Personalisation
Personalisation is seeing oneself as the cause of a negative external event for which one was not, in fact, primarily responsible. The emotional consequence is typically guilt, as the person takes on blame that more properly belongs elsewhere, or is simply not usefully assignable to any single cause.
Illustration
When her child is sent to the head teacher's office for misbehaving at school, a mother immediately concludes that this reflects her own failure as a parent, rather than considering the far more ordinary explanation that children sometimes misbehave regardless of how well they are raised.
References
- Casey, P. & Kelly, B. (2019). Fish's Clinical Psychopathology, 4th ed. Appendix II, 'Defences and Distortions'.