Magnifying & Minimizing Techniques

Magnifying and minimizing techniques are tools used in cognitive behavioral therapy, which is an umbrella term in psychotherapy that refers to forms of therapy that emphasize feelings and reactions as important in the therapeutic process. The terms magnifying and minimizing in this context refers to how someone might habitually magnify their problems and minimize their successes. This is known as a type of cognitive distortion. There are many techniques to change magnifying and minimizing issues.

Fostering Cognitive Dissonance

• Cognitive dissonance can disrupt people's negative self-assessment.

  Cognitive dissonance is a technique that can challenge magnifying and minimizing thoughts. To use cognitive dissonance, a therapist might ask questions like, "Is this always true? What percentage of the time is it true? When has this not been true? What percentage of the time am I failing versus succeeding?" Cognitive dissonance disrupts magnifying and minimizing thought processes by asking a person to more accurately assess his life.

Evoking Stories of Success

• Telling stories of positive experiences can change a person's thought process.

  Another technique to disrupt magnifying and minimizing thought patterns is to ask the person to remember and tell the stories from her life when she's been successful. Not only does this challenge her negative thought patterns, but remembering positive outcomes and bringing them to the forefront of a person's consciousness can be beneficial in changing a person's outlook.

Aversion Therapy

• Aversion therapy can be used with magnifying and minimizing problems when someone has anxiety and fear around bad things that he feels are imminent. Aversion therapy has a person imagine the worst possible scenario of what would happen if all his problems were truly as huge as he believes them to be, and all his successes were similarly slight. Trying to immerse a person in the worst-case scenario, and allowing him to see that he would in fact be able to deal and cope with that situation, can be an effective technique to disrupt the fear and anxiety that goes with magnifying and minimizing thought processes.

Journaling

• Having someone write down and accurately document the ups and downs of her daily life creates a physical document that realistically lays out the truth of someone's life. As magnifying and minimizing thoughts generally over and under exaggerate the negatives and positives of life, this can be a helpful technique for showing someone that things are not as bad as she is perceiving them to be.