Cognitive Distortions and Trauma
After a traumatic experience the way we see ourselves and the world often changes. This is a normal reaction, and with appropriate care, and support, many folks eventually return back to their former selves. But not everyone. Something that can keep us stuck are the thought patterns we fall into after a traumatic event. Cognitive distortions are negative thinking patterns that impact the way we feel about what has happened. They often become automatic, repetitive, and increasingly negative. Because our thoughts impact the way we feel about everything in our lives, they can trigger PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Although these thoughts are irrational, we often accept them as truth, and don’t consider that we may be falling into a thinking trap. Luckily, once we are aware of cognitive distortions we are more likely to catch them, and can begin to challenge these negative thoughts, helping ourselves to feel better. Some common trauma related cognitive distortions are hindsight bias, discounting the positive, emotional reasoning, labeling, degree of responsibility, and all or nothing thinking.
Hindsight Bias:
Hindsight bias occurs when knowing the outcome of an event biases how we think about it after. We often distort how much information we we had prior to the event. You may think you overlooked clues or signs that signaled what was going to happen and that you could have prevented it had you acted on these clues, hunches, or gut feelings. We often assign more meaning and significance to these clues than they actually had in the moment, and forget that during trauma things happen quickly and we don’t have time to evaluate every piece of information. Because you believe you “should have acted on this knowledge” you may feel like you are to blame or didn’t do all you could.
Discounting the Positive:
After a trauma we may ignore any positive action we took in order to survive, and focus exclusively on all that we “should” have done or didn’t do. By ignoring positive outcomes associated with actions you took during the trauma and only focusing on the negative outcomes you may feel like a failure, or like you are responsible. If you are reading this, you survived the trauma, which means you made the right choice.
Emotional Reasoning:
When you fall into this thinking trap you take your emotions as facts or evidence of truth. You also assume that your negative feelings reflect how things really are. This can show up as "Because something bad happened to me I must be bad" or "Because I feel bad I must have done something bad"
Labeling:
When you attach a negative label to yourself because of trauma such as "I am broken" or "I'm unlovable" you are labeling. This is problematic, because trauma does not define who a person is.
Degree of Responsibility:
This thinking error occurs when you assign yourself a high level of blame or responsibility for what occurred without considering the roles others played in what happened and their level of responsibility. Traumatic events have multiple causes, and when we ignore others responsibility we are not looking at the full picture of what happened, and must especially consider the role of the perpetrator and their responsibility for their actions.
All or Nothing Thinking:
This is also often referred to as Black and White thinking. This occurs when we see things as either all good or all bad and forget about grey area or nuance. This can show up as "no one can be trusted" or "I will never be safe.” Another way this shows up can be in difficulty acknowledging harm done to use by someone we love. We assume that if we acknowledge something bad or harmful they did to us that we are saying they are a 100% bad person ignoring the nuance that sometimes people who have shown us kindness or cared for us can also be the ones who inflict harm upon us.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) targets maladaptive thoughts like cognitive distortions, and teaches you to challenge them using facts. There are CBT based therapies designed to specifically treat trauma including Prolonged Exposure and Cognitive Processing Therapy.