All or Nothing Thinking

Although I have criticised Cognitive BehaviouralTherapy (CBT), it has some fantastic tools that allow one to challenge your thinking.  Briefly, CBT is based on the idea that much of our suffering is due to distorted thinking and faulty logic.  As you know, I believe that it is not enough to address faulty logic without also addressing relationships.  However, let's assume that you are taking care of that side of things, and look at one distorted thought process, namely "All or Nothing" thinking, which is also called "Black and White" thinking.

All  or nothing thinking happens when an individual characterises an object, the self or others as either totally wonderful or completely evil, without recognising that all things and people exist on continua that vary according to:

 (a) context;

(b)  stages of a process/development

(c) energy/resource availability;

(d) short term and long term needs;

(e) insight and knowledge.

In general,  nothing is perfect or imperfect because, as the Buddhists say, everything is in a constant state of flux; everything is changing; and everything that exists is in process. The notion of perfection or imperfection is a human construct which assumes that there is some pre-existing and overarching standard or pattern, separate from the human collective consciousness, against which things and people can be tested.  

This assumption is probably rooted in our primitive instincts.  As a newborn, we are only able to experience the absolute joy of having our needs met (nursing); or being utterly overwhelmed by our immediate needs being unmet (crying for the breast).  These ideas were first put forward by Melanie Klein, an English psychoanalytic theorist in the early 20th Century, who is credited as being the first children's psychotherapist and who wrote on the topic of "object relations". She wrote about how the reflexive infant splits experiences into a good breast or a bad breast.  This splitting results in the infant existing in binary states and in which they are either experiencing either total joy or total suffering.  Thus both the part representation of the mother (breast) and the self are split into two.  

Crying in response to hunger holds survival value because it signals need.  However, as time passes,  the infant who has his needs met learns that the breast sometimes provides and sometimes withholds;  and the developing personality learns to trust the process of life.  Freud said that depending on the quality of care, people carry with them into adulthood either a hostile or idealised infantile prototype.  In other words he noticed that individuals exist on a continuum that ranges from a tendency to project an ideal onto other people, or they project hostility (evil) onto others.  

Some people switch suddenly between these extremes, without integrating people or situations into their grey in-betweens which depend, I believe, on the factors I mentioned in the list above.  

Therefore, awareness of all or nothing thinking challenges us to see things in a balanced way.  In order to be whole,happy and Integrated we need to be able to see things in and people as wholes and in constant process.  By avoiding black and white thinking, we are better able to respond to things as they really are, rather than what we believe they should or should not be.  This requires the nurturing of gentleness and kindness towards ourselves and to others.