Cognitive distortions are specific, nameable patterns of misperception — all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, personalization — that the mind generates automatically when under stress or emotional activation. Naming them precisely, as Beck and Burns have done and as the Sutras did with the kleśas, is itself therapeutic: the seen pattern is already beginning to loosen. Change comes not from arguing with distortions but from building sufficient witness capacity to see them as they arise.
Patan