Minorities and Mental Health

So my favorite color combination is black and white.  White House | Black Market, Ebony and Ivory, checkerboard prints, dalmatians, that really great scene in My Fair Lady, mimes… ok maybe not mimes.

The point being, I have a really hard time getting to gray. I do often see things as good or evil, right or wrong, true or false, love or hate. Only recently, when my therapist casually mentioned that seeing things as only black or white is an immature way to look at the world (in his defense I’d not yet shared with him my attachment to those contrasting colors) that I started to rethink this view.

See I’d always figured that it is best to simplify whenever possible. Things go much smoother if everything is 1s or 0s, and heck knows I’d be perfectly content to live my life in binary code. But, I’m not that lucky. I live in a world where grey is the new black and I’m one season behind the trends.

Dr. Charles H. Elliott wrote this great post on Anxiety & OCD Exposed, one of PsychCentral’s blogs, about just this topic and includes a technique for dealing with it. Often those who see the world as black or white feel that being right is all that matters:

When potential for conflict or disagreement arises, anxiety may cause you to think you must “win” the argument. And if you don’t win, you obviously must lose.

Unfortunately, such thinking makes you seem defensive in response to criticism and overly aggressive when you need to be critical of someone else.

I can do gray… I can do middle ground… “It’s not that you’re wrong and I’m right. You’re right, I’m just more right.” Hmm, I have a feeling I still have a way to go on this one.