How Distorted Thinking Affects Your Relationships

There’s a biblical proverb that says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” (Proverbs 4:23, NIV) In the Bible, the “heart” when used this way isn’t referring either to the organ in your chest, or to the place where your emotions reside. Rather, the heart was essentially the core of who you are – your will, thoughts, and emotions. From this core flows everything that you do, including the thoughts you think, and the decisions you make.

The reason to guard this core of who you are is that when distortions take over, they cause or perpetuate harm in your life and relationships.

A key part of who you are is how your mind works. With our minds, we process our emotions, weigh information, consider options and the ramifications of taking certain actions, and so much more. If you’re measured in how you think and act, that can benefit your relationships immensely. However, if your thinking is distorted in one form or another, that affects your overall wellness along with your relationships.

What is distorted thinking?

Distorted thinking, otherwise known as cognitive distortion, names the unhelpful ways in which we can process information to arrive at conclusions. This can be regarding your health, relationships, or the world around you generally.

According to Harvard Health, “Cognitive distortions are internal mental filters or biases that increase our misery, fuel our anxiety, and make us feel bad about ourselves. Our brains are continually processing lots of information. To deal with this, our brains seek shortcuts to cut down our mental burden. Sometimes these shortcuts are helpful, yet in other circumstances — such as with these unhelpful cognitive filters — they can cause more harm than good.” (Peter Grinspoon, MD)

When your thinking is distorted, you can come to conclusions that are way off the mark about a situation. If you act on that thinking, it can make you anxious, and you can make unhealthy choices that affect your relationships, work, and other aspects of your life. These patterns of thinking tend to be negative, and they aren’t based on facts or the reality of the situation at hand.

The reason why these thought patterns are distorted is because they don’t allow a person to view the situation realistically. While distorted thinking often cooccurs with mental health conditions such as depression, dysphoria, and anxiety disorders, it’s not a mental health condition according to the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5, which is used to diagnose mental health conditions.

Distorted thinking is when a person misinterprets situations in negative ways. When this becomes habitual, it can have negative mental health effects such as deepening depression and increasing anxiety. Distorted thinking can also affect relationships negatively.

Examples of distorted thinking.

We all engage in distorted thinking from time to time. Sometimes we take on distorted thinking as a way to cope with adverse events such as stress. To understand distorted thinking, some examples may be helpful. The main ways distorted thinking occurs are below. Keep in mind that there is often an overlap between the different kinds of distorted thinking.

Overgeneralization.

This is when you make conclusions about a broad range of situations based on a single instance. For example, one bad date can be taken to then imply that you’ll never find a partner.

Black-and-white, polarized, or all-or-nothing thinking.

This is thinking in extremes without nuance or considering all the facts. If you’re engaged in this sort of thinking, you can be convinced that the people in your life are either saints or totally evil, or that you’re doomed to certain failure or destined for success. You can think of yourself as never having anything interesting to say, or of being the most interesting person you know.

Personalization.

This involves thinking you’re responsible for something bad that’s happened when it’s not even connected to or caused by you. Whatever has happened may be entirely beyond your control, but you still blame yourself.

Catastrophizing.

Thinking this way involves blowing things out of proportion and dreading outcomes without any evidence for it. A person who’s catastrophizing may find a skin tag or a spot on their skin, and then from that conclude that it’s probably skin cancer and it means they’ll likely be dead soon.

Or when called in for a meeting with their boss, they may begin to think that they’re going to get fired, and losing their job means they won’t be able to provide for their family and will likely lose the car and get evicted from the family home.

Jumping to conclusions, or mind-reading.

Assuming you know what others are thinking about, or even concluding they think poorly of you.

Should and ought. Laying certain expectations upon yourself that you feel apply to you. Often, this type of language is self-critical and places enormous pressure on the individual.

Examples of this include thinking you should be at a certain weight, or that you ought to have gotten married or bought a home at your age. These internalized expectations are often culturally and societally informed, and the individual embraces them even though they may not be entirely appropriate for them.

Emotional reasoning.

This form of distortion is when a person believes that their emotions are the truth of a situation, without regard to the facts. So even if you’re making progress and getting good grades, you might feel like a bad student and allow those feelings to be determinative.

Mental filter and disqualifying the positive.

These are two sides of a similar form of distorted thinking. A mental filter will often function by focusing almost entirely on the negatives of a situation, while disqualifying or discounting the positive will dismiss any positives in the situation as incidental, or simply “luck” and not the result of skill and hard work.

One magnifies the negative while minimizing the positive. Winning a competition gets understood as “It was just one competition,” and a narrow loss for your team is read as a complete breakdown.

Fortune-telling.

This is when you presume to know what is going to happen, and the outcome is always dismal. So, if you have tests done by your doctor, you assume that your blood pressure, blood sugar levels, or cholesterol is going to be dangerously high.

Comparison.

Comparing yourself to others in ways that make you appear in a negative light when you don’t know the entirety of others’ situations. You can, for instance, look at your neighbors and colleagues and conclude they are happier and more accomplished than you without knowing the facts about their lives or performance.

Labeling.

This is when a person negatively classifies themselves or other people, such as calling themselves unhealthy or a failure based on a single aspect of their behavior or from a single event.

How distorted thinking affects relationships.

Distorted thinking can affect a person’s relationships in many ways. For one thing, it can make communication difficult because distorted thinking dismisses the facts and generates an alternate reality. These various ways distorted thinking works will often lead to misunderstandings, which can lead to conflict.

If one engages in emotional reasoning, for instance, they may think they’re unwanted or a terrible partner, even when that’s not the case. For their partner, it can become a constant and losing battle trying to convince their significant other that they are loved.

Distorted thinking can also contribute to an unhealthy relationship with poor boundaries and little to no accountability. If a person believes themselves responsible for the behavior or even the happiness of another person, they can take on more responsibility than they should. Codependency can thus result from distorted thinking by sacrificing your health and boundaries to meet the needs of another person.

Not only that, but distorted thinking can also result in poor decision-making overall because one isn’t making decisions based on the facts and an accurate assessment of those facts. Thus, one can jump to conclusions about the fidelity of their partner, or they can make poor financial decisions based on fears of what might happen.

Steps to overcoming distorted thinking.

To overcome distorted thinking requires that you understand that the ways you’re looking at things are indeed distortions of reality. Thought patterns can be changed, and that requires self-awareness and putting in the work to turn things around.

It’s key to be able to identify distorted thoughts, and usually, you can begin by tracing feelings of anxiety or a foul mood back to the thought that originated them. At the root of these negative emotions, there’s typically a distorted thought. Journaling can help you identify these patterns of thought.

As distorted thinking often contributes to feelings of anxiety, depression, or other mental health problems, part of combating it is to seek professional help. Counseling can help you learn how to uproot distorted thinking.

Therapeutic techniques such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can help you by identifying distorted thinking and teaching you how to reframe the situation and your thoughts to be more realistic by looking at possible alternative interpretations. However, when distorted thoughts are deeply rooted in past relational trauma, as is often the case, a more “depth” approach, such as narrative or psychodynamic therapy, may be needed.

If distorted thinking affects your relationships, emotional and mental well-being, and your life, feel free to contact me or one of the other counselors in our online counselor directory who can help you change these unhelpful ways of thinking.