Changing Negative Automatic Thoughts
Cognitive Distortions
Gutrot and Mental Filters


The way in which survivors of adverse childhood experiences think can significantly impact their self-esteem, resulting in feelings of loss of hope from lack of clearly defined goals, low willpower, and / or low waypower. It is for this reason identifying and changing cognitive distortions is vital to living with courage, improving self-esteem, and fostering the growth of hope. Some common cognitive distortions are:

Childish Automatic Thoughts

• All-or-Nothing Thinking: viewing everything in absolute, black-and-white categories
• Magnification and Minimization: Either blowing events and circumstances way out of proportion or shrinking their impact
•  Overgeneralization: viewing negative events as a never-ending cycle
• Emotional Reasoning: individuals reason from how they feel what kind of person they are, believing that if they “feel” like a loser than they must “be” a loser
• Personalization and Blame: individuals blame themselves for something they were not entirely responsible for, or they blame others while denying their role in the problem

•  Mental Filter: denying the positive and only dwelling on only the negative
• Discounting the Positives: insisting that accomplishments of positive qualities are not worthwhile
• Labeling: instead of stating, “I made a mistake,” individuals call themselves names such as “idiot,” “loser,” and “jerk”
• “Should / Shouldn’t Have” Statements: individuals criticize themselves and / or others with phrases such as “should,” “ought,” “must,” and “have to,” rather than “want to”