How Black-and-White Thinking Distorts Your Perception of Life

“Data data everywhere but not a thought to think.”

— Theodore Roszak

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week of August 31, 2019

How Black-and-White Thinking Distorts Your Perception of Life

Condensed from www.Learning-Mind.com

Black-and-white thinking divides reality into light and dark with a clean cut, canceling its complexity, ambiguity, and every nuance. It makes us think in terms of “all or nothing.”

“

I never let schooling get in the way of an education.”

Mark Twain

Exercising black-and-white thinking means believing that things can be completely right or totally wrong, that people are either friends or foes, that the days are perfect or a nightmare, that what is not a success is a failure, and that all that is not virtuous is vicious. It is now or never. We are beautiful or ugly, you love or you hate, and so on.

In short, black-and-white thinking tends to define a situation by making clear, rigid and permanent distinctions with only two opposing categories: good or bad. Here are three examples:

• Seeing only one side of a situation.
• Ignoring the contrary evidence and not questioning one’s source of information.
• Getting into heated arguments with those who do not share one’s opinions.

A cognitive distortion

Thus, black-and-white thinking is a cognitive distortion, one of the many biases that can obscure our ability to judge and make good decisions. Black-and-white thinking is reassuring, at least in the short term, but in the long run it has several disadvantages:

• Limits our ability to connect with and understand the world, which is not always black or white.

• Reduces the number of choices we have available and erases any possibility of mediation and synthesis. And when we erase possible choices, it becomes easy to feel angry or impotent, or both at the same time.

• Precludes creative solutions. The judgments are unquestionable, so there is no room for the invention of any better alternative.

• Leads to an egocentric and childish way of thinking.

• Induces depression: What is not good will continue to be worse; what is wrong will become irreparable; what is negative will become catastrophic.

“

When you were a child you had two options—to trust or not to trust. Your options are broader now

.”

Ellen Bass

Schematic Realities

And yet, we are surrounded by interesting dichotomous schematizations: Nature and Culture. East and West. Peace and War. Public and Private. Masculine and Feminine. Vice and Virtue. City and Countryside. Freedom and Oppression. Right and Left. Health and Illness. Reason and Sentiment. Youth and Old Age. And so on.

But those dichotomies express the extreme polarizations of reality that are a continuum. Between one pole and the other, there is not a chasm but a more or less wide and variously shaded area of gray.

Small doses of black-and-white thinking can, therefore, be useful in life. And as long as you commit to paying attention to the thousands of changing shades of gray (and the thousand rainbows), you can have a reasonable and balanced view of the world we live in.

How to Develop Balanced Patterns of Thinking

So, let’s look at four steps you could take to change a black-and- white habitual perspective.

1. Be Ready to Accept. The ability to see something from many points of view gives an individual the ability to accept and understand a situation much better and find more solutions.

2. Do Not Judge. Open-minded people are willing to listen to someone without judging or develop certain conclusions before they finish talking. Do not assume you know someone just because they shared with you a few details of their story.

3. Be Curious. Do not think that a story or a piece of information contains all the knowledge you need. Research the information from more resources. Ask questions and compare.

4. Live in the Present. The best way to walk through life’s challenges is to focus your energy and attention on what you have and where you are now.

Although the reasons we choose to think in black and white may vary, there can be infinite ways to resolve a situation and many aspects that can influence a person’s behavior or story. So next time before you put a label on someone or something, take a step back and reconsider if you really understood the root cause and all the details.

Click here to download the full PDF version of this week’s bulletin

How to Love Your Enemy

“We must accept our pain, change what we can, and laugh at the rest.”

— Camille Paglia

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Featured Story

Week of August 24, 2019

How to Love Your Enemy

by Melissa Florer-Bixler

"If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down."

Mary Pickford

When someone shares with me that they have an enemy, it is often in pastoral confidence, whispered as a confession. Having an enemy, they intuit, is a botched form of discipleship resulting from failed reconciliation. The language of enemies is seen as the end of a conversation—or the end of a relationship.

We assume everyone is doing their best, or failing on some things but not everything, or that people are cogs in a complex machine over which they have little control. We let systemic oppression be the problem.

Yet Christians follow scriptures in which enemies are named with clarity and vigor. The third chapter of Luke begins by naming the names of the tormentors of the Jews of the first century: Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, and Herod. Right up front we are introduced to the full swath of political actors who oppress and terrorize the common people of Judea.

Tiberius was the emperor known for his extreme paranoia and wrath that spread like a disease across his territories. Pontius Pilate, the prefect of Judea, executed political enemies without trial and was infamous for his bribes and insults. Herod Antipas imprisoned and executed his enemies over personal slights.

Luke sets the scene for the gospel in a tyrannical, volatile, and oppressive political climate. And he wants us to know who is in charge, who makes this repression possible. He doesn’t reduce the problem to “good people who do bad things.” He doesn’t blame systems. He names enemies.

"Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength."

Corrie ten Boom

Rightly having enemies is an unsung discipline of the Christian life. More often than not we abandon the task before we get started; we wrongly assume we should not have enemies. But the expectation of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that we will have enemies. We know this because Jesus gives us a command to love our enemies. And in order to love your enemies, you first have to know who they are.

Held up by people

Often people outside the church tell me how they are drawn to Jesus, meek and mild. This caricature misses out on the actual Jesus of the Bible, who lashes out against the religious teachers whom he calls false prophets, blind guides, whitewashed tombs, and hypocrites. Jesus’ anger drove the moneychangers from the temple with a whip.

This Jesus teaches us that there are right and wrong ways to have enemies. When we look at Jesus’ life we see that enmity is born when we recognize that the structures of terror and injustice are held up by people. Oppression is enacted by individual human beings, who collectively wash their hands of the matter. Without the participation of people—individuals doing the work—these systems would collapse.

Enemies are not the people we dislike or those who are different from us. In the gospel, enemies are those who make camp on the far side of the line that is justice. And God is beckoning us—all of us—to join God among the oppressed.

In this way Jesus reorients our way of having enemies. We do not arm ourselves with weapons to coerce or threaten enemies of God’s liberation into submission. Instead we create the world we want.

The enemy within

On December 8, 2018, Jakelin Caal Maquin, age 7, died in El Paso, Texas, 2,000 miles from the home she fled in Guatemala. She and her father were detained at a remote border crossing in New Mexico. We have yet to see anyone take responsibility for her death. Instead, individuals and agencies wash their hands of Jakelin’s death.

But there are many individuals who contributed to Jakelin’s death. Doris Meissner is the enemy of Jakelin. She is the commissioner who signed off on the 1994 plan to strategically push migrants into remote parts of the desert, making the desert a weapon. President Dwight D. Eisenhower is responsible for Jakelin’s death. He oversaw the coup d’etat in Guatemala orchestrated by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected president and install a puppet administration.

The architects of the Central America Free Trade Agreement that decimated the Guatemalan economy are responsible for Jakelin’s death. White House staffer Stephen Miller is responsible for Jakelin’s death, by whipping up anti-immigration sentiment in the U.S. The border guards who refused to respond to her father’s cries for help are responsible for Jakelin’s death. . . .

We cannot be former enemies until we first name our enmity, both that we have enemies and that we have been the enemies of others. This is why the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in post-apartheid South Africa began with confession. There could be no hope for forgiveness unless enemies were named first.

To love your enemies is to call them out of the world of denial and oppression, of despots and executioners. To love your enemies is to help them see the truth about themselves and show them something else is possible. To love your enemies is to tell them the story of how we once too were enemies of God and that through the love of God who lived, died, and rose among us, we are now called friends. We have enemies because we hope that one day we might call them friends. There is nothing emotional or psychological about this change. To turn from enemies to friends means our lives must change. And sometimes this means our jobs, how we make money, how we act in the world must change.

—Condensed from Sojourners magazine Sept./Oct. 2019

Click here to download the full PDF version of this week’s bulletin