Thinking in Extremes

     My therapist brought something to my attention this week in our session, and I'm still struggling with it. It's called thinking in extremes, and it's the reason that my anxiety gets the best of me. Apparently it's a pretty common thing when you live with OCD (or other anxiety disorders) along with the doubt and the need for certainty, but according to my therapist, it's a thing that can happen whether or not a person has a diagnosable mental health condition.
     What I mean when I say thinking in extremes is seeing the world (or whatever issue you're dealing with at the moment) in only black and white with no gray area. In my case it's seeing something only as good or bad, and by something I mean myself. I would label certain thoughts I would have as bad, and since I had those thoughts, I was also bad. I also classified emotion in this way. Anger and sadness were bad, so I must never feel those. In regard to my OCD thoughts and my anxiety I would often go to the extreme in thinking that I was never going to get well again, and that I was always going to feel as awful as I felt in that moment. (I still struggle with the last example in particular.) Basically, thinking in extremes is an unhealthy thinking pattern.
     Most of the time, I only tend to go into thinking in extremes when I'm already experiencing an elevated level of anxiety, and when I go into the extreme thinking pattern, my extreme thoughts always revolve around the OCD worry that I have that I'm really a terrible, possibly intrinsically evil person. Do you know what happens when I think in extremes? I get even more anxious, and then I cry...a lot. This happened yesterday. I had a thought (a completely normal thought that I've had before), and I wasn't proud of the thought, even though it was a completely human thought. I went to the extreme, and I felt like I was a terrible person.
     My therapist and I are working on separating my thoughts so that I can develop healthier thinking styles. At the moment, I just have to label my thoughts as extreme and/or OCD thoughts. My therapist is also working with me so that I can be okay with a gray area instead of insisting on certainty or thinking that to be good I can only live life strictly in the "white" area of things. I shouldn't feel guilty if I can't be all good, 100% of the time. It's impossible to live that way. We all have a shadow self. Life is full of uncertainty and the "gray area". Nothing is ever just black and white, and no person is only good or only bad, like my OCD and extreme thinking patterns would have me believe when my anxious brain chimes in.
     I'll end with this: Thinking in extremes is a harmful thinking pattern that has definitely added to my anxiety, and changing that thought pattern takes more time and effort than I thought it would. A gray area of uncertainty does exist in life, and it's impossible to live an all black or an all white life in a world full of all kinds of different shades of gray. Life is on a spectrum of good or bad, and it's okay to slip into the middle sometimes because we are human, and we don't all always make the best choices. They gray area isn't the end of the world, or at least I don't think it would be if I could find a gray area to categorize my thoughts into. (I'm working on that...")