BluBird, I'm glad that you learned something too. I am just starting to recognize how much I distort! Some of it I would never vocalize, but it's so thick in my internal self-talk, and I've kind-of known that it was there but I didn't want to see it. You bet it affects my daily life.

Also look at the list of cognitive distortions in the sticky post up above. I have been aware of those for a long time, but didn't think that I was doing them this much. It was an eye-opener when my learning group did a presentation for class on how this could be used in the treatment of depression. We took a list of negative thoughts from The Feeling Good Handbook, and did a role-play. Every negative thought on that list could have actually been mine, and countering them was hard. Again last night I got into a conversation with a friend and started talking about therapy and I got upset and felt like my therapist must hate me because I can never be good enough and I do too many things that I know she would never approve of, and that I am sure hurt her when I tell her about them, and she confronts me with those things, and did recently. I started crying about it, and my friend asked what I was so upset about and where it was coming from. We went through that list of cognitive distortions and found every single one of them. I was blowing things out of proportion and making assumptions about what someone else thinks and feels. Lots of black and white thinking and emotional reasoning and catastrophizing. At the risk of engaging in more of these, it seems like if someone were to open up my head and look inside, it would be nothing but a swarming mass of distortions. Ugh.