When gifted children have negative thoughts about themselves, others, or the world in general, it causes negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, fear, guilt, worry, inferiority, loneliness, discouragement, and frustration. It is important to analyze these forms of distortion in order to prevent continued negative thinking.
The following are forms of dysfunctional thinking:
- Rationalization – making excuses for poor choices you make or for events in life that don’t go your way.
- Overgeneralization – seeing a single negative event as applicable to all or no situations.
- All or nothing thinking – seeing things in black or white categories with no middle ground. Everything is viewed in only positive or negative extremes.
- Discounting the positive – positive experiences or compliments are discounted in order to maintain a negative belief system.
- Fortune telling – making irrational doomsday predictions about the future based solely on past negative experiences.
- Mind reading – assuming you know what people are thinking in a given situation based solely on how others in your past have thought in similar situations.
- Should statements – placing false or unrealistic expectations upon yourself or others, believing “I” or “they should have done” that, causing negative feelings.
- Emotional reasoning – assuming that your negative feelings reflect the way things really are.
- Magnification – blowing things out of proportion to exaggerate the importance or impact of events.
- Personalization – seeing yourself as the cause of something you had nothing to do with.
- Jumping to conclusions – interpreting things negatively when there are no facts to support your conclusion.
- Labeling – calling yourself or others a negative label (“fool”, “jerk”, “loser”, “failure”) when a mistake is made.
Sources:
1980 by David Burns, M.D. – “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy”
2008 by Jeff Riggenback, Ph.D. – “New Trends in Cognitive Behavior Therapy”