Uncategorized – LIBERTY PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

Narcissistic Gang Stalking may not be a formal psychiatric term:

Narcissistic Gang Stalking may not a formal psychiatric. It is a phrase sometimes used to describe a perceived pattern in which a person believes that a narcissistic individual or a group influenced by that person is deliberately coordinating harassment, intimidation, surveillance, social exclusion, or reputation attacks against them.

How the concept may be usually described

A person using this term may describe:

Smear campaigns: spreading damaging stories or accusations about someone.

Triangulation: recruiting other people into an interpersonal conflict.

Flying monkeys: a popular term for people allegedly enlisted to support or enforce the narcissistic person’s agenda.

Social isolation: encouraging friends, relatives, coworkers, or community members to distance themselves.

Intimidation: repeated hostile interactions, threats, or provocative behavior.

Digital harassment: unwanted messages, online impersonation, monitoring, or coordinated social media activity.

Provocation: repeatedly doing things intended to elicit an emotional reaction.

The important distinction

There could be two separate questions that may not be automatically collapsed into one:

1-Is there objectively verifiable harassment or coordinated behavior?

2-Is the interpretation of apparently connected events accurate?

Real coordinated harassment may occur. At the same time, when someone is under prolonged stress, trauma, interpersonal conflict, or hypervigilance, may cause sever psychological and some medical issues: the victim(s) should consult with a medical doctor and a therapist.

A psychologically careful approach may therefore:

Validate the person’s distress without automatically validating an unverified explanation for it.

For example, instead of saying “Yes, the narcissist has organized people to stalk you,” a clinician might say:

“It sounds frightening and exhausting to feel that multiple people may be targeting you. Let’s separate what you directly observed from what you believe those observations mean, and look for independently verifiable evidence.”

Narcissistic abuse vs. “Gang stalking”

There could be useful conceptual distinction:

Narcissistic/interpersonal abuse	Alleged coordinated stalking
Can be objectively documented	May be difficult to independently verify
Often involves identifiable relationships	May involve strangers or loosely connected people
Smearing, manipulation, intimidation, triangulation	Surveillance, following, coordinated harassment
Can occur without a large conspiracy	Requires actual coordination if the claim is literal
Established concepts in psychology	“Gang stalking” is not a recognized psychiatric diagnosis

From a clinical perspective, hypervigilance, trauma responses, confirmation bias, threat perception, and pattern recognition may all influence how ambiguous events are interpreted. That may not mean that every report of harassment is imaginary; it means the evidence needs to be evaluated independently of the interpretation.

If there are concrete threats, stalking behaviors, property damage, or identifiable harassment, the appropriate response is to document specific observable events, preserve evidence, establish safety, and use appropriate legal and law enforcement channels rather than trying to prove a broad theory of coordination by yourself.

Be ready to Legally defend yourself, your family and your property.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology and Quantum Physics may often be discussed together:

Parapsychology and Quantum Physics may often be discussed together because both raise questions about the nature of observation, consciousness, information, and reality, but the connection could be speculative than established.

What quantum physics actually establishes

Quantum mechanics describes matter and energy at microscopic scales. Some of its well established features may be:

Superposition: quantum systems may be described as combinations of possible states.

Entanglement: separated quantum systems may exhibit correlations that may not be explained by simple classical local variables.

Measurement: measurement affects the quantum state being measured.

Quantum indeterminacy: some individual outcomes are fundamentally probabilistic.

Nonlocal correlations: entangled particles may display correlations across distance, although this may not allow ordinary faster than light communication.

Some of these findings may demonstrate telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, or survival of consciousness after death.

Where parapsychology enters

Parapsychology investigates purported anomalous phenomena such as:

ESP

telepathy

clairvoyance

precognition

Psychokinesis (PK)

influence of physical systems by intention

Survival related phenomena

near death experiences

apparitions

mediumship

terminal lucidity

reincarnation type memories

The interesting question is whether some of these phenomena could eventually require a non-classical theory of information or consciousness.

That is a legitimate research question, but it remains an open question depends who you ask?

The “quantum consciousness” idea

A common hypothesis may be:

Consciousness may have properties that may not be completely explained by classical neuroscience and might involve quantum processes.

There are several very different versions of this idea.

Some theories concern quantum processes inside the mind. Others go much further and propose that consciousness is somehow fundamental to reality itself.

The latter connects with philosophical positions such as:

panpsychism

dual aspect monism

idealism

information based theories of consciousness

But these philosophical possibilities may not be confused with experimentally established quantum physics.

The measurement problem may be particularly interesting

Quantum mechanics raises a profound question:

What exactly constitutes a measurement?

Some interpretations historically encouraged the idea that conscious observation causes quantum collapse.

However, modern physics may not require a conscious human observer for quantum measurement/decoherence. A physical interaction with an environment or measuring apparatus may produce the relevant effects.

So:

“Observation” in quantum physics vs necessarily “a human mind looking at something.”

That could be a distinction when evaluating parapsychological claims.

Could quantum physics explain psi?

There are several possibilities one could investigate scientifically:

Hypothesis

Current status

Psi is entirely classical

Possible

Psi involves unknown biological mechanisms

Possible

Psi involves quantum processes in the mind

Speculative

Psi involves quantum information outside the mind

Highly speculative

Consciousness is a fundamental property of reality

Philosophically serious, scientifically unresolved

Quantum entanglement explains telepathy

some established evidence

Quantum physics proves ESP

some established evidence

Quantum physics proves survival after death

some established evidence

A particularly interesting distinction

There could be three different questions that frequently get mixed together:

A. Quantum biology:

Do quantum phenomena play important roles in living organisms?

B. Quantum consciousness:

Are quantum processes necessary for explaining consciousness?

C. Quantum parapsychology:

Could quantum processes help explain anomalous information transfer or mind matter interactions?

A has substantial scientific evidence.

B is actively debated.

C remains highly speculative and controversial.

Where parapsychology gets especially interesting

From a parapsychological perspective, the deepest question may not be necessarily:

“Is ESP caused by quantum mechanics?”

It may instead be:

“Does consciousness have properties that our current physical theories may not adequately describe?”

That may be a much more scientifically defensible question.

For example, if exceptionally well controlled experiments eventually demonstrated reliable information transfer without conventional sensory channels, physicists would have to determine what physical mechanism could account for it. Quantum theory might become relevant but it may not automatically be the explanation.

A useful conceptual model

You may think of the relationship this way:

Quantum physics…provides a radically non-classical picture of physical reality

Consciousness research…asks how subjective experience arises

Parapsychology…investigates claims that consciousness may sometimes obtain information or influence events beyond conventional sensory/motor pathways

Quantum parapsychology…asks whether quantum principles could provide part of the missing theoretical framework?

That last step is a hypothesis, may be or may not be a demonstrated fact.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology; Mind to Mind Communication:

Mind to Mind Communication may generally refer to the idea that information may be transmitted from one person’s mind to another without relying on ordinary sensory channels such as speech, writing, gestures, or electronic communication.

It may mean different things depending on the framework:

Ordinary psychological communication

People continuously infer each other’s thoughts and emotions through facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, context, and learned patterns. This may feel almost instantaneous, but it still involves sensory information.

Telepathy

In parapsychology, mind to mind communication may often be used as another way of describing telepathy: the purported transfer of thoughts, images, emotions, or other information between people without known sensory mediation.

Empathic or intuitive communication

Someone may accurately sense another person’s emotional state without consciously knowing how they obtained the information. Psychology may explain many such experiences through unconscious perception, pattern recognition, emotional attunement, and inference. A parapsychological interpretation might consider psi as an alternative hypothesis when ordinary explanations appear insufficient.

Altered states and hypnosis

Hypnosis, meditation, dreaming, ganzfeld procedures, and other altered states may have been investigated in relation to unusual forms of interpersonal information transfer. These areas may particularly be interesting to parapsychology because they may reduce ordinary sensory distractions.

The key distinction

A useful conceptual distinction may be:

Communication…information is exchanged through an identifiable channel. Telepathy…information appears to be exchanged without an identifiable sensory channel.

For example:

Person A thinks intensely about a particular image. Person B, isolated from Person A and unable to obtain the information normally, reports the same or substantially similar image.

That would constitute a telepathy hypothesis, not automatically proof of telepathy. A rigorous investigation would need to exclude coincidence, sensory leakage, prior knowledge, cueing, selective reporting, and other conventional explanations.

In parapsychology

Mind to mind communication may be closely related to the concepts of:

Telepathy…ESP…psi…anomalous information transfer

It may be useful to distinguish telepathy from psychokinesis (PK):

Telepathy: purported mind…mind information transfer

Clairvoyance: purported information about an object/event without ordinary sensory access

Precognition: purported information about a future event

Psychokinesis: purported mind…physical system influence

One of the longstanding questions in parapsychology is whether these phenomena represent different abilities or different manifestations of a more fundamental psi process.

Importantly, mainstream science may not or does not want to established telepathy as a demonstrated mechanism of human communication. Parapsychological research continues to investigate anomalous information transfer, while conventional psychology emphasizes known mechanisms of perception, inference, memory, social cognition, and coincidence.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology; A Paranormal Hypothesis; is a proposed explanation for an unusual or anomalous experience:

A Paranormal Hypothesis is a proposed explanation for an unusual or anomalous experience that suggests the phenomenon may involve processes not adequately explained by currently accepted scientific models.

In simple terms:

“Something unusual happened. Could there be an explanation beyond ordinary physical or psychological mechanisms?”

Examples

A paranormal hypothesis might propose that:

Telepathy: information was transferred between minds without known sensory communication.
Precognition: information about a future event was obtained before the event occurred.
Psychokinesis (PK): mental activity influenced a physical system without ordinary physical interaction.
Apparition: an apparently deceased person was perceived in a way that might involve something beyond memory, hallucination, or expectation.
Remote viewing: a person obtained information about a distant target without ordinary sensory access.
Survival of consciousness: some aspect of consciousness continues after biological death.
Non-human intelligence: an anomalous experience may involve an intelligence not readily attributable to ordinary human activity.

Paranormal hypothesis vs. Paranormal belief

This distinction is important:

Paranormal belief:

“Ghosts are real.”

Paranormal Hypothesis:

“Some reports of apparitions may be produced by a mechanism that may not currently be explained by conventional psychological or physical models.”

The second is testable in principle and therefore more useful scientifically.

A good paranormal hypothesis may have several characteristics

Clearly defined phenomenon: What exactly happened?

Alternative explanations considered: Could perception, memory, coincidence, fraud, suggestion, sleep phenomena, “neurological factors: consult with a Neurologist”, or environmental causes explain it?

Specific prediction: What would we expect to observe if the paranormal explanation were correct?

Falsifiability: What result would count against the hypothesis?

Replication: Can independent investigators obtain similar results?

Controls: Can sensory leakage, experimenter effects, statistical artifacts, and selection bias be minimized?

Proportional conclusions: Evidence for an anomaly may not automatically establish a particular paranormal mechanism.

In parapsychology

A particularly useful framework may be:

Observation…Anomaly…Hypothesis…Experiment…Replication…Interpretation

For example:

Observation: A participant appears to identify information about a distant target above chance.

Conventional hypotheses: cueing, sensory leakage, statistical artifact, recording error, unconscious inference, etc.

Paranormal hypothesis: information was acquired through a psi process.

Test: preregistered, blinded, controlled trials.

Result: determine whether the anomalous effect persists under increasingly stringent controls.

This approach allows someone to take paranormal experiences seriously without automatically assuming that the paranormal interpretation is correct.

An important distinction

“Unexplained” vs “Paranormal.”

An experience may be genuinely unexplained while the ultimate explanation remains unknown. A paranormal hypothesis becomes scientifically interesting when it makes predictions that distinguish it from ordinary explanations.

This distinction may be especially useful: you may investigate an anomalous experience phenomenologically while maintaining separate hypotheses for psychological, “Medical/Neurological: please, consult with a Neurologist”, environmental, conventional physical, and genuinely psi/paranormal explanations.

Shervan K Shahhian

The Art of Adaptation is the ability to adjust, without losing your core values or sense of self:

“Consider Alternative Interpretations and Strategies.Changing your strategy without abandoning your principles.”

The Art of Adaptation is the ability to adjust your thoughts, behaviors, strategies, and expectations when circumstances change, without losing your core values or sense of self.

In mental health, adaptation could be closely related to resilience, cognitive flexibility, emotional regulation, and problem solving.

Flex Without Breaking Down

A simple formula

Adaptation: accepting reality, learning from it, adjusting your response, continuing forward.

It may not mean simply “going along with everything.” Healthy adaptation involves knowing what to change and what not to change.

Five elements of adaptation

Awareness: Recognize that circumstances have changed.
Acceptance: Stop fighting the reality that may not be changed.
Flexibility: Consider alternative interpretations and strategies.
Action: Change behavior based on what you have learned.
Integration: Incorporate the experience into your future decision making.

Adaptation vs. Rigidity

Rigidity	Adaptation
“This is how it has always been done.”	“What does this situation require now?”
Resists new information	Uses new information
Repeats the same strategy	Changes strategy when necessary
Sees change as a threat	Can see change as information
Protects certainty	Tolerates uncertainty

An important psychological distinction

Adaptation may not be the same as conformity.

A person may adapt while maintaining strong boundaries and principles.

For example:

“I cannot control what happened, but I can control how I respond to what happened.”

That is adaptive thinking.

But:

“I must change myself to keep everyone else happy.”

May represent people pleasing, fear, or loss of identity, rather than healthy adaptation.

Adaptation under stress

Under significant stress, the mind may become less flexible. A person may enter a survival-oriented mode characterized by hypervigilance, avoidance, emotional shutdown, impulsivity, or rigid thinking.

Effective adaptation therefore involves learning to ask:

“Is my current response helping me deal with the situation, or is it a response I learned in an earlier situation that no longer fits?”

The deeper principle

The strongest adaptation may not be changing who you are whenever circumstances change.

It is:

Changing your strategy without abandoning your principles.

That is why adaptation may be closely connected to resilience and psychological flexibility: bend without breaking, learn without losing yourself, and change without becoming ungrounded.

Shervan K Shahhian

Chauffeur Psychology may be a useful metaphor for a psychological pattern:

Chauffeur Psychology may be a useful metaphor for a psychological pattern in which a person controls, directs, or carries another person through life rather than helping that person develop their own capacity to navigate independently.

It may be understood in several ways:

1. The “chauffeur” as a psychological role

A person may repeatedly:

Make decisions for others
Solve problems before the other person tries
Give constant advice or direction
Protect someone from consequences
Take responsibility for another person’s emotions
Become indispensable to the other person’s functioning

The underlying message may become: “I know what is best for you, so let me drive.”

2. The psychological payoff

Chauffeur behavior may not be necessarily malicious. It may satisfy important psychological needs, such as:

Control: “If I’m driving, I can prevent things from going wrong.”
Significance: “People need me.”
Identity: “I’m the helper/rescuer.”
Anxiety reduction: “If I take over, I don’t have to tolerate uncertainty.”
Avoidance: Focusing on someone else’s problems can distract from one’s own.
Self-esteem: Being needed can temporarily reinforce a person’s sense of worth.

3. The danger may be: learned dependence

If the chauffeur continually takes over, the passenger may gradually become less confident in their own ability.

This may produce a cycle:

Anxiety…chauffeur takes over…passenger avoids responsibility…passenger becomes less confident… chauffeur becomes even more necessary.

This overlaps with concepts such as codependency, enabling, Overfunctioning/underfunctioning, rescuing, and learned helplessness, although those concepts may not be identical.

4. Healthy alternative: “teach rather than drive”

A psychologically healthier approach may be:

“I can support you without taking over your life.”

Instead of saying:

“I’ll handle it.”

The helper might say:

“What do you think your options are?”

or:

“Would you like advice, or would you rather I just listen?”

That preserves autonomy, agency, and competence.

A particularly interesting distinction

There may be a major difference between being a chauffeur and being a navigator.

Chauffeur: “I’ll take you where you need to go.”

Navigator: “I’ll help you understand the map, but you’re still driving.”

In psychotherapy, the second model may be more consistent with empowerment and client autonomy. The therapist provides expertise, structure, and guidance without unnecessarily assuming control over the client’s decisions.

In one sentence: Chauffeur psychology describes the tendency to manage another person’s journey instead of helping them develop the confidence and skills to drive their own life.

Shervan K Shahhian

Compulsive Shopping, loss of control and the function shopping serves:

Compulsive Shopping, also called compulsive buying or buying shopping disorder, is a pattern of repetitive, difficult to control purchasing in which a person continues to shop despite negative emotional, financial, relational, or occupational consequences.

It is less about how much someone buys and more about loss of control and the function shopping serves.

Common cycle

Emotional trigger…urge...shopping…temporary relief/excitement…regret…distress…renewed urge

For example:

Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger, or low self-esteem…intense desire to shop…purchase…temporary mood improvement…guilt or financial stress…another emotional trigger.

Common characteristics

Preoccupation with shopping or purchasing
Strong urges that feel difficult to resist
Buying things that aren’t needed
Shopping to regulate emotions
Spending more money or time than intended
Hiding purchases or financial activity
Repeated unsuccessful attempts to stop or reduce shopping
Financial problems, debt, or relationship conflict
Buyer’s remorse after the purchase
Feeling temporarily better immediately after buying

Compulsive shopping vs. Normal shopping

Normal shopping	Compulsive shopping
Usually intentional	Often driven by an urge
Purchases serve a purpose	Purchases may serve an emotional function
Can postpone buying	Difficulty resisting
Little distress afterward	Guilt, shame, regret, or anxiety
Spending generally remains manageable	Can cause financial or relational harm
Behavior is flexible	Behavior becomes repetitive and difficult to control

What may drive it?

Psychologically, shopping may become a form of emotion regulation. A person may unconsciously learn:

“When I feel bad, buying something makes me feel better.”

The anticipation of purchasing may itself produce excitement and reward. Over time, the mind may develop a strong cue…craving…purchase…relief/reward pattern.

Common triggers include:

Anxiety
Depression
Loneliness
Stress
Low self-esteem
Boredom
Trauma related distress
Interpersonal conflict
Feelings of inadequacy or lack of control

Is it an addiction?

There is debate about terminology. Researchers have proposed conceptualizing it may be a behavioral addiction, an impulse control problem, or an obsessive compulsive spectrum condition.

Importantly, compulsive shopping may also occur alongside other conditions, particularly mood disorders, anxiety disorders, ADHD, OCD spectrum problems, and bipolar spectrum disorders. Excessive spending during a manic or hypomanic episode, for example, it may have a different clinical meaning than chronic compulsive buying.

Treatment

Treatment may generally focuses on:

Identifying triggers and maintaining cycles
CBT to modify thoughts and behaviors surrounding purchasing
Developing alternative emotion regulation strategies
Delaying or interrupting urges
Reducing exposure to shopping triggers
Creating financial safeguards and spending limits
Addressing underlying depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, etc.
Treating co-occurring disorders when present

A useful clinical question may be:

“What emotional state are you trying to change when you feel the urge to buy something?”

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology; Supernatural Threats may refer to perceived dangers attributed to Unknown Phenomena:

Supernatural threats may refer to perceived dangers attributed to forces, beings, or phenomena that are believed to exist outside ordinary physical or scientific explanations.

Examples might include:

Entities or beings: ghosts, spirits, demons, angels, extraterrestrials, or other alleged non-human intelligences.

Paranormal phenomena: perceived attacks, apparitions, unexplained physical events, poltergeist activity, or alleged psychic interference.

Curses or supernatural influence: beliefs that a person, object, ritual, or location may cause harm through non-ordinary forces.

Possession or spiritual attack: interpretations in which an external entity is believed to influence thoughts, emotions, behavior, or bodily experiences.

Occult threats: fears associated with magic, rituals, witchcraft, or perceived occult practices.

Environmental or location based phenomena: places believed to be haunted or associated with unusual experiences.

Three ways to understand them

1. Paranormal interpretation: Within parapsychology or spiritual traditions, a person may interpret an unusual experience as evidence of an external intelligence, psi phenomenon, spirit, or other non-ordinary reality. These interpretations remain controversial and scientifically unestablished.

2. Psychological interpretation: Experiences perceived as supernatural may sometimes arise from sleep paralysis, trauma, dissociation, hypervigilance, expectation, suggestion, perceptual errors, substance effects, or culturally shaped beliefs. Importantly, explaining a possible psychological mechanism may not necessarily mean the person’s experience was fabricated.

3. Social/cultural interpretation: What constitutes a “supernatural threat” varies considerably among cultures. The same experience might be interpreted as a ghost in one culture, a spirit or ancestor in another, or a neurological/sleep phenomenon in another.

A useful distinction

Experience vs interpretation vs explanation.

For example:

Experience: I felt that something was watching me.

Interpretation: A supernatural entity was watching me.

”Explanation: Could involve environmental factors, psychology, sleep phenomena, a cultural framework, or if one adopts a paranormal hypothesis an anomalous phenomenon.

That distinction allows someone to take the person’s experience seriously without prematurely deciding what caused it.

In a clinical setting, the safest approach may be to assess immediate safety and functioning first, while remaining respectful and non-dismissive about the person’s interpretation.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology; People with Supernatural Powers may mean several different things:

People with supernatural powers may mean several different things, depending on whether you mean religious traditions, paranormal claims, or scientifically established abilities.

1. People traditionally believed to have supernatural powers

Across cultures, certain individuals have been described as having abilities beyond ordinary human capacities:

Prophets: receiving divine revelations or foreknowledge.

Mystics: reporting direct experiences of God, spirits, or transcendent realities.

Shamans: traditionally believed to communicate with spirits and enter altered states of consciousness.

Psychics / clairvoyants: claimed ability to perceive information unavailable through the ordinary senses.

Mediums: claimed communication with deceased persons or spirits.

Healers: believed to heal through spiritual, energetic, or other non-ordinary means.

Witches / sorcerers: traditionally associated with spells, curses, divination, and other forms of magic.

Seers: people reputed to perceive future events or hidden information.

Yogis and advanced meditators: some Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Zen and Buddhist traditions describe siddhis, unusual abilities acquired through spiritual practice.

Saints: some religious traditions attribute miracles, bilocation, prophecy, levitation, or healing to particular saints.

2. Paranormal researchers describe other claimed abilities

In parapsychology, the terminology may somewhat different. Researchers could have investigated alleged phenomena such as:

Claimed ability	Description
Telepathy	Information transfer between minds
Clairvoyance	Perception of distant or hidden information
Precognition	Apparent knowledge of future events
Psychokinesis (PK)	Mind influencing physical systems
Remote viewing	Attempting to describe a distant target without ordinary sensory access
Mediumship	Apparent communication with the deceased
Healing psi	Claimed anomalous influence on health or biological systems
Apparitions	Experiences of apparently seeing deceased or non-ordinary beings

These are claims or areas of investigation, may or may not be abilities established as ordinary scientific facts.

3. An important distinction

There could be major difference between saying:

“This person reports having an extraordinary experience.”

and

“This person objectively possesses a supernatural power.”

The first may be documented phenomenologically. The second requires evidence demonstrating that the ability may not be explained by ordinary psychological, neurological, environmental, or statistical mechanisms.

Interestingly, some people who appear to have “supernatural” abilities may instead have exceptional natural abilities, for example, extraordinary memory, pattern recognition, intuition, perceptual sensitivity, hypnotic responsiveness, or an unusual capacity to read subtle social cues.

4. From a parapsychological perspective

A more neutral question may not necessarily “Who has supernatural powers?” but:

“Are there people who demonstrate anomalous information processing or mind matter effects that may not yet be adequately explained by conventional models?”

That is essentially where parapsychology enters the discussion. It leaves open the possibility of phenomena such as ESP or PK while requiring systematic investigation rather than simply accepting supernatural explanations.

And this distinction is particularly important with prophets, psychics, mediums, remote viewers, and people reporting encounters with non-human intelligences: the experience may be genuine as an experience without the proposed explanation necessarily being established.

Shervan K Shahhian

Irrational Thinking; interpretations are not adequately supported by available sound reasoning:

Irrational Thinking is a pattern of thinking in which conclusions, beliefs, or interpretations are not adequately supported by available evidence or sound reasoning. It may feel completely convincing to the person experiencing it because emotions, assumptions, biases, or previous experiences may strongly influence how information is interpreted.

Common forms of irrational thinking

Pattern Example

All-or-nothing thinking “If I fail once, I’m a complete failure.”

Catastrophizing “If this goes wrong, my life will be ruined.”

Mind reading “I know they’re judging me.”

Fortune telling “I already know this will end badly.”

Emotional reasoning “I feel unsafe, therefore I must be in danger.”

Overgeneralization “Everyone eventually betrays you.”

Personalization “They seem unhappy, so I must have done something wrong.”

Confirmation bias Looking mainly for evidence that supports what you already belive Magical thinking Believing that thoughts, rituals, or unrelated events directly cause outcomes without evidence of a causal connection.
False certainty Treating an assumption as an established fact.

Irrational thinking may not be necessarily “crazy”

Everyone engages in irrational thinking sometimes. Stress, anxiety, fear, anger, grief, trauma, sleep deprivation, and strong emotional states may make reasoning less flexible.

A useful distinction may be:

Thought…Interpretation…Belief…Action

For example:

“My friend hasn’t responded.”

“Something must be wrong.”

“They’re angry with me.”

“I should confront them.”

The initial fact is observable. The subsequent conclusions may or may not be accurate.

Rational thinking may ask different questions

Instead of asking:

“How do I feel about this?”

Rational thinking adds:

What do I actually know?

What am I assuming?

What evidence supports my interpretation?

What evidence contradicts it?

Are there alternative explanations?

Am I confusing possibility with probability?

What would change my mind?

Am I reacting to the present situation or to something from my past?

An important clinical distinction

Irrational thinking exists on a continuum. Ordinary cognitive distortions are different from severely impaired reality testing.

For example:

Cognitive distortion: “My boss didn’t smile at me, so maybe she’s upset with me.”

versus

Fixed false belief: “My boss is secretly transmitting messages into my mind through the office lights.”

The second example raises a substantially different clinical question because the belief involves reality testing, evidence evaluation, and potentially delusional conviction.

A useful principle is:

A thought may feel true without being factually true.

That distinction between subjective certainty and objective evidence is central to rational thinking, critical thinking, and psychological reality testing.

Shervan K Shahhian