Usually, our relations with others are based on our ideas about them and our positionality. Those ideas can influence how we feel around different people and how we act when we meet them. For example, if you think that people belonging to a particular culture or subculture are dangerous you probably will avoid them or avoid specific areas associated with that social group. We are used to labeling and making generalizations to determine what or who threatens our well-being and when we have to act to protect ourselves against those threatening factors.

It is normal and even preferable to be able to distinguish what could harm us and to take safety measures but sometimes not everything we see as problematic really is. Then how could we know how to balance socio-emotional health, not become scared of anyone who has a different background, and not suffer from interactions with people who could affect us?

First of all, we shouldn’t forget that anyone is different, even if a person belongs to a specific social group socially associated with inappropriate behavior. It that doesn’t means that the person is problematic. That’s also happening because the majority is not always right in society but the majority have more social influence because of social power based on their access to society’s resources. Also, there’s no scientific evidence that specific cultures can be seen as problematic due to their own cultural belonging. Cultures are not inferior to each other, they are just different, according to social anthropology.

Our tendency to put different people who we don’t know so many things about in specific categories and attribute them a particular risk level come from an adaptatively thinking pattern that helped us to survive overtime, psychologists say, when human interactions were based more on physical domination and threats were everywhere. Today, when social life takes place according to other principles, many of these patterns are rather maladaptive aspects that make it difficult for us to live with others.

The psychiatrist Aaron Beck is considered to be a pioneer of therapy of maladaptive thinking patterns, known better as cognitive distortions. In the 1960s and 1970s Back developed cognitive behavioral therapy, still used today as an important therapy for psycho-emotional difficulties. Is important to mention that Back is not the only one who contributed to research and treatment of cognitive distortions, many other professionals worked overtime to improve their knowledge of how to support people to be adapted to the social environment.

Unfortunately, maladaptive thinking pattern is not the only aspect that clients have to fight with. Also the stigma of accepting that they confronting a psycho-emotional difficulty, especially in a culture where we don’t have a rich history of self-emotional care, many people have the tendency to tag those ones who talk about their emotional difficulties as wake people or maybe sick. In fact, any person is vulnerable in particular circumstances and this does not mean that if a person is vulnerable due to certain factors, that person is less clever or able than others but only human. The specialists claim that anyone confronts cognitive distortions at some level.

Furthermore, not anyone who confronts difficulties like cognitive distortions presents a signing of mental illness, anyone can have it, are just risky thinking patterns that can affect our emotional state and our social relationships if we maintain it as a habit to think about social reality. An important step recommended by cognitive behavioral therapists in dealing with socio-emotional difficulties is to learn to accept that sometimes our thinking way can be risky and to recognize when we tend to approach a situation inefficiently. I will expose here some of the most common cognitive distortions that can affect your social life quality.

• Polarized thinking

Polarised thinking is the black-or-white thinking way, the habit to perceive reality in extremes abstracting the complexity of life and the probability of it existing between the extremes.

• Catastrophizing

Catastrophizing is the tendency to perceive reality in a hyperdramatic way, avoiding accepting reality as a natural process of life.

• Mind reading

Sometimes, some people are used to believing that they know what others think, based on their experiences. In reality, mind reading is an auto-confirmation of our own opinions about others, minimizing the importance of the dialog and avoiding approaching others, based on the conviction that we already have in advance about what is in the mind of the other.

• Discounting the positive

The tendency to consider the worst scenario as more plausible, not paying enough attention to favorable aspects of the situation.

• Labeling

Labeling means putting people or facts in inflexible categories based on your ideas, avoiding considering the social and psychological particularities.

• Personalization

Personalization is when we think that most of the things that are happening around us are about ourselves, considering that what others do are directly connected with the way you are.

• Emotional reasoning

Emotional reasoning means that reality consists of your emotions. Some people associate what they are feeling directly with how reality is and sometimes they also believe that what they feel says something about what will happen.

• Mental filtering

Filtering the aspects and focusing only on negative aspects, ignoring the positive ones.

• “Should” statements

„Should” thoughts are usually about the social and cultural expectation that creates a discordance between want we do and what it is claimed that we should do.

• Overgeneralization

Overgeneralization appears when we extrapolate particular cases on a majority of individuals or situations that have one or more aspects in common without considering the logic of specifics and their effects of it.