in today's video we're going to be talking about disqualifying the positive and how
this cognitive distortion might be dragging your mood down and what you can do about it
hi everybody today we're continuing our series on cognitive distortions and biased ways of thinking
and this week we're going to be talking about disqualifying the positive which as its name
implies means that you may tend to dismiss good or positive things that are happening to you
or that are good or positive in you or that are happening in your life but before i get into
that just a couple of disclaimers to go over i'm a registered psychologist in the province
of british columbia canada and this video is for informational purposes only it is not intended as
a substitute or replacement for advice from your doctor or mental health professional
now with those things out of the way let's start talking about disqualifying the positive which um
at its core uh a person when they're disqualifying the positive are rejecting positive things in
in your life and insist that they don't count for one reason or another so disqualifying
the positive is very similar to the cognitive distortion of filtering that i talked about in
a previous video now in disqualifying the positive what happens is that negative events or
negative characteristics of me or negative responses from other people tend to be assigned
very high levels of meaning and validity so uh the low grade that i got in that course
means that i'm stupid my partner telling me that she's upset with me means that i'm unlovable
me not getting that promotion means that i'm destined to have a a dead end career than that
i'm not going to get anywhere in terms of my career and i'm never going to be successful
now in disqualifying the positive not only are those negatives assigned very high
levels of meaning or very strong levels of meaning but any positives tend to be dismissed or given
very little significance at all so even though you can recognize that there are potential positives
occurring those positives get dismissed or brushed aside so this is what tends to differentiate
disqualifying the positive from filtering and that disqualifying the positive the person can
recognize the positives they just dismiss the positives whereas in filtering the person may
not even see that there are any positives so these positives that tend to get brushed
aside are usually associated with uh examples of assuming that other people are acting out of pity
so yeah she agreed to go on a date with me but she just did it to be nice and
and didn't want to hurt my feelings achievements are assumed to be universal or insignificant
going to college isn't that big of a deal everybody can do it
good fortune or positive experiences or taken as examples of pure luck
yeah i got the job but i lucked out because there probably weren't a lot of people who
applied for it anyway so i was probably the only the only choice now if you've ever tried to talk
to someone who is depressed and you try to talk them out of their bad mood
you've probably seen this cognitive distortion at work and it usually takes the form of
what i call the yes but so imagine you're trying to convince someone that they're not an idiot
and you point out that hey you just got like an a plus on that test you've probably gotten an answer
like yeah but i just got lucky because it was a really easy test so there's the positives but the
positives get brushed aside and this can be really really sort of frustrating or challenging for
family members of someone who is depressed because they try to point out
all of the things that are going well but it just gets brushed aside or gets dismissed and
and that can be really frustrating and cause a lot of problems in interpersonal relationships
so the thing with disqualifying the positive is that the person recognizes
there's a positive but they dismiss it they see no value in it and they give it no credit
so what can you do about this is what can you do if you tend to engage in a lot of disqualifying
the positive well as is the case with all of the cognitive distortions that we're talking about in
this series the first step is to be aware of it and to be able to identify when you actually are
disqualifying the positive one of the things i find really helpful about understanding these
uh cognitive distortions or these biased ways of thinking is that you get to put labels on these
types of thoughts so that uh it's almost like a bit of a mental shorthand that you can catch
yourself while you're doing it and be able to recognize yes i am disqualifying the positive
in this situation but once you notice that you're disqualifying the positive you have
to remind yourself that positives count that no excuses positive discount no excuses no yes but
um if negatives count then positives must count at least equally as much and you may need to find
yourself having to continually remind yourself of that fact negatives count so positives must count
as well so this can be challenging at first i know it can be really really kind of a tough thing to
do especially if you're used to disqualifying the positive a lot but with practice you'll
catch yourself when you're yes budding and you'll be able to sort of intervene and stop it
so that's the cognitive distortion of disqualifying the positive i hope that makes
sense i'd love to hear your thoughts or questions about this so please leave me some comments
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when i post a new video so that's all for today's video as always thank you for
making it all the way to the end of this video and i will see you in the next one