Trauma and Cognitive Distortions: How Trauma Can Cause Thinking Errors and Support Options
Trauma can reshape how people think about themselves, others, and the world around them.
After experiencing trauma, the brain can develop protective patterns that lead to cognitive distortions, or thinking errors that often feel true but don’t really reflect reality. You might think you’re always in danger, that nothing good can ever last, or that you’re somehow always responsible for what happens.
These distorted thoughts are survival responses that may have helped during the traumatic events, but they can also interfere with daily living once the danger has passed.
If you’ve experienced trauma that has impacted the way you think about yourself and the world around you, professional support is advised. Mission Connection can help you process your experiences and find relief from distorted patterns of thinking.
This page can also help, as it explores the connection between trauma and cognitive distortions by discussing:
- The potential causes and links between cognitive distortions and trauma
- Common thinking errors for people who’ve experienced trauma
- How PTSD can impact your worldview and negative thinking patterns
- Evidence-based treatments to help
- How you can find treatment for trauma and thinking errors
Trauma and Thinking Errors
Let’s take a look at how this can happen.
Brain Changes Traumatic experiences trigger changes in regions of the brain responsible for threat detection, memory, and emotional regulation. The amygdala becomes hyperactive, constantly scanning your surroundings for danger.1
Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex, which handles rational thinking and perspective, can simultaneously become less active. These neurological shifts can make it harder to view situations with objectivity.1
Survival Mechanisms During trauma, certain thought patterns actually help you survive. All-or-nothing thinking can simplify quick decisions, hypervigilance catches more potential threats, and self-blame can give you a false sense of control.2
After the danger passes, these once-helpful patterns typically remain active, turning into cognitive distortions that influence and interfere with daily life.
Emotional Dysregulation Trauma also disrupts the brain’s ability to regulate emotions effectively. When feelings are overwhelming, your judgment can become clouded and prone to more distorted thinking.3
For example, someone experiencing intense anxiety might start to catastrophize small setbacks, and unprocessed shame can soon create self-blame and over-identification with negative outcomes.
Memory Issues Traumatic memories form differently from normal ones. They could be fragmented, sensory-based, or lack a clear context from the circumstances. This fragmentation can make it hard to process your experiences fairly and accurately.4
You might unintentionally fill in the gaps with assumptions or overgeneralizations, creating new distorted narratives about both what happened and what it says about you.
Common Thinking Errors for People Who’ve Experienced Trauma
All-or-nothing thinking: Also known as “black-or-white” thinking, this involves viewing situations in extremes, without acknowledging any possible middle ground.- Catastrophizing: Expecting the worst potential outcome in any given situation. Small setbacks can feel like unmitigated disasters, with normal stressors triggering predictions of failure.
- Overgeneralization: Taking a single negative experience and applying it to all future situations.
- Mental filtering: Focusing almost entirely on negative details, ignoring any positive aspects or potential. For instance, trauma survivors sometimes dwell more on perceived failures and threats than potential accomplishments and growth.
- Personalization and self-blame: Assuming responsibility for events you don’t control.
- Mind-reading: Assuming other people have negative thoughts or intentions about you, typically without any evidence. This can be related to ongoing hypervigilance and difficulty trusting others after experiencing trauma.
- Emotional reasoning: Believing your feelings are always reflective of reality – if you feel unsafe, you may quickly decide you must be in total danger, even when no threats exist.
- Making “should” statements: Making inflexible rules about how things are “supposed” to be, which can quickly lead to guilt and circumstances don’t line up.
What Is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
Not everyone who experiences trauma goes on to develop PTSD, but those who do can experience major disruptions in their daily lives.
PTSD symptoms fall into four main categories: intrusive memories, avoidance, negative changes in thinking and mood, and hyperarousal. Therefore, people with PTSD might experience intense memories and nightmares, severe anxiety, and uncontrollable thoughts about the traumatic event(s), with symptoms lasting more than a month.
Negative Thought Patterns and PTSD Negative thought patterns can be a hallmark of PTSD symptoms. The disorder usually involves ongoing distorted beliefs about yourself and the world around you, with these trauma-related thinking errors making the recovery process difficult.
For instance, people with PTSD often develop harsh, untrue beliefs about themselves. You might think that struggling with trauma means you’re “weak” or that something is fundamentally “wrong” with you. However, these beliefs can stem from your attempts to make sense of your experiences that disrupted previous assumptions about safety and self-worth.6
PTSD can also distort beliefs around trust and the future, involving fortune-telling and all-or-nothing thinking patterns. These cognitive distortions can convince people that changing and healing are possible, even before they attempt to do so.
Evidence-Based Treatments For PTSD
Research into trauma and PTSD treatment has shown that there are several safe, effective interventions for processing trauma and restructuring harmful thought patterns. These evidence-based supports can help you or your loved one move from survival mode into genuine recovery.
The following are some evidence-based treatments for trauma and cognitive distortions:
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT works to directly address the thoughts and behaviors that often go hand-in-hand with trauma and trauma-related issues. It helps you identify and challenge these negative core beliefs, giving you new tools that help to change them into something more useful and reducing trauma-based symptoms.
CBT also teaches practical skills for being able to catch distorted thoughts as they occur, replacing them with more accurate, empathic interpretations.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is a highly effective approach for treating trauma and abuse in adults. EMDR is centered around helping you process traumatic memories and specific eye movements. You’ll recall distressing memories in a safe environment, working with a clinician through a process that helps your brain work through and reprocess them.
These eye movements, known as “bilateral stimulation,” help your brain to integrate traumatic memories more adaptively, reducing their emotional intensity and the resulting cognitive distortions they bring up.
Trauma-Focused Psychodynamic Therapy
Trauma-based psychodynamic therapy helps you explore how past traumatic experiences influence your thought patterns and behaviors, examining unconscious patterns and defense mechanisms that trauma creates.
Trauma-focused therapies can be effective for adults struggling with the long-term aspects of PTSD and similar diagnoses, working to the roots of how survival mechanisms can get in the way of daily functioning.
Group Therapy
Feeling supported by others and hearing similar stories can make a major difference, and group therapy provides a safe place to be vulnerable and open. Group therapy challenges the isolation that trauma can create, giving you a place to see and hear others working through similar experiences with cognitive distortions and trauma-based symptoms.
Participants learn from one another and a trained therapist, discovering new tools and perspectives about their own thinking patterns and cognitive distortions.
Find Trauma Treatment for Recovery at Mission Connection
Trauma-related distortions can respond well to the right treatment, and finding the right support can make all the difference.
Mission Connection offers evidence-based, outpatient treatment in various locations that are flexible to fit your life and evidence-based to help you recover. These programs allow you to maintain your work, family, and other responsibilities while still receiving affirming care that’s close to home.
Conveniently located for residents of California, Virginia, and Washington state, Mission Connection makes accessing high-quality treatment easy. If you’re struggling with PTSD and other related symptoms, contact us today – our team is ready to help you turn the page on trauma.
Frequently Asked Questions About Trauma and Cognitive Distortions
If you have experienced trauma, it’s normal to wonder how it may be affecting your ways of thinking and acting. For extra clarity, we’ve provided the following responses to FAQs we receive on the topic.
Can Trauma Cause Permanent Changes in Thinking?
Trauma can create lasting changes in how your brain processes information, but these changes aren’t necessarily permanent.
Your brain can always form new neural pathways throughout the lifespan. Evidence-based care can help you to reprocess traumatic memories and develop new, healthier ways of thinking and acting as a result of trauma.
Without treatment, trauma-related distortions can last for quite some time; the amygdala can remain hyperactive and scan for danger. However, those who engage in treatment usually experience major improvements, even years after the original trauma.
Is it Easy to Tell if Thinking Errors Are Trauma-Related?
Trauma-related cognitive distortions are often connected to themes of safety, trust, control, and self-worth, though not always. The timing can also provide clues – certain planes, people, sensations, or anniversary dates can all be triggers. If challenging these thoughts usually results in intense fear, rather than just discomfort, trauma could be the underlying cause.
Does Everyone With PTSD Recognize Their Thoughts Are Distorted?
PTSD can impair the brain’s prefrontal cortex’s ability to evaluate thoughts objectively, which can make it difficult to recognize distortions. Many people who live with PTSD can go years without realizing their ongoing negative beliefs about themselves and the world are maladaptive.
Trauma-focused therapy helps to provide new perspectives and tools, teaching you to recognize when survival-mode thinking no longer serves you in genuinely safe situations.
References
- Bremner, J. D. (2006). Traumatic stress: effects on the brain. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 8(4), 445–461. https://doi.org/10.31887/dcns.2006.8.4/jbremner
- Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. (2014). Clinical issues across services. In www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (US). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207185/
- SAMHSA. (2014). Understanding the Impact of Trauma. National Library of Medicine; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (US). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/
- Bedard-Gilligan, M., & Zoellner, L. A. (2012). Dissociation and memory fragmentation in post-traumatic stress disorder: An evaluation of the dissociative encoding hypothesis. Memory, 20(3), 277–299. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2012.655747
- Mayo Clinic. (2024, August 16). Post-Traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/post-traumatic-stress-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20355967
- Lanius, R. A., Terpou, B. A., & McKinnon, M. C. (2020). The sense of self in the aftermath of trauma: lessons from the default mode network in posttraumatic stress disorder. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 11(1), 1807703. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2020.1807703
