Thanks for reply. Your message is grey which is normal for normal people. Let me tell you how I see black and white:

Black is when you take a decision based on dark feelings more than on rationalism and you realize that decision was stupid.
White is when your brain is working upon a less of 50% influence of dark feelings and the results is a success.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Can you give me some examples of dark feelings and white ones?
What means disturbed behavior? Can you define some limits where is normal and where is anormal?

Cheers,
Florin

This article is part of a series on the types of thinking that are common to persons with disturbed characters. It’s not a condemnation of the type of thinking, per se. In fact, I have some other posts that address the issue of when it’s not only okay but advantageous for someone to have a rather uncompromising mind set (like when a brain surgeon is about to operate on someone). The problem for disturbed characters is that all the traits and thinking patterns this and other series have addressed cluster together in a manner that makes for difficult relationships between the disturbed character and others. The “black and white” metaphor is just that – a metaphor. There is no attempt to necessarily cast the “black” as bad or the “white as good. It’s merely a metaphor to illustrate some folks’ difficulty with seeing “shades of gray.” : )

Thanks and wait for a competent reply.
F.

What I’m saying is that this is just one of a cluster of thinking patterns common to individuals who have difficulty leading well-socialized lifestyles. Having one or two of these thinking tendencies would never be a problem for anyone. But when several less than optimal thinking patterns cluster together, they can pose significant obstacles to the socialization process.

Extreme thinking can be the result of all kinds of conditions. It is not unique to disturbances of character, but individuals with character issues tend to engage in it as well as the other thinking errors I’ve been posting about. It’s the clustering of those problematic thinking patterns that pretty well defines character disturbance.

CBT is certainly the treatment of choice when character disturbance is the main issue needing therapeutic attention. Where other issues predominate, the treatment of choice may vary considerably.

Whatever the causes of problematic thinking patterns, they have to be faced before they can be changed. Sometimes, I think therapeutic confrontation of relevant issues gets an unnecessarily bad name. HOW such issues are confronted (benignly and with empathic understanding) is a very big part of the therapeutic process. However, if the problematic thinking patterns don’t get recognized, challenged, and eventually modified, no amount of kind, supportive, “hand-holding” in therapy will improve the situation. There is a real art to addressing problem thinking patterns in a manner that is not only tolerable to the client, but also eventually welcomed and cherished.

I can kind of understand why Laura feels upset.

I do a fair bit of black and white thinking, and it’s very hard to get yourself out of it, sometimes when I get called to account for it (so to speak) I get outraged (when my therapist mentions it or a partner brings it up), so it’s easy to lash out and feel you’re being attacked. Unfortunately I have a habit of picking partners who have major issues or have personality disorders, so I spend a lot of time trying to work out whether I’m thinking in black/white or if my feelings are valid.

It’s worth mentioning that black and white thinking can come from trauma (I’m pretty sure you do say this somewhere). For me I think it comes from growing up in an alcoholic family, it was my way of dealing with difficult situations. I shut down from reality, and it was easier for me to not deal with shades of grey.

Do you really think cognitive-behavioural therapy is the best treatment? Just curious as I’ve had a lot of psychodynamic therapy (years of it), it’s really helped me but I have a very good relationship with my therapist. However, I do feel a bit stuck now, but I tried cognitive therapy and it didn’t feel right, but think that was more down to the therapist.

Anyway, I love the site btw, am studying psychology and the work you have on here is really interesting, I have spent a lot of time reading your articles on not getting involved with the wrong people… some of it may sink-in eventually.

I was glad to read your post and remind myself that although these clients present an enormous and exhausting challenge for me, I still need to maintain hope that they have the capacity to grow.

I’m sensitive to your concern about what appeared to you to be evidence of a lack of compassion and therapy know-how. When I was first exposed to the principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy for the treatment of character disturbance, I actually had a negative reaction myself. First, I thought the approach was cold and heartless because it was so focused on thinking patterns and behavior and appeared insensitive to feelings and emotional underpinnings. But it didn’t take me that long to recognize how much I had misunderstood the paradigm. It also became very clear to me eventually that individuals who unfortunately suffered from severe disturbances of character didn’t get any better with traditional insight-oriented or any of the other more traditional psychotherapeutic approaches. Moreover, the people in relationships with them continued to suffer and to solidify hostile attitudes toward them. It appeared a lose-lose situations. Besides, the dirty little secret in the “helping” business is that a lot of well-meaning and sensitive therapists pretty much wrote off people with character disturbance as people who couldn’t change and that the best we can do is to learn to tolerate and at least contain them and then complain behind their backs about what a pain they were to deal with. I couldn’t accept that.

After I adopted the approach that the last 20 years of research has validated over and over again as superior to other approaches, I began to change my attitude dramatically, not so much because the new approach was comfortable for me, but because my patients and those in relationships with them began to experience better lives. So, I’m forever calling attention to well-researched patterns of thinking and patterns of behavior that contribute to arrested or impaired character development. These are the things – among others – that I have written and posted about for many years and which I invite you to become more familiar with in their entirety. I have experience with literally thousands of individuals who have made significant changes not only their thinking and behavior patterns, but also their very characters in the process. I am always impressed by a human being’s capacity to LEARN and change.