A tendency to think in very black-and-white terms is usually driven by over-emotionality. If you want to make an emotionally appealing speech, you need to talk about good and evil and right and wrong.
Trouble is, life isn’t always that simple, and being too ‘all or nothing’ about things gets us into psychological problems.
Take self-blame, for instance. A person who tends to always blame themselves for everything that goes wrong is missing part of the picture. Strong emotion drives black-and-white extremes of thinking because thought is often driven by emotion. If you are constantly firing off the ‘fight or flight’ response (which is a rather black-and-white survival function in itself), then you are going to think in oversimplified ways.
‘I am totally to blame!’
‘I ruined that relationship’
‘I am such a loser!’
‘I hate myself.’
These are all extreme statements. We need to accept some responsibility for what happens to us, but we also need to understand that we can, at best, only influence events but not control them completely. After all, if a relationship fails, well, there were two people active in that relationship. Self-blame grabs all of the responsibility out of a situation: ‘It’s entirely my fault!’ Never mind that my ex was chronically moody, his or her parents were set against us, we both had huge work pressures, etc. No, all outside factors are ignored as the self-blame takes over.
Notice this!
Self-blamers will often do something else rather interesting. They take all the blame for stuff when it goes wrong, but if the same thing goes well, they don’t correspondingly take the credit. No, the credit for that success goes to others! Talk about biased thinking. So, if the relationship fails it’s all my fault, but if it works it’s because my partner is so understanding, or I’m just ‘lucky’, or the stars are in my favour. All situations have multiple aspects and there are often many reasons for why anything succeeds or fails. Even success and failure are relative. If you were in a good relationship which has now ended, then it was successful for a while.
No wonder self-blame and back-and-white thinking often go hand-in-hand with depression. If you take someone out for the evening and they remain miserable, that is not your fault. Self-blamers would feel that it was totally their fault.
The new hypnosis session Stop blaming yourself from hypnosisdownloads.com will, I hope, help widen such limited perceptions so that automatically blaming yourself (whether because you were always blamed as a child or because you happen to be a black-and-white thinker) becomes a thing of the past. Accept responsibility where it is due – but don’t grab more than your fair share.
Mark
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