Quotes from David D. Burns

Magnification and Minimization. You exaggerate the negativity in a situation and minimize the positives. I call this the "binocular trick" since magnifying is like looking through a pair of binoculars (which makes everything much bigger), and minimizing is like looking through the opposite end (which makes everything much smaller).

Emotional Reasoning. This involves reasoning from the way you feel, such as: "I feel like an idiot, so I must be one" or "I feel hopeless, so things are never going to get better." Or in the case of panic attacks, "I feel like I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so I must be in a lot of danger.

your thoughts create your feelings.

Should Statements. You criticize yourself or other people with shoulds, shouldn'ts, musts, ought tos, and have tos. There are several types of should statements:

If you can answer yes, then you are clearly motivated to change. You will probably succeed in gaining greater inner peace and self-esteem, and you will increase your effectiveness in life. This

Self-Directed Shouldslead to feelings of guilt and inferiority when we don't live up to our self-imposed standards ("I shouldn't have screwed up!").

Other-Directed Shoulds lead to feelings of anger and frustration when others don't meet our expectations ("He shouldn't feel that way" or "She shouldn't have said that!"). Other-directed shoulds cause conflicts with others, such as marital problems, arguments, and even violence and war.

World-Directed Shoulds lead to frustration and anger when the world doesn't meet our expectations. For example, I sometimes tell myself that this or that software program shouldn't be so dang complicated and hard to learn!

No one has a moral or legal obligation to credit me for my cleverness or praise my good efforts on their behalf.

Hidden Shoulds are not expressed explicitly with terms like should, ought, or must, but they're implied by your negative thoughts and feelings. For example, if you berate yourself whenever you make a mistake, you're essentially telling yourself that you should be perfect and should never goof up.

Train yourself to recognize and write down the self-critical thoughts as they go through your mind; b. Learn why these thoughts are distorted; and c. Practice talking back to them so as to develop a more realistic self-evaluation system

Self-Blame and Other-Blame. You find fault in others or yourself instead of solving the problem or identifying the true causes of the problem.

Self-Blame. You blame yourself for something you weren't entirely responsible for, or you beat up on yourself because of some mistake you made.

Other-Blame.You blame others and overlook ways you might have contributed to the conflict.

In contrast, if you are harboring the deep fear that you are going insane and are experiencing episodes of panic in which you sense you are losing control or going over the deep end, it is a near certainty that you are not. These are typical symptoms of ordinary anxiety, a much less serious disorder.

Being a woman alone can be helpful in making you more understanding of the problems women in different situations face. This can help you to learn to be more supportive of other women and can enable you to develop more meaningful relationships with them.

In my practice I find that the great majority of the depressed patients referred to me improve substantially if they try to help themselves. Sometimes it hardly seems to matter what you do as long as you do something with the attitude of self-help.

In one sense, depression can feel even worse than cancer, because most cancer patients feel hope as well as self-esteem.

But your feelings are not always a reliable guide to reality and

The first principle of cognitive therapy is that all your moods are created by your "cognitions," or thoughts. A cognition refers to the way you look at things—your perceptions, mental attitudes, and beliefs.

Make sure you believe in your rebuttal to self-criticism. This rational response can take into account what was illogical and erroneous about your self-critical automatic thought.

You feel the way you do right now because of the thoughts you are thinking at this moment

For example, in answer to "I never do anything right," you could write, "Forget that! I do some things right and some wrong, just like everyone else. I fouled up on my appointment, but let's not blow this up out of proportion.

Don't be afraid to ask other people how they would answer an upsetting thought if you can't figure out the appropriate rational response on your own.