Self-sabotage is self-sabotaging. Why would anyone do this?

A peer-reviewed exploration of how unresolved trauma rewires the brain, regulates the nervous system, and silently orchestrates our everyday lives.

There is a particular kind of suffering that doesn’t announce itself with a single, datable event. It doesn’t always arrive in the form of a car accident, a natural disaster, or a violent assault — the traumas most commonly depicted in clinical textbooks. Instead, it accumulates. It seeps in through years of emotional neglect, through childhoods spent walking on eggshells, through relationships that felt unsafe, through the ongoing experience of being small in a world that felt threatening. This is complex trauma, and its effects are as pervasive as they are often invisible — to others, and sometimes even to the person living inside them.

In 1994, psychiatrist and Harvard scholar Judith Lewis Herman first articulated the concept of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) in her landmark book Trauma and Recovery, arguing that the diagnostic framework available at the time failed to capture the full range of psychological devastation wrought by prolonged, repeated traumatisation — particularly when it occurs in childhood, within relationships, and from which there is little or no escape (Herman, 1992). Decades later, the World Health Organisation formally recognised C-PTSD as a distinct diagnosis in its ICD-11 classification (2019), distinguishing it from standard PTSD as a more severe subtype that is more common following repeated interpersonal trauma, with prominent disturbances of emotion regulation, self-identity, and relational capacities.

But the question that haunts clinicians, researchers, and the people living with it remains: how, exactly, does trauma get under the skin? And what does it actually look like — not in a clinical checklist, but in the texture of a real human life?

The Brain on Alert: What Trauma Does to Your Neurobiology

To understand complex trauma, we first need to understand what happens inside the brain when threat — especially repeated threat — rewires the system designed to protect us.

The human stress response is centred on what is sometimes called the threat triad: the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex. The hippocampus, amygdala, and the medial prefrontal cortex are all important limbic structures involved in the processes that undermine mental health, and hyperarousal of the sympathetic nervous system with sustained allostatic load along the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis has been theorised as the basis for adult psychopathology following early childhood trauma.

In plain terms: when a threat is perceived, the amygdala — our brain’s alarm system — fires first. The amygdala instantly sends signals to the hypothalamus and brainstem, which results in activation of the autonomic nervous system and secretion of cortisol and catecholamines, the key drivers of stress reactions. This is adaptive. Under normal circumstances, once the danger passes, the prefrontal cortex helps regulate the alarm back down. But when stress is chronic — when there is no “once the danger passes” — the system becomes recalibrated.

Research has demonstrated what happens to these structures under prolonged duress. Chronic stress exposure leads to dendritic atrophy in the prefrontal cortex, dendritic extension in the amygdala, and strengthening of the noradrenergic system. High levels of norepinephrine release during stress rapidly impair the top-down cognitive functions of the prefrontal cortex, while strengthening the emotional and habitual responses of the amygdala. In other words: the rational, regulating part of the brain shrinks back; the reactive, threat-detecting part grows stronger.

Neuroimaging data reinforces this picture. Research consistently shows altered connectivity between the insula, amygdala, and prefrontal regions in individuals with PTSD, with hyperactivation of the amygdala and insula coupled with hypoactivation of prefrontal regions during emotion processing and regulation tasks — an altered connectivity pattern thought to contribute to heightened threat sensitivity and difficulties in emotion regulation.

The world’s largest childhood trauma study, published in 2024 by researchers at the University of Essex, uncovered a disruption in neural networks involved in self-focus and problem-solving, meaning that those under 18 who experienced abuse may struggle with emotions, empathy, and understanding their own bodies.

This is not metaphorical damage. It is measurable, structural, and neurologically real — and it shapes everything that follows.

The Body Keeps the Score: Physical Manifestations of Unresolved Trauma

Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal phrase — that the body keeps the score — has entered popular consciousness for good reason. It describes something clinicians and survivors have long observed: that unresolved trauma does not stay neatly contained in the mind. It lives in the muscles, the gut, the skin, the breath.

Individuals with C-PTSD often exhibit a heightened or diminished awareness of internal bodily sensations, such as heart rate or respiratory changes, which in turn affects their ability to regulate emotional responses to stress or trauma cues appropriately. This disruption of interoception — the ability to sense and interpret one’s own bodily signals — is central to understanding why so many trauma survivors find it difficult to know what they are feeling, or feel overwhelmed by physical sensations without understanding why.

The autonomic nervous system (ANS), which governs involuntary functions like heart rate, digestion, and breathing, is thrown into chronic dysregulation. Two PTSD subtypes have been proposed: a dissociative (hyporeactive) subtype characterised by extreme inhibition of emotion, and a re-experiencing/hyperaroused subtype characterised by under-modulation of emotion. One person with complex trauma may be perpetually activated — heart racing, muscles braced, breath shallow, unable to relax in quiet moments. Another may feel chronically numb, flat, and disconnected from their own physical experience. Both are responses to the same underlying dysregulation, expressed differently.

Common physical symptoms include persistent sleep difficulties and nightmares, chronic muscle tension, jaw clenching and headaches, gastrointestinal problems, and an exaggerated startle response — the flinch at a door slamming, the spike of panic at an unexpected touch. Perhaps most confounding is the presence of chronic pain without a clear medical explanation, which is increasingly understood not as psychosomatic dismissal but as a genuine physiological consequence of a nervous system that has been held in prolonged fight-flight-freeze activation.

Symptoms related to arousal and reactivity — such as irritability, hypervigilance, and sleep disturbances — are associated with dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, increased activity of the noradrenergic system, and weakened inhibition of limbic systems by the frontal cortex. Together, these neurobiological changes sustain the chronic dysregulation of systems responsible for fear, arousal, and emotional control.

For many survivors, these physical symptoms are the first — or only — place the trauma appears. They visit doctors for fatigue, for chronic pain, for digestive issues, never connecting these to experiences that may have happened decades earlier. The body, as van der Kolk observed, never forgets.

The Emotional Landscape: Feeling Too Much, Feeling Nothing, or Oscillating Between the Two

The emotional signature of complex trauma is not one thing. It is a constellation — and it is often internally contradictory. Survivors may describe feeling intense, overwhelming emotion that seems disproportionate to any visible trigger, while also describing long stretches of emotional numbness or flatness, as though a dimmer switch has been turned down on their inner life.

Complex PTSD was formulated to include, in addition to the core PTSD symptoms, dysregulation in three psychobiological areas: emotion processing, self-organisation (including bodily integrity), and relational security. The emotional dysregulation that characterises C-PTSD is not simply moodiness or sensitivity — it is a nervous system that has lost the capacity for flexible, graduated response, instead lurching between extremes: flooded and overwhelmed, or shut down and dissociated.

Shame is a central emotional feature, often more prominent than fear in complex trauma — particularly when the trauma was interpersonal and relational. Individuals with clinical levels of dissociation display increased levels of both state and trait guilt and shame, coupled with a tendency toward social withdrawal and an obsessive preoccupation with social interactions. This shame is not a rational judgement. It is somatic, preverbal, often arriving before conscious thought, producing a pervasive sense of being fundamentally flawed or different from other people.

Other common emotional experiences include persistent anxiety or a low-grade, free-floating dread that is hard to attribute to any single cause; depression; grief; and a deep difficulty trusting others — not as a choice, but as a nervous system default shaped by past experience of betrayal or abandonment. Rapid mood shifts, difficulty feeling pleasure, and a sense of being disconnected from oneself or from one’s life are also frequently reported.

What makes the emotional experience of complex trauma so disorienting — and so often misunderstood by others — is that these responses are frequently not linked to what is visibly happening in the present. A benign comment, a tone of voice, the smell of a particular place: these can trigger a cascade of emotion that, to an outside observer, seems entirely out of proportion. The key word is trigger — and it speaks to a nervous system that has learned to pattern-match present cues to past danger with alarming efficiency.

The Cognitive Architecture of Trauma: How It Reshapes Thought

Complex trauma does not merely colour how a person feels. It rewrites how they think — about the world, about other people, and most profoundly, about themselves.

Prolonged and complex trauma exposure leads to the establishment of highly probable hypotheses — for example, perceiving situations as unsafe or others as inherently dangerous — that are based on the impact of the trauma and the physiological response it triggers. Such trauma-based predictions often get reactivated in later situations, regardless of whether they match current sensory data, allowing them to override actual perceptions and elicit negative emotions tied to present circumstances instead of being correctly attributed to past events.

This is one of the most important — and least appreciated — aspects of complex trauma: it is a predictive system. The brain, having learned that certain patterns were dangerous, pre-empts new experience by applying old templates. What looks from the outside like an irrational response is, from inside the traumatised nervous system, a completely logical extension of what was learned.

Common cognitive patterns include intrusive thoughts and unwanted memories that break through without warning; flashbacks, in which the emotional and sensory reality of a past event is re-experienced as though it were happening now; difficulty concentrating; and what many survivors describe as “brain fog” — a sense of mental slowness or inability to think clearly that reflects the prefrontal cortex’s compromised functioning.

Dissociation deserves particular attention here. Trauma-related dissociation is a biological response to a stressful event in which the victim finds themselves in a completely helpless situation, to which the body responds by stopping processing perceptual, cognitive, and emotional information. In complex trauma, this can manifest as memory gaps, a sense of watching oneself from the outside (depersonalisation), feelings that the world is unreal or dreamlike (derealisation), or the more complete “spacing out” that renders a person temporarily absent from a conversation or situation. Far from being a dramatic phenomenon, many survivors experience low-grade, everyday dissociation — the phenomenon of “losing” large portions of a day, or not being able to remember much of childhood.

Complex trauma occurring within attachment relationships would interrupt emotional development and the development of social cognition and social information processing. This manifests in the cognitive realm as difficulty reading social situations accurately, misinterpreting others’ intentions (typically in the direction of perceived threat), and an impaired capacity for what researchers call mentalisation — the ability to understand one’s own and others’ mental states. Relationships become cognitively exhausting and confusing, because the mental models built from early experience are fundamentally distorted.

Negative core beliefs — “I am not safe,” “I am worthless,” “I am different from everyone else,” “I am fundamentally broken” — are not conscious intellectual conclusions. They are deeply embedded assumptions, formed in the crucible of early experience, that filter all subsequent perception. A compliment slides off; a criticism confirms what was already “known.”

The Behavioural Imprint: How Trauma Lives in What We Do

Perhaps the most visible — and most judged — dimension of complex trauma is its behavioural expression. The patterns that emerge from unresolved trauma are, in a very real sense, adaptations: strategies that once served survival and have since become habits the nervous system cannot easily relinquish.

Hypervigilance is one of the most consistent. The person who scans a room upon entering, who monitors tone of voice and facial expressions with exhausting precision, who cannot sit with their back to the door — this is not anxiety in the ordinary sense. It is a nervous system executing a threat-detection protocol that was once, in a different context, an entirely rational response to an unpredictable or dangerous environment.

Avoidance — of people, places, conversations, and feelings that echo past pain — is another core feature. Avoidance mechanisms are associated with reduced functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and limbic structures, reflecting processes of emotional and cognitive suppression related to trauma. The problem is that avoidance, while offering short-term relief from activation, prevents the nervous system from ever learning that the avoided thing is no longer dangerous. The threat remains vivid and alive precisely because it is never re-encountered in safety.

People-pleasing and difficulty setting limits are particularly prevalent in those whose early trauma occurred within attachment relationships — where expressing needs was dangerous, and whose sense of safety became contingent on managing others’ emotional states. The adult who cannot say no, who exhausts themselves maintaining social harmony, who feels profound guilt or dread at the prospect of disappointing anyone, is often unconsciously re-enacting the relational dynamics of a much earlier, much more constrained world.

At the other end of the behavioural spectrum: sudden anger, emotional outbursts, or what appears to others as aggression or volatility. The affective domain problems characteristic of C-PTSD are evidenced by heightened emotional reactivity, violent outbursts, reckless or self-destructive behaviour, or a tendency towards experiencing prolonged dissociative states when under stress. These are not character flaws. They are the product of a regulatory system that was never properly developed, because the environment that should have co-regulated it — usually a safe, consistent caregiver — was not consistently available.

Increased use of alcohol, substances, or other numbing or regulating behaviours is extremely common, and again, makes perfect adaptive sense: when the nervous system cannot regulate itself, external means of regulation become necessary.

Perhaps the most enduring behavioural signature is the re-enactment of relational patterns. Complex PTSD is associated with traumatic events that start earlier in life and are perpetrated by acquaintances or family members. When the source of trauma is relational — a parent, a partner, a sibling — the nervous system learns that intimate relationships carry particular qualities: unpredictability, danger, simultaneous need and threat. Those templates, if unaddressed, get applied to future intimate relationships with remarkable fidelity, producing cycles of conflict, dependency, or distrust that can baffle and exhaust both the survivor and those around them.

The Hidden Prevalence: Who Is Affected, and Why It Goes Unrecognised

A critical but often overlooked dimension of complex trauma is the breadth of experience it encompasses. While the public imagination tends toward extreme, dramatic events, trauma is substantially broader. Trauma exposure is common — lifetime estimates in the United States range from 50% to 89%, and in an international study of 69,000 adults, 70% reported lifetime exposure to a traumatic event and 30.5% reported being exposed to four or more traumatic events.

Crucially, C-PTSD is a stress-related mental disorder generally occurring in response to complex traumas — commonly prolonged or repetitive exposure to traumatic events from which one sees little or no chance to escape. This includes, but is not limited to, childhood neglect, emotional abuse, domestic violence, bullying, medical trauma, community violence, and the cumulative stress of marginalisation and systemic inequality. The question is not only what happened, but how long, how often, and within what relationship.

One of the most striking clinical observations is the capacity of highly traumatised individuals to present as high-functioning — capable, competent, even successful externally, while carrying an enormous internal burden. The dissociative and compensatory strategies that trauma produces can be extraordinarily effective at maintaining surface functionality, making it difficult for others — and sometimes the person themselves — to recognise that anything is wrong. The absence of obvious distress does not equal the absence of suffering.

Patients with CPTSD report earlier onset of trauma, more trauma perpetrated by acquaintances or family members, and more comorbidities than those with PTSD. This comorbidity — with depression, anxiety disorders, substance use, chronic pain, and personality difficulties — means that complex trauma is often treated piecemeal, its symptoms addressed in isolation from their common root.

The Path Forward: What Healing Requires

Understanding complex trauma is not merely an academic exercise. It is, for millions of people, the difference between a lifetime of confusion about why they are the way they are, and a coherent framework that opens the door to recovery.

The same neuroplasticity that allows the brain to be shaped by trauma also provides the basis for healing and recovery — the brain can re-wire, the nervous system can regain regulation, and evidence-based trauma therapies and intentional lifestyle practices offer concrete pathways to support this healing process.

Treatment approaches specifically designed for complex trauma — including trauma-focused CBT, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), and phase-based approaches such as STAIR — aim to work not just with conscious narrative but with the body, the nervous system, and the deep relational wounds that lie at C-PTSD’s core. Techniques such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which has been found effective in addressing C-PTSD symptomology, incorporate elements designed to enhance interoceptive tolerance and accuracy, facilitating a more nuanced understanding and integration of bodily sensations with corresponding emotional states.

The recognition that persists through all the research is this: complex trauma is not a weakness of character, not a failure of resilience, and not a permanent state. It is a deeply human response to experiences that exceeded the capacity of the nervous system to integrate — often with very limited support and at a very young age. Its symptoms, however disruptive, are adaptations that once served a purpose. The task of healing is not to extinguish those adaptations by force, but to slowly build the safety, the relational experience, and the neurological capacity from which they are no longer needed.

If something in this article resonates — if you recognise patterns that keep repeating, reactions that feel disproportionate to present circumstances, or a persistent difficulty feeling safe, calm, or connected — it may be worth exploring with a qualified therapist who works with trauma. The body remembers. But it can also, with time and the right conditions, learn something new.

References

• American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.).
• Frontiers in Psychiatry. (2024). Tracing the paths: a systematic review of mediators of complex trauma and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1331256
• Frontiers in Psychiatry. (2024). A network analysis of ICD-11 Complex PTSD, emotional processing, and dissociative experiences. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1372620
• Guzman Torres, E. et al. (2023). Predictors of complex PTSD. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40479-022-00208-7
• Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.
• Kaplan Therapy. (2025). The trauma-brain connection. https://kaplantherapy.org/trauma-brain-connection/
• Kozlowska, K., et al. (2022). Childhood Trauma, the HPA Axis and Psychiatric Illnesses. Frontiers in Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.748372
• Lanius, R., et al. (2024). Reconceptualizing complex PTSD: A predictive processing framework. Neuroscience & Biobehavioural Reviews. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0149-7634(24)00305-1
• MDPI Journal of Clinical Medicine. (2025). Impact of PTSD duration on hippocampus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm14207242
• MDPI International Journal of Molecular Sciences. (2025). Hyperarousal, dissociation, emotion dysregulation and re-experiencing. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms26115216
• Quirk, G. J. & Beer, J. S. (2014). The effects of stress exposure on prefrontal cortex. PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4244027/
• Siciliano, R. E. & Compas, B. E. (2022). Autonomic nervous system correlates of posttraumatic stress symptoms in youth. Clinical Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2022.102125
• Stein, M. B. & Bhatt, D. (2024). Neurobiology and treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.20240536
• University of Essex. (2024). World’s largest childhood trauma study uncovers brain rewiring. ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240205165831.htm
• van Dijke, A., et al. (2015). Association of childhood complex trauma and dissociation with C-PTSD symptoms in adulthood. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation. https://doi.org/10.1080/15299732.2015.1016253
• van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
• World Health Organization. (2019). International Classification of Diseases (11th ed.).

Unhelpful Cognitions

Mental Filter: This thinking style involves a “filtering in” and “filtering out” process – a sort of “tunnel vision”, focusing on only one part of a situation and ignoring the rest. Usually this means looking at the negative parts of a situation and forgetting the positive parts, and the whole picture is coloured by what may be a single negative detail.

Jumping to Conclusions: We jump to conclusions when we assume that we know what someone else is thinking (mind reading) and when we make predictions about what is going to happen in the future (predictive thinking).

Mind reading: Is a habitual thinking pattern characterized by expecting others to know what you’re thinking without having to tell them or expecting to know what others are thinking without them telling you. This is very common, and most people can identify. Oftentimes, when we are telling someone a story about an interaction, we’ve had with someone else, we will make mind reading assumptions without actually having fact or evidence e.g., “They haven’t phoned me in two weeks so they must be angry with me for cancelling on them last week.”

Personalisation: This involves blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong or could go wrong, even when you may only be partly responsible or not responsible at all. You might be taking 100% responsibility for the occurrence of external events. It can also involve blaming someone else for something for which they have no responsibility. This can often occur when setting a boundary with someone and you take responsibility for their guilt or anger.

Catastrophising: Catastrophising occurs when we “blow things out of proportion” and we view the situation as terrible, awful, dreadful, and horrible, even though the reality is that the problem itself may be quite small.

Black & White Thinking: Also known as splitting, dichotomous thinking, and all-or-nothing thinking, involves seeing only one side or the other (the positives or the negatives, for example). You are either wrong or right, good or bad and so on. There are no in-betweens or shades of grey.

Should-ing and Must-ing: Sometimes by saying “I should…” or “I must…” you can put unreasonable demands or pressure on yourself and others. Although these statements are not always unhelpful (e.g., “I should not get drunk and drive home”), they can sometimes create unrealistic expectations.

Should-ing and must-ing can be a psychological distortion because it can “deny reality” e.g., I shouldn’t have had so much to drink last night. This is helpful in the sense that it communicates to us that we have exceeded our boundaries, however, saying “shouldn’t” about a past situation can be futile because it cannot be changed.

Overgeneralisation: When we overgeneralise, we take one instance in the past or present, and impose it on all current or future situations. If we say, “You always…” or “Everyone…”, or “I never…” then we are probably overgeneralising.

Labelling: We label ourselves and others when we make global statements based on behaviour in specific situations. We might use this label even though there are many more examples that are not consistent with that label. Labelling is a cognitive distortion whereby we take one characteristic of a person/group/situation and apply it to the whole person/group/situation. Example: “Because I failed a test, I am a failure” or “Because she is frequently late to work, she is irresponsible”.

Emotional Reasoning: This thinking style involves basing your view of situations or yourself on the way you are feeling. For example, the only evidence that something bad is going to happen is that you feel like something bad is going to happen. Emotions and feelings are real however they are not necessarily indicative of objective truth or fact.

Magnification and Minimisation: In this thinking style, you magnify the positive attributes of other people and minimise your own positive attributes. Also known as the binocular effect on thinking. Often it means that you enlarge (magnify) the positive attributes of other people and shrink (minimise) your own attributes, just like looking at the world through either end of the same pair of binoculars.

(CCI, 2008)

Well, hello and good morning, afternoon, and evening readers. I truly hope you’re swimming in the pleasantries of life rather than keeping your head above water in the unpleasant swamp. HOPE = Hold On Pain Ends. And there’s generally a learning or personal growth that comes after the storm of every painful experience, even if it’s simply greater empathy and compassion for others.

Today’s the day to learn or remember the fallacies of the human mind. I am not as smart as I look, haha. Have you heard of heuristics before? In cognitive psychology, a heuristic is a mental “shortcut” that allows people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. They can be very helpful in many situations, but they can also lead to cognitive biases, errors in thinking, and even perhaps without the mental shortcut, our thinking is often filled to the brim with cognitive distortions, assumptions and fallacies (faults). Awareness raising is probably the first step to identify our own cognitive traps and also identify them in others. Cognitive errors are natural – we all have them. Below are some cognitive distortions/errors to be aware of when we reflect on our interactions with people, during personal reflection, and when making meaningful decisions or judgements.

• ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING (aka. POLARISED THINKING, SPLITTING, and BLACK-AND-WHITE THINKING: is extreme thinking i.e., the error in a person’s thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism. Before you think “I must have really shitty thinking because I do this ALL the time”, give yourself a break. If you’re thinking in black and white, you probably internalised this from social media, television and movies, your family of origin and the broader society. Be mindful of using extreme, dichotomist terms, such as “failure”, “success”, “best”, “worst”, “freezing”, “boiling”, “everything”, and “nothing”. If you think “I’m a terrible person”, that is bullshit and inaccurate. You may have behaved terribly for a period of time towards yourself, to someone else, or towards some “thing”, but we cannot discount all the NON-terrible qualities about you. We must THINK in DIALECTICS i.e., the ability to view issues from multiple perspectives with reason and wisdom or in other words being able to have two contradictory viewpoints, where a greater truth emerges from their interplay. The truth is, if you think you’re a terrible person, there’s also virtuous person in there too.

• OVERGENERALISTION: The words “always”, “every” and “never” come into play here, and you have an unshakable “rule” or “conviction” about yourself, something, or someone, based on one or two incidences. Overgeneralising is “a cognitive distortion in which an individual views a single event as an invariable RULE, so that, for example, failure at accomplishing one task will predict an endless pattern of defeat in all tasks.” Coming into the present moment and being specific can be helpful if you are someone who overgeneralises. You may also want to ask yourself if what your saying is the really the truth. Is it really accurate or correct. There’s an assumption that because something has happened once or a few times that it’s like going to happen every time. Remember, the words “always”, “every”, and “never” frequently appear in this cognitive “trap”. I encourage you to look at the big picture and ask yourself if what you’re saying or thinking is accurate. Overgeneralisations tend to be vague and board statements e.g., “I always get every red light”. Perhaps this is part of our evolutionary negativity bias. We tend to notice the so-called “bad” and overlook the so-called “good”. If you find yourself using overgeneralisations that suggest a future prediction (e.g., “I’ll never get a partner) … use some humour – you may have big balls but neither one of them are crystal – VEEP. If there is some truth to unusually frequent and specific situations that are making your life unpleasant, validate them, talk to someone, and brainstorm some solutions. We humans have plenty of blind spots that others can see sometimes.

• MENTAL FILTER: is considered to be the opposite to OVERGENERALISATION the mental filter takes one small event and focuses on it exclusively, filtering out anything else that’s relevant. Filtering out the positive and focusing on the negative can have a detrimental impact on your mental well-being. Filtering out the so-called “negative” can also make one a bit hubris (excessive pride or self-confidence), arrogant, vain and conceited – and then you’re just a stone’s throw away from narcissism.

• PERSONALISATION AND BLAME: Personalization and blame is a cognitive distortion whereby you entirely blame yourself, or someone else, for a situation that in reality involved many factors that were out of your control. I think this is a symptom of our wounded ego, or simply just the ego. As human’s we are egocentric, like children, and we often think that circumstances in our environment are solely because of our influence. For example, your friend isn’t behaving like they usually do, so it must be because you have done something.

Again, personalisation is an egocentric error in cognition. “Of course it has to do with me”, we think. It makes sense that we personalise things. We are the star of our own show, our own narrative. If you personalise something, it means we’ve directly influenced it – we are the primary cause. This may elicit internal pain, shame or guilt, so what’s the pay-off? Personalisation is a cognitive error that offers us the illusion of control e.g., “If we caused it then we will learn how to not cause it again, and maybe even undo what we have caused”. If you think about it, personalising something is something children do. Remember, there are infinite variables in any situation to take full credit of the outcome. That being said, it is responsible and mature to reflect objectively on the influence of our behaviour and what we can learn about our shortcomings.

Blame deserves it’s own blog post but in short, it can be defined as a defence mechanism to protect the self from feeling some unwanted emotion or thinking something unacceptable in relation to the “self”. Blaming provides a way of devaluing others, an the pay-off or reinforcement the blamer receives is a sense of superiority. It protects our ego from feeling responsible for something, and protects us from feeling guilt or shame. Perfectionists are very good at blaming others, and themselves. Even if you genuinely think faulting someone or something is valid, remember that no one is perfect. Recognise that you are human and others are fallible humans. As they say in recovery, “there is a bit of bad in the best of us and a bit of good in the worst of us“. We may have internalised from society and culture that we couldn’t make mistakes (because we receive “punishment” for making mistakes) but we must move beyond that now. As adults, we need to get real. Validate your experience because it may be very disappointing when we don’t meet others or our own expectations. We must nurture and care for the wounded child. Lets attend and befriend to our shortcomings and accept we are not superhuman. Learn to expect you will make mistakes. Failure is kind of an illusion, isn’t it? Or maybe a social construct? “Failure” is really learning – replace ‘failure’ with the word ‘feedback’. Would a cat or dog blame them self for a “mistake”? In the minds of animals, there’s no such concept as failure or a mistake.

Here’s a link to website “simplypsychology” that discusses a theory called Attribution Theory, an idea about how people explain the causes of behaviour and events: Attribution Theory – Situational vs Dispositional | Simply Psychology