After a painful or traumatic event, you may feel intense fear, panic or numbness. You may also have physical reactions such as rapid heartbeat, pain and headaches. These reactions and thoughts are common. Unfortunately, these thinking patterns may lead to more negative emotions, such as depression, anger, guilt, shame and fear.
Negative thinking patterns are common in everyone, but they’re actually based on thinking mistakes or errors. Negative interpretations about your trauma reactions can worsen your distress and make you feel worse about yourself.
Learning something about these thinking patterns can make it a bit easier to avoid falling back into using them. Here is a list of negative thinking patterns. Which patterns do you recognize in yourself?
- Jumping to conclusions — Drawing conclusions when evidence is lacking or even contradictory.
- Exaggerating or minimizing the meaning of an event — Blowing things way out of proportion or shrinking their importance inappropriately.
- Catastrophizing — Focusing on the most negative things that could possibly happen.
- Disregarding — Ignoring important aspects of a situation.
- Oversimplifying — Labeling events or beliefs as good or bad, right or wrong, with little to no information on the subject.
- Overgeneralizing from a single incident — Viewing a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
- Mind reading — Assuming that people are thinking negatively of you when there’s no evidence of this.
- Emotional reasoning — Reasoning based on an emotional reaction.
