How do we interpret the events that happen in our lives? Cognitive theory can help us get a better understanding of how that happens. The first concepts that you want to familiarize yourself with are 'assimilation' and 'accommodation.' Charlotte Nickersen wrote a very informative - and well illustrated - article with a simple overview of these concept.s
When individuals are confronted with new information that is inconsistent with preexisting schemas (i.e., stored bodies of knowledge), one of two processes occurs: assimilation or accommodation. Assimilation is the incorporation or alteration of new information to fit into existing schemas. Accommodation is the modification of existing schemas (and creation of new ones) to incorporate new events and information.
Although accommodation is necessary to integrate a new experience, individuals sometimes over-accommodate when interpreting input in their environment. Over-accommodation occurs when schema changes are inaccurate and overgeneralized.
Assimilation is interpreting incoming information in light of prior beliefs:
I believe that leaving my car in a dark parking garage in a high-crime neighborhood is dangerous. I do that one day, and my car is broken into. I can easily understand this event within my existing schemas, so it would be assimilated with no adjustment of beliefs needed.
Growing up, I was taught to believe that “good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people” (also known as a “just world” hypothesis). Then something bad happens to me. To assimilate this event within my schemas, I would then need to tell myself that I must be “bad.”
Accommodation is altering beliefs enough to incorporate the new information:
Growing up, I was taught to believe that “good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.” Then something bad happens to me. I can accommodate that by finding a new equilibrium in my belief system that states that good and bad things happen to both “good” and “bad” people – the world is not always “fair”.
Over-accommodation is altering one’s beliefs about oneself and the world to the extreme in order to make sense of new events and information. Examples of over-accommodation (also known as over-generalization) in the situations above would be:
I am not safe anywhere.
Since I can’t control what happens to me, what I do and don’t do doesn’t matter at all.
One of the goals of CBT is to help you stay away from over-accommodations (and unhelpful assimilations) and find accommodations that are complete, balanced, and useful to you.