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All or Nothing: Dichotomous Thinking

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Borderlines are certainly not the only ones who practice dichotomous thinking,  and yet the second website popping up on a Google search on the topic is one on Borderline Personality Disorder and dichotomous thinking.  Most simply put, this way of thinking looks like this:

• black or white
• good or bad
• all or nothing

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I believe that this type of thinking pattern is completely entrenched in Judeo-Christian traditions.  Seems obvious to me!  And yet our culture finds its way into our growing infant-child brain so that we seldom question what the basis of our thinking is or where it comes from.

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I need to remind myself of this as I work with my quarter-century old journals.  It seems a pattern for me to think dichotomously, and then assign blame, guilt, shame and other toxic labels to the simple facts of what went on ‘back then’.  I was not the bad guy, nor was my husband.  I was just thinking back, and remembered how I found out in January 1985 as our divorce was finalizing that he had been seeing another woman (nine years his junior and eight years mine) for three years, starting winter 1981-1982.

What I might call my indiscretions – and what others might see as my indiscretions, tended to be out-front, blatant and obvious.  I never had one single clue for those three years he was ‘seeing’ another woman that this was going on.  It had progressed to the point where he brought her home to his mother and father’s house, introduced her to his family – all the while nobody ever said a thing to me, and I did not know.  Not consciously, anyway.

Supposedly his indiscretion didn’t matter and didn’t count because they ‘controlled themselves’ and did not have intercourse.  Give me a break.  They met in 12-Step meetings, and their relationship evidently flourished.  They married shortly after my husband and I divorced, and are still married.  That relationship wasn’t a fling in the park, and all honesty would have made sure I at least knew they were involved.  I could say “So much for ‘working an honest program’.”  Oh, I guess I just DID say it.

I found out when I received a telephone call from my small-town neighbor, also an Al-Anon member, who told me the facts 3 days before our divorce was final.

“Everyone in town knows,” this lady told me.  “I thought you should know, too, in case you don’t.”  I didn’t.

(More to this story will be told when I get to the 1984-1985 journals.)

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I realized that demonizing and angelizing was something my mother was a professional at.  She was an expert in dichotomous thinking.  Of course I was immersed in an environment thick with it, both in my home and in my culture.  But I do not want to think that way now if I can catch myself and stop it so that I can take another course in my thoughts.

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I am also thinking about how the signs of the endings of all my relationships were present in their beginnings.

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