I first learned about black and white, all or nothing thinking when in school for training as an addictions counselor. I was required to participate in a certain number of twelve step groups. It was recognized that black and white, all or nothing thinking was common with addicts and with their codependent partners.
When we are engaged in black and white thinking, we are not aware of the shades of gray in between. Our friends, family members or romantic partners are either amazing or horrible, lovable or hated, good or bad, right or wrong.
In personality disorders there is something called “splitting,” where the object of one’s affections is either all good or all bad. There is no in between. This is what causes the idealization and the devaluation common in personality disorders. Believe it or not, this begins early in life as a defense mechanism against painful circumstances or childhood abuse.
Splitting is a psychological mechanism which allows the person to tolerate difficult and overwhelming emotions by seeing someone as either good or bad, idealized or devalued. This makes it easier to manage the emotions that they are feeling, which on the surface seem to be contradictory.
We all engage in splitting to some degree. We tend to view people as good or bad depending on how they treat us or how they treat the people we love.
In relationships “splitting” or black and white, all or nothing thinking is what causes us to toss the baby out with the bathwater. We may not recognize that bad behavior doesn’t make the person himself bad. Everybody engages in behavior they might not be proud of. People do things or say things when they are upset or dis-regulated that they wish they hadn’t done. This doesn’t make them bad people. We can all lose our temper, or shut down, or not be perfectly honest, or blame others. This is being human.
Splitting was first described by Ronald Fairbairn in his formulation of object relations theory; it begins as the inability of the infant to combine the fulfilling aspects of the parents (the good object) and their unresponsive aspects (the unsatisfying object) into the same individuals, instead seeing the good and bad as separate. In psychoanalytic theory this functions as a defense mechanism.
As children we are dependent upon our parents and need to love them. So, our tendency is to cut off from the abusive, neglectful parts of our parents and focus on what we love. This is a survival mechanism that may serve us as young children but doesn’t serve us as adults.
Unfortunately all dysfunction in our adulthood comes from getting stuck in childhood patterns and bringing them with us into our adult relationships.
Black and White thinking comes with us into our adult relationships because we never learned how to take the good with the bad and find the shades of gray. Instead of seeing a loved one as having made a mistake, we might see them as being a mistake. The stronger the tendency to have black and white, all or nothing thinking, the less accepting we are of the humanness in others. We may expect perfection or at the very least we may expect that the people in our lives perfectly meet our needs.
The desire for a partner to perfectly meet our needs comes from unmet needs in childhood. These unmet needs follow us into adulthood and we project them onto the people in our lives, especially our romantic partners.
There can be a tendency to get angry at a partner for not meeting our needs, and depending on our own level of dysfunction, we can split that partner into the unsatisfying love object that has failed us in some way.
We see this kind of behavior magnetized in Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. This is because splitting can happen so quickly and out of the blue we have become the bad guy or the enemy and we don’t know what we did. Its not that we did anything wrong, but the personality disordered individual when triggered, projects something onto us that doesn’t belong to us. Suddenly we are being accused of doing or saying something we didn’t do or say.
Although splitting and black and white thinking can be grouped together as the same thing, we don’t tend to use the word “splitting” for typical low level dysfunctional behavior. Splitting tends to be used to describe personality disordered behavior when there is an actual break from reality or psychosis present.
With black and white, all or nothing thinking, a partner may have an affair which destroys your trust and really hurts you. This is a real event. You are not creating this event in your head. It really happened. Your partner may even admit it happened. As a result of your own pain, you may get really angry at your partner and even feel you hate him. You may see him as the bad guy in your relationship and even attempt to convince others he is a bad guy for cheating on you.
Cheating doesn’t make your partner a bad person, but the behavior is certainly bad. Especially if you have a commitment of fidelity. He has betrayed your trust. The relationship may be irreparable. Your partner may even feel he has made a mistake and ask your forgiveness. If you have black and white thinking, you probably wouldn’t be able to forgive him or move forward in the relationship because you see him as a horrible cheater which undermines any good you have had in the relationship.
I’m not saying, if you don’t have black and white thinking that you should try and repair the relationship. You may not feel you can rebuilt the trust and prefer to just cut your losses and move on. But you may eventually see that he is not a bad guy, he just went through a period of feeling lost, disconnected, hurt, confused or whatever he might have been going through.
In my research in borderline personality disorder it is typically said that borderlines are often really beautiful, sensitive people who have a mental illness causing them to engage in some pretty extreme and hurtful behavior.
I know myself I have had a tendency to categorize personality disordered people into the “really bad choice” category. I don’t talk enough about all the beautiful qualities that are present with someone who has a personality disorder.
When I did my last podcast on borderline personality disorder, a few women got upset with me for painting them in such a bad light. I realized that I had been biased because of the number of men I had worked with who went through a pretty intense and crazy relationship with a borderline woman.
As an empath, I often empathize too much with my clients and even develop negative feelings for their borderline or narcissistic partner. I realized I needed to heal this in myself in order to be a more grounded, neutral support person. I realized that I had a lot of borderline listeners and followers of my work because it is typical that borderlines will get into relationship with narcissists. I also realize that a majority of people who get involved with narcissists do have borderline traits; especially those who are highly empathic, sensitive personalities.
Complex Post Traumatic Stress also has many of the same traits as a borderline personality. This whole process of understanding has helped me to go deeper into my own black and white thinking. I realized I needed to develop more compassion and understanding for the wounded souls whose wounds have led them to develop destructive coping mechanisms.
We still need to have strong boundaries in what kind of behavior is acceptable to us and what is not acceptable. But we would likely feel much more balanced in our lives if we aren’t demonizing people for their failure to not meet our needs or be what we need.
I understand that some narcissists and sociopaths do seem to be all bad. Although most people do have good in them, there are some people who are just incapable of loving others and seem to get enjoyment in hurting others. We may rightfully label these people as not only “bad” but dangerous. Some people are to be avoided.
But others may simply be wounded and traumatized as children and are good people with good hearts, but have some really unhealthy and destructive defense mechanisms. We may be hurt by these defense mechanisms and choose to end our relationships with such people because they continue to be hurtful, but this still doesn’t make them “bad people.”
When we can rectify this need to label others as bad, we also rectify labeling ourselves as bad.
I can look back on most of my relationships and feel compassion for the pain these people have gone through that caused them to act out in destructive ways. I wouldn’t go back or consider having these people in my life again in any significant way, but I certainly don’t hate them or think of them as bad people. Instead I see them as deeply wounded. Remember that hurt people, hurt people.
Black and white, all or nothing thinking causes us to see things in extremes. If you are coming out of a relationship where your heart is really broken you may find yourself saying “I’m never going to fall in love again. I will never get involved with another person! I only fall in love with narcissists!”
The always or never statements can be black and white thinking. YOU always do this! You never do that! These are often exaggerations. Someone may engage in a certain behavior frequently but they don’t always do it.
If you find yourself saying “nobody really loves me,” “I will never meet someone who loves me,” this is not only black and white thinking but catastrophic thinking. When we imagine the worst and believe it to be true it is catastrophic. Catastrophic thinking leads us to say things like “I will never lose weight, or I’ll never find love, or I’ll never find a good job or “I always screw up,” or anything that you would like to have happen but have not yet found success.”
The past doesn’t equal the future, unless you repeat the same patterns over and over. If you want a different result in life, you have to do things differently.
We use black and white thinking not only towards others but towards ourselves. We can see ourselves as successful or a failure, lovable or unlovable, beautiful or ugly, happy or sad, good or bad, right or wrong, worthy or unworthy and how we see ourselves can fluctuate with our moods.
Someone might adopt a lifestyle change in order to get healthier and lose some weight and be doing really well. They may have a bad day, where their mood is low and find themselves running to the store for a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. After they binge on the ice cream they may have an even greater drop in mood and tell themselves “I will never be able to lose weight, I can’t stick to a diet, I always fail,” etc. They don’t look at the seven days they just had where they really did well. They only look at the one day they didn’t. It is this kind of catastrophic thinking that sabotages our efforts.
Seeing the shades of grey might involve saying to yourself “okay you had a bit of a set back but you have been doing really well and you can get right back on the horse and continue riding. You learn not to interpret a downfall or setback in all or nothing terms.
When one is a perfectionist, the need to be perfect and do things perfectly is huge. So anything short of perfection may cause extreme thinking. We need to be very careful about trying to be perfect, appear perfect or seek out the perfect mate. Nobody is perfect. We are all human. We all have flaws. We all make mistakes.
When we engaged in polarized, black and white, all or nothing thinking, we ourselves will idealize and devalue people. Think about how you felt about a significant other when you first met and how you thought of that person when you were breaking up.
Black and white thinking can cause us to devalue people and discard them rather than trying to resolve conflicts. It can prevent us from seeing people as human with their quirks, moods, ups and downs, and accepting people for who they are.
Black and white thinking can destroy relationships. We may walk off a job, fire someone, break up with someone, leave a community, or make other impulsive decisions because we have devalued a person or situation when we were feeling hurt or down. When we recover ourselves and are feeling better again, we may regret our impulsive behavior.
Black is one end of the spectrum and White is the other, but life really happens in the middle. This is where all the color is. Even though we talk about the shades of gray in between black and white, I prefer to see the place between black and white as being where all the color is. Life is colorful! It is filled with variety and nuances. Life is neither perfect or imperfect. It just is! We have so many different emotions, feelings, moods, experiences, ups, downs, problems, victories, fears, failures, successes, gains and losses.
We come to learn that it can be very difficult to label something as either right or wrong. There are so many variables. We can’t judge a person or situation without having all the information and even when we do have a lot of information, who are we to judge? We haven’t walked a mile in that persons shoes or know what they are really going through. We also can’t know what its like to have a mental illness, if we don’t have one.
There are things in life we feel are just not right and in a human sense we can all agree on some of those things. But other things are dependent upon our perspective.
What can we do to heal black and white thinking?
The first thing you can do to heal black and white, all or nothing thinking is to become aware of it. You can’t heal or change anything until you become aware of it. Ask yourself where it is showing up in your life and be mindful on a daily basis of any rigid or all or nothing thinking.
Think about any tendency you might have to devalue people you are hurt or angered by. Think about any times you might have had catastrophic thinking.
When you can become aware of your own tendency to look at things in black and white, try expanding and adding more color. Try looking at the situation from a different perspective. Ask yourself some questions around the situation you are seeing as all good or all bad.
When we stop thinking in terms of black and white, we can actually make healthier decisions, not only in regard to others but to ourselves, seeing ourselves in a more true and realistic light.
People with low self worth, who have core wounds and beliefs that tell them “you are a bad person, nobody will ever love you, you aren’t enough,” don’t see themselves in a good light. Making mistakes can bring core shame to the surface which basically says “I am a mistake.” Building self worth involves ditching the black and white thinking and begin to see that everyone makes mistakes, we are all human, nobody is perfect, there are plenty of things that are amazing and lovable about YOU; you have lots of beautiful colors, and as you truly get to know yourself on a deeper level you can see and appreciate your own colors. Your own rainbow spectrum.
As you look at the world around you and the people around you, practice seeing the full spectrum of colors, rather than the polar opposites. There is plenty of good in the world, plenty of beauty. There is also plenty of bad, plenty of darkness, but there is also everything in between.
If you find yourself looking at life through the lens of black and white, try switching to a colored lens and see the full spectrum. You may start to see that although your parents didn’t give you what you needed, they did the best they could with what they had and they did give you some things that are valuable in your life now. You might see that your ex-partner hurt you but you had a lot of good times together and the relationship wasn’t a total waste. You might see that your boss is a bit of a control freak but there are a lot of great things about your job. Your house needs some repairs but it’s a comfortable home. Your best friend wasn’t there for you that time you really needed her but she has been there for you most of the time. You may not be perfect, but you are pretty awesome, you have a lot of great qualities and you are lovable.
As you become more aware of black and white, all or nothing thinking in yourself and others you can take the important steps to bridge the gap in between and live a much more colorful, healthy, and whole life.
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