The Healthy Management of Reality - Stanford University

Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist who developed Cognitive Therapy, identifiedseveral logical errors in the thinking of people who are prone to depression. Oneof his colleagues, David Burns, lists some of these errors in his book FeelingGood: The New Mood Therapy:• All-or-nothing thinking: Things are either all good or all bad. You areeither a success or a failure. You are either a good parent or a bad parent.• Overgeneralizing: If one bad thing happens, then bad things will alwayshappen.• Ignoring the positive: If a good thing happens, you ignore it, because, ofcourse, only bad things happen to you.• Mind reading: You believe that people are always thinking about you, andthat what they are thinking about you is always bad.• Fortune telling: You believe you know yourself well enough to predict thefuture, and the future will turn out badly.• Emotional reasoning: You believe that your feelings are an accuratereflection of reality. If you feel something is awful, then it is awful.• Labeling yourself: You take labels people may have given you when youwere little, or just to tease and insult you, as true descriptions of yourself.In fact, you continue labeling yourself negatively, and believing thesenegative labels are true.HMOR.July2005.Muñoz.doc 80