“Garbage in, garbage out”: If you think inaccurate, distorted thoughts, your emotional reactions will be painfully exaggerated.  Here are five common cognitive distortions that can greatly impact your relationship:

1. Tunnel vision: Filtering out important parts of the picture, usually the good part (i.e. you focus almost exclusively on the parts of the relationship that feel hurtful or deficient).
2. Assumed intent: Mind-reading; making assumptions about the motives, desires and feelings of your partner.  (You form negative assumptions to explain why your partner acts the way he or she does).
3. Magnification: Exaggerating; making things worse than they are; overgeneralizing with words such as all, every, always, none, nobody, everyone.
4. Global labeling: Pinning a negative identity tag on your partner—stupid, lazy, crazy, selfish, etc. It’s a damning form of overgeneralization.

5. Black and white thinking:  Your partner’s behavior is good or bad, wrong or right (and nothing in-between).  Good-                meets your needs; Bad- doesn’t.  Right- your partner is generous; Wrong-  self-focused.

Reference: Couple Skills: Making Your Relationship Work- By Matthew McKay, Patrick Fanning, Kim Paleg

Researcher John Gottman of the University of Washington has made a career of studying marital interactions. He claims to be able to predict with 95% accuracy which couples will eventually divorce.

After an earlier study that gathered data from thousands of couples over 13 years, Gottman’s research team studied 130 newlyweds intensively over a six-year period. The couples were invited to Gottman’s laboratory, where they were hooked to instruments that measured variables such as heart rate, sweating, and muscle tension. The couples were recorded with a video camera while they had a conversation about a disagreement. In a frame-by-frame analysis, their facial expressions, movements, and comments were analyzed.

What sort of research did Gottman do? What were Gottman’s “Four Horsemen”?

After correlating the data with marriage outcomes, Gottman found four factors that predicted divorce. He called these the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for marriage. They were:

1) criticism (telling the other person his or her faults)

2) defensiveness (reacting to certain subjects by denying responsibility, or refusing to discuss an issue the spouse regards as important)

3) contempt (making sarcastic or cutting remarks about the other person)

4) withdrawal (also called “stonewalling”: showing no reaction, having a blank look, or ceasing to care)

Perhaps the most “corrosive” of the four, according to Gottman, is contempt, which he said should be “banned from marriages.”

What did later analysis show?

Later analysis of his data provided a surprise for Gottman. While the Four Horsemen remained important, he found one factor that was the best predictor of all. This was a positive predictor, one that predicted long-term success rather than failure in marriage. Gottman found that marriages are likely to thrive when the man was willing to be influenced by his wife (“Want a successful marriage? Listen to your wife” CNN, February 20, 1998).

Source: Webpage URL: http://www.intropsych.com/ch16_sfl/four_horsemen.html 

While ADD tends to be associated with childhood, we’ve learned that it is far more widespread among adults than previously understood.  While there are some children with ADD/ADHD who will outgrow it, we now know that the vast majority will not.  Listed below are criteria for adult ADD that we developed from our clinical experience:

1. A sense of underachievement, of not meeting one’s goals (regardless of how much one has actually accomplished).
2. Difficulty getting organized.
3. Chronic procrastination or trouble getting started.
4. Many projects going simultaneously; trouble with follow through.
5. A tendency to say what comes to mind without necessarily considering the timing or appropriateness of the remark.
6. A frequent search for high stimulation.
7. An intolerance of boredom.
8. Easy distractibility; trouble focusing attention, tendency to tune out or drift away in the middle of a page or conversation, often coupled with an inability to focus at times.
9. Often creative, intuitive, highly intelligent
10. Trouble in going through established channels and following “proper” procedure.
11. Impatient; low tolerance of frustration.
12. Impulsive, either verbally or in action, as an impulsive spending of money.
13. Changing plans, enacting new schemes or career plans and the like; hot-tempered.
14. A tendency to worry needlessly, endlessly; a tendency to scan the horizon looking for something to worry about, alternating with attention to or disregard for actual dangers.
15. A sense of insecurity.
16. Mood swings, mood lability, especially when disengaged from a person or a project.
17. Physical or cognitive restlessness.
18. A tendency toward addictive behavior.
19. Chronic problems with self-esteem.
20. Inaccurate self-observation.
21. Family history of AD/HD or manic depressive illness or depression or substance abuse or other disorders of impulse control or mood.

Recognizing and treating ADD is just as important for adults as it is for children, as it has a wide ranging impact in careers, marriages and families.

Source: Webpage URL: http://www.drhallowell.com/add-adhd/adult-add/