My father, a lifelong black and white thinker, lamented on his death bed that he had not seen and appreciated all the colors and gradations of human experience.  “I think how much richer my life would have been,” he mused in a voice that was near the end.

I did not at that moment have any feeling besides sympathy for him as he went.  It was one of those times when everything aligned correctly and we were able to finally have the conversation he had never been capable of.  It’s not clear how much of a long-term blessing it was for me, though it felt enormous at the time.  I’m sure it was a blessing to him, to be able to unburden himself to a life-long adversary he’d created, a suddenly former adversary who was now gently helping him go.  

I think of my father first whenever I hear the term Black and White Thinking.  Those words are on a sheet the CBT therapist gave me during the last session.  Ten ways people suffer and ten ways each form of, what is essentially deleterious cognition, can be changed for the better by properly reframing them.  I don’t know how much faith I have in this whole system, though the value of going to this session every week, working myself out of my torpor, seems beyond question.   I face many obstacles in a possibly impossible undertaking I have staked everything on, but I am facing them one at a time again.  Waiting for the mapped redesigned website to load at wehearyou.net so I can return to my marketing and networking efforts.

My father’s black and white thinking arose from the facts of the world he was born into.  His mother hated his father.  She had done her duty with him and eight or nine months later their first child was stillborn.   She lay with him again.   The second child, my father, was a huge baby.  She was a tiny, furious woman.  She cursed him before she even saw him.   Once he could stand she began whipping him in the face for what felt to her like a baby’s defiance.  

I have to get in the shower and down to my session in a moment, but I leave you with this excellent TED talk I heard last night.  It was about the long-term changes in a human mind and body produced by childhood trauma.  The chemicals that are available to us in a moment of danger, things that give you a surge of strength and concentration to fight or flee, constantly flood the child who must be on guard against, say, a whip in the face from mom.   This does damage that is hardwired into the human body.   Listen to this pediatrician.  The talk is fifteen minutes long and well worth your time.