Cognitive Distortions: Discounting the Positive

You just got a big promotion at work, but you think your boss has made a mistake by giving it to you. You win a prestigious community award, but you think it was a fluke and should have been given to someone else. That blue ribbon? It should have gone to your neighbor instead.

If this sounds familiar, then you may have fallen into the way of thinking known as discounting the positive. Everyone says they were “just lucky” now and again. If that thinking has become a pattern, you should be aware of the habit and take steps to replace this cognitive distortion.

Cognitive Distortions Defined

A cognitive distortion is a negative thought pattern that becomes habitual. These patterns inform your behavior as well as your self-concept. These thoughts are detrimental to you because they aren’t based on truth.

Therapists have identified multiple forms of cognitive distortions. One of these is Discounting the Positive. How do you know if you’re having a bad day, or you’ve entered the realm of cognitively distorted thinking?

What Does Discounting the Positive Mean?

If you’ve ever said, “Oh, that was just luck,” you’ve discounted the positive. Discounting the positive means you don’t take credit for the good things you’ve earned or achieved in your life. You think it’s just a wild coincidence that something good happened.

Everyone has credited luck with something good happening on occasion. The issue comes when it is a habit. If you habitually say you don’t deserve the things you have or that you didn’t earn your position or your awards, you have slipped into a cognitive distortion pattern.

When you use this kind of thinking you don’t expect good things to happen again. Your confidence in your abilities is shattered because you don’t believe you deserve the good things that have happened. You don’t recognize your own capabilities. You view everything as a fluke.

A person who doesn’t recognize the positive accomplishments in life is often highly self-critical. Their self-esteem is dramatically damaged by their own negative thinking. It reaches a point, if unchecked, where the person refuses to even consider the possibility of a positive outcome.

Can Anything Help?

As with other cognitive distortions, there has been some success with using cognitive behavior therapy as a treatment for discounting the positive. The point of cognitive behavior therapy is identifying negative patterns and then replacing them with new thought patterns.

This goal-oriented therapy is not an instant solution. It takes time to restructure thoughts so that they are no longer harmful to your mental health. Developing unhealthy thought patterns didn’t happen instantaneously, so neither will correcting them.

Final Thoughts

There are a variety of cognitive distortions that have been identified. One of them is known as discounting the positive. If you always view good events in your life as nothing more than luck, you may have fallen into this thought pattern. Recognizing and retraining these negative patterns is a goal of cognitive behavior therapy.