All-or-Nothing Thinking / Polarized Thinking (DW#488)

emotions feelings positive thinking Nov 06, 2018

For the next several days, we will be looking at different types of distorted thinking.

Today let’s look at Black-and-White Thinking which is sometimes also called Polarized Thinking.

Some examples of black and white thinking are:

He is a terrible person

My sister is so beautiful and I’m so ugly.

This option is great and the other one is awful.

When we think in this way, we are unable or unwilling to see shades of grey or a middle ground. Things are either good or bad, right or wrong. In other words, we only see the extremes of the situation.Nothing is okay or good enough or somewhere in the middle – it is either fantastic or awful, we are either perfect or we are a total failure.

While black and white thinking can provide us with apparent security and certainty in the short term, it is fundamentally distorted because people and situations are rarely so simple and easy to categorize. All of us, and most situations in life as well, fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum from awful to awesome.

To work through the habit of polarized thinking, we must get into the discipline of challenging ourselves to take into account other viewpoints and interpretations of the situation.

Listening to those who have a different view from ourselves, without shutting them down or arguing with them, is a great first step!

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All-or-Nothing Thinking / Polarized Thinking (DW#488)

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