Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns Read Free Book Online Page A

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    Some readers—maybe you—will experience a pang of despair when they read that paragraph. Yet there is nothing upsetting about it. If anything, the paragraph should bring hope. Then what caused your mood to plunge as you were reading? It was your thought, “For other people a little tuning may suffice. But I’m the radio that is broken beyond repair. My tubes are blown out. I don’t care if ten thousand other depressed patients all get well—I’m convinced beyond any shadow of doubt that my problems are hopeless.” I hear this statement fifty times a week! Nearly every depressed person seems convinced beyond all rhyme or reason that he or she is the special one who really is beyond hope. This delusion reflects the kind of mental processing that is at the very core of your illness!
    I have always been fascinated by the ability certain people have to create illusions. As a child, I used to spend hours at the local library, reading books on magic. Saturdays I would hang out in magic stores for hours, watching the man behind the counter produce remarkable effects with cards and silks and chromium spheres that floated through the air, defying all the laws of common sense. One of my happiest childhood memories is when I was eight years old and saw “Blackstone—World’s Greatest Magician” perform in Denver, Colorado. I was invited with several other children from the audience to come up on stage. Blackstone instructed us to place our hands on a two-feet by two-feet birdcage filled with live white doves until the top, bottom, and all four sides were enclosed entirely by our hands. He stood nearby and said, “Stare at the cage!” I did. My eyes were bulging and I refused to blink. He exclaimed, “NowI’ll clap my hands.” He did. In that instant the cage of birds vanished. My hands were suspended in empty air. It was impossible! Yet it happened! I was stunned.
    Now I know that his ability as an illusionist was no greater than that of the average depressed patient. This includes you. When you are depressed, you possess the remarkable ability to believe , and to get the people around you to believe, things which have no basis in reality. As a therapist, it is my job to penetrate your illusion, to teach you how to look behind the mirrors so you can see how you have been fooling yourself. You might even say that I’m planning to dis illusion you! But I don’t think you’re going to mind at all.
    Read over the following list of ten cognitive distortions that form the basis of all your depressions. Get a feel for them. I have prepared this list with great care; it represents the distilled essence of many years of research and clinical experience. Refer to it over and over when you read the how-to-do-it section of the book. When you’ are feeling upset, the list will be invaluable in making you aware of how you are fooling yourself.
Definitions of Cognitive Distortions
    1. All-or-Nothing Thinking . This refers to your tendency to evaluate your personal qualities in extreme, black-or-white categories. For example, a prominent politician told me, “Because I lost the race for governor, I’m a zero.” A straight-A student who received a B on an exam concluded, “Now I’m a total failure.” All-or-nothing thinking forms the basis for perfectionism. It causes you to fear any mistake or imperfection because you will then see yourself as a complete loser, and you will feel inadequate and worthless.
    This way of evaluating things is unrealistic because life is rarely completely either one way or the other. For example, no one is absolutely brilliant or totally stupid. Similarly,no one is either completely attractive or totally ugly. Look at the floor of the room you are sitting in now. Is it perfectly clean? Is every inch piled high with dust and dirt? Or is it partially clean? Absolutes do not exist in this universe. If you try to force your experiences into absolute categories, you will be constantly depressed