional Regulation, Interpersonal Effectiveness, and Mindfulness. It was developed to treat Borderline Personality Disorder, and appropriates concepts from Buddhism, Hinduism and Daoism.
What is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)
300
In this technique, a client *agrees* to run delusional ideas or hallucinations by a trusted caregiver to determine whether they are true, or if they are symptoms.
What is Reality Testing
300
In this technique, the individual who is vulnerable to fear or anxiety imagines the outcome of the worst case scenario and lets this scenario run its course. This can help the individual recognize that the fear of the outcome is greater than the real outcome, and can help patients move past obsessing about negative outcomes, toward working on coping and problem-solving.
What is Playing the Script Until the End
400
This cognitive distortion is also referred to as “black and white thinking,” or “all-or-nothing thinking,” because those subject to this distortion leave no room for complexity or nuance, or gray area.
What is Polarized Thinking
400
Symptoms of this disorder may include: Unclear or unstable self-image; unstable relationships; Fear of abandonment; Paranoia and suspicion; Extreme emotional swings set off by minimal triggers, particularly anger; self-destructive behaviors and self-harm; and Chronic feelings of emptiness
What is Borderline Personality Disorder?
400
This therapeutic practice entails focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations.
What is Mindfulness
400
This clinical tactic commonly used in CBT and Motivational Interviewing helps a client conquer ambivalence and commit to a decision by listing the pros and cons of a choice or action.
What is a Cost/ Benefit Analysis or Decisional Balance Sheet
400
This CBT tactic inherited from Behaviorism is commonly used to treat Depression from the "outside-in," countering inertia and avoidance by scheduling pleasant tasks to allow the client to increase their chance of having pleasant and thereby positively reinforced activities.
What is Behavioral Activation
500
This cognitive distortion involves assigning responsibility to others when things go wrong, don't go our way, or trigger feelings or behaviors in us that we are in fact responsible for controlling.
What is Blaming
500
This personality disorder is characterized by: *self-centeredness; a lack of empathy; *jealousy; arrogance, feelings of superiority, grandiose sense of self-importance, demands for recognition; *manipulation, exploitation; deceit, * side effects may include running for President
What is Narcissistic Personality Disorder
500
This clinical strategy commonly employed in DBT teaches people to open up to unpleasant feelings, rather than overreacting to them, or avoiding situations where unwanted feelings may be invoked.
What is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
500
Many counselors have struggled with avoiding *this urge* to correct their clients or solve their clients' problems for them, rather than coaching clients to make their own decisions; a pitfall which often backfires and leads to more resistance.
What is the Righting Reflex
500
In this CBT intervention, the counselor coaches the client to break up a large task into small steps, in order to make it seem less overwhelming and easier to accomplish.
What is Successive Approximation
M
e
n
u