Hello blessed child of God, I hope you’re fine by God’s grace, and I hope you’re doing all your assignments.
Today we’re going to talk about distorted thinking, and how it causes depression.
These days I’m reading “Anxiety and Depression Workbook For Dummies” by Charles Elliot and Laura Smith. It’s not a Christian book but it’s a psychology book. I try to share what j read from it and to apply God’s Word as I analyse and appreciate the content.
Distorted thinking can lead to anxiety and depression. We call these kinds of distortions reality scramblers.
There are three types of reality scramblers:
- Information Reality Scramblers
- Self-judging Reality Scramblers
- Self-blame Reality Scramblers
Philippians 4:8 NIV
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
Before explaining what each of those reality Scramblers are, you need to know that those are thoughts which aren’t true, right, admirable, pure, lovely, excellent or worthy of praise. They poison your mind and your heart.
They look true because the devil will use real facts of your life and transform stuff and tell you things in your mind and you’ll think “he is right” but that’s false. The devil is a liar and he will do everything to poison your thoughts.
That’s why you need to know his strategies so that you can identify those thoughts which have been poisoned by him, and then you’ll be able to correct them with God’s Word.
1. Information Reality Scramblers
These are various ways in which the mind distorts the information coming into it. Examples include:
1. Enlarging and shrinking: Magnifying unpleasant events and minimizing the importance of anything positive about yourself, your world, your future.
2. Filtering: Searching only for negative, dark or frightening data while screening out more positive information.
3. Seeing in black-and-white, all-or-none terms: A single bad event indicates complete failure. You view events and your character as either black or white with no shades of Grey.
4. Dismissing evidence: Discarding every evidence which may contradict your negative thoughts.
5. Overgeneralizing: Looking at a single negative event and deciding that the event represents a general unrelenting trend. You can recognize overgeneralization through words like “always” and “never”.
6. Mind reading: Assuming you know what others think about you without asking them or checking it out.
7. Emotional reasoning: Treating feelings as facts. For example when you feel guilty you assume that you must have done something wrong.
8. Unreliable forecasting: Presuming a negative outcome without any real evidence
2. Self-Judging Reality Scramblers
They twist the way you see yourself and your behaviour, making you harshly critical, judgemental and self-abusive.
1. Shoulding on yourself: Judging and criticising ourselves with should phrases: I should have done better, I should be nicer to people, I should…
2. Making critical comparisons: Comparing ourselves with others
3. Tagging yourself with loathsome labels: Calling yourself bad names.
For example : “I’m a loser”, “I’m a failure”, “I’m a misfit“.
3. Self-blame reality Scramblers
Taking 100% blame for every negative situation.
For example blaming yourself for being raped.
In the next days, we will work on all these reality scramblers God willing.
Exercise: Reality Scramblers Examples
In the meantime your exercise for today is to find examples for every single reality scrambler which was given. Find examples from your own life.
For example.
Overgeneralizing: I needed help from someone yesterday, and the person didn’t help me, and I thought “People are never available to help me when I need them”.
This is overgeneralizing because I’m taking a single event and concluding that people never help me. Which is false because I know that there have been times where I needed help and God sent people to help me. In fact thinking something like this shows that I’m dismissing evidence of times where God sent people to help me.
So, do this for all the reality scramblers. Write it down in your exercise book.
Conclusion
Your mind is a battlefield. Distorted thinking is not right, not pure, not worthy of praise, not excellent, not admirable, not noble.
The devil attacks your mind with distorted thinking. He takes real events from your life and whispers or screams to you interpretations which are not what they should be. That’s because he wants to discourage you and to destroy you, your relationship with God and your relationships in general.
Learn to discover his strategies and the trends in the distorted thinking he causes in you, so that you may fight it with God’s Word.
Prayer
Father Lord God Almighty, open my eyes so that I may notice where I let the devil distort my thinking and my perception of my life, help me identify each of his attempts to pollute my thoughts, and help me fight with Your Word, in Jesus Christ’s Name. Amen.
It’s Now Your Turn
Do your homework. Write down examples of distorted thinking from your own life.
Share one or two in the comments section.
Don’t forget to share this blog post on your social media accounts and to invite your friends and family members to join us as we’re waging war against depression. You may save a life by sharing.
If you’ve not done it yet, subscribe to my Newsletter so as not to miss any post on depression and also, make sure to invite anyone whom you know is suffering from depression.
Click here to subscribe to my Newsletter.
Also, please consider sharing this blog post on all your social media accounts.
Invitation
Click here if you’re looking for a church. I recommend Elevation Church to you. A wonderful Christ-centered Church in which you aren’t limited by your location and in which you can see what God can do through you.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this blog post please subscribe to my Newsletter so as not to miss any new post.
Also, please consider sharing this blog post on all your social media accounts.
God bless you
Victoria Eyog
0 Comments