Cognitive Distortions Quotes

“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but you thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“In projecting onto others their own moral sense, therapists sometimes make terrible errors. Child physical abusers are automatically labeled “impulsive," despite extensive evidence that they are not necessarily impulsive but more often make thinking errors that justify the assaults. Sexual and physical offenders who profess to be remorseful after they are caught are automatically assumed to be sincere. After all, the therapist would feel terrible if he or she did such a thing. It makes perfect sense that the offender would regret abusing a child. People routinely listen to their own moral sense and assume that others share it.
Thus, those who are malevolent attack others as being malevolent, as engaging in dirty tricks, as being “in it for the money,“ and those who are well meaning assume others are too, and keep arguing logically, keep producing more studies, keep expecting an academic debate, all the time assuming that the issue at hand is the truth of the matter.
Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998 p122”
― Anna Salter

“Traumatic events challenge an individual's view of the world as a just, safe and predictable place. Traumas that are caused by human behavior. . . commonly have more psychological impact than those caused by nature.”
― American Psychological Association, The APA Dictionary of Psychology

“When we feel bad, we often automatically decide that either we are bad or another person is bad. Both of these moves cause damage and distort the truth, which is that we are all navigating difficult conditions the best we can, and we all have a lot to learn and unlearn.”
― Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis

“Years ago I had realized I was blaming myself for it. People and doctors would tell me it wasn't my fault, but I couldn't “BELIEVE” it! Then I was talking to my friend Kieran and he explained to me in a way that I could PERCEIVE that I was not at fault. No one else could ever do that before, though many tried. Many, many people had tried to tell me it wasn't my fault, but I was convinced it was my fault because I was trying to cheer up my dad.”
― Robert Anthony

“From the moment when Pierre saw this horrible murder performed by people who did not want to do it, it was as if the spring that upheld everything and made it seem alive had been pulled from his soul, and it had all collapsed into a heap of meaningless trash. Though he did not account for it to himself, his faith in the world's good order, in humanity's and his own soul, and in God, was destroyed. Pierre had experienced this state before, but never with such force as now. Before, when doubts of this sort had come over Pierre, those doubts had had their source in his own guilt. And deep in his soul, Pierre had felt then that salvation from that despair and those doubts lay in himself. But now he felt that it was not his guilt that caused the world to collapse in front of his eyes and leave only meaningless ruins. He felt that to return to faith in life was not in his power.

p. 968-969”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“And that is why they let us down so badly.
For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“The military estate is the most honored. But what is war, what is needed for success in military affairs, what are the morals of military society? The aim of war is killing, the instruments of war are espionage, treason and the encouragement of it, the ruin of the inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to supply the army; deception and lying are called military stratagems; the morals of the military estate are absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, depravity, and drunkenness. And in spite of that, it is the highest estate, respected by all . . . the one who has killed the most people gets the greatest reward . . . They come together . . . to kill each other, they slaughter and maim tens of thousands of men, and then they say prayers of thanksgiving for having slaughtered so many people . . . and proclaim victory, supposing that the more people slaughtered, the greater the merit. How does God look down and listen to them! . . . Ah, dear heart, lately it has become hard for me to live. I see that I've begun to understand too much. And it's not good for man to taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . . Well, it won't be for long!”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Results of a recent survey of 74 chief executive officers indicate that there may be a link between childhood pet ownership and future career success. Fully 94% of the CEOs, all of them employed within Fortune 500 companies, had possessed a dog, a cat, or both, as youngsters.

The respondents asserted that pet ownership had helped them to develop many of the positive character traits that make them good managers today, including responsibility, empathy, respect for other living beings, generosity, and good communication skills. For all we know, more than 94% of children raised in the backgrounds from which chief executives come had pets, in which case the direction of dependency would be negative. Maybe executive success is really related to tooth brushing during childhood. Probably all chief executives brushed their teeth, at least occasionally, and we might imagine the self-discipline thus acquired led to their business success. That seems more reasonable than the speculation that “communication skills” gained through interacting with a childhood pet promote better relationships with other executives and employees.”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“But what if current misery hindsightfully selects and reconstructs memories of childhood to be consistent with a miserable state today? Peter Lewinsohn and Michael Rosenbaum (1987) set out to answer this question with a rare prospective study of over a thousand citizen volunteers.
[...] The results were consistent with the hypothesis that recollection of one’s parents as rejecting and unloving is strongly influenced by current moods; negative recollections were not a stable characteristic of depression-prone people.
[...] This study of depression is important in that it casts doubt on the degree to which adult problems are caused by childhood ones. Given a biasing effect of mood on memory, people who are distressed as adults tend to remember distressing incidents in their childhood. And, if a person also believes that current problems have their roots in early life (perhaps because their therapist told them so), this view itself may serve as an organizing principle to produce even greater distortion of recall (remember the Conway & Ross [1984] study).”
― Reid Hastie, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making

“[Plato's] achievements are impaired by his hatred of the society in which he was living, and by his romantic love for the old tribal form of social life. It is this attitude which led him to formulate an untenable law of historical development, namely, the law of universal degeneration or decay. And the same attitude is also responsible for the irrational, fantastic, and romantic elements of his otherwise excellent analysis. On the other hand, it was just his personal interest and his partiality which sharpened his eye and so made his achievements possible. He derived his historicist theory from the fantastic philosophical doctrine that the changing visible world is only a decaying copy of an unchanging invisible world. But this ingenious attempt to combine a historicist pessimism with an ontological optimism leads, when elaborated, to difficulties. These difficulties forced upon him the adoption of a biological naturalism, leading (together with ‘psychologism’, i.e. the theory that society depends on the ‘human nature’ of its members) to mysticism and superstition, culminating in a pseudo-rational mathematical theory of breeding. They even endangered the impressive unity of his theoretical edifice.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato

“Many parents, K-12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habits commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression... students were beginning to react to words, books, and visiting speakers with fear and anger because they had been taught to exaggerate danger, use dichotomous thinking, amplify their first emotional responses, and engage in a number of cognitive distortions. Such thought patterns directly harmed student' mental health and interfered with their intellectual development-- and sometimes the development of those around them.”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“Some regulations promulgated by administrators restrict freedom of speech, often with highly subjective definitions of key concepts. These rules contribute to an attitude on campus that chills speech, in part by suggesting that freedom of speech can or should be restricted because of some students' emotional discomfort. This teaches catastrophizing and mind reading (among other cognitive distortions) and promotes the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning.”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

“In my clinical experience, always trusting your feelings or jumping to conclusions that you know what others are thinking, without any supporting evidence, are seen as examples of cognitive distortions.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice