At a glance
All or nothing thinking is what a feeling does with an uncertainty it cannot hold. The verdict about a person, a job or yourself arrives whole, and it arrives faster than any thought could. This article looks at what the flip is protecting, what it costs the people around you, and what makes the middle bearable.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- The feeling turns before the sentence does. Clients describe something moving in the chest first, with the judgement arriving a second later, already finished.
- The grey is the frightening part. When clients manage to hold two views of the same person at once, what they report is often a rise in anxiety rather than relief.
- The harsh side comes home. Clients who sort the world into brilliant and worthless rarely leave themselves on the brilliant side for long.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
What happens in the second before the verdict?
Something moves in the body, and the words that follow are already absolute because the feeling was.
Clients almost always describe the moment physically before they describe it in language. The stomach drops, or the chest tightens, or there is a small cold jolt somewhere under the ribs. By the time there are words, a side has been taken. Hours later the other side returns, usually with shame attached, and the swing itself starts to feel like evidence that you cannot trust your own reading of people.
Arguing with the sentence rarely works, because the sentence was never where it began. This is why so much advice about challenging your thoughts leaves people feeling they have failed at something simple. They are being asked to correct the last step of a sequence that started two steps earlier.
Why can I see the grey on a calm day and not in the moment?
Knowing the middle exists and being able to stand in it are different capacities, and only one of them is about understanding.
On a quiet Tuesday afternoon you know perfectly well that your partner is neither wonderful nor impossible, that your work is neither your calling nor six wasted years. The knowledge is real. It is also thin, and when something stings it goes first.
Staying in the middle asks you to keep caring about someone you are currently furious with, or to want a job you are currently humiliated by. That is not a thinking problem at all. It is a feeling you have to carry without discharging it, and if nobody ever showed you how to do that, the switch does the carrying for you. The verdict is a relief, of a bleak kind, because it ends something that was becoming hard to feel.
Is it my thinking, or how much I can bear not knowing?
In my practice the people who flip hardest are rarely the most rigid ones. They are the ones who cannot leave a question open.
A feeling moves first, usually fear of being dropped or of not being enough. The body registers it before you do. Only then does the language arrive, and the language is absolute. What sits underneath, more reliably than anything else I see, is how hard you find not knowing where you stand.
The evidence I have read points the same way. Across two non-clinical samples, one of 151 students and one of 500 adults, all or nothing thinking tracked with how poorly people tolerated uncertainty rather than with any trait directly.1 Both studies were cross-sectional and self-reported, so they show an association rather than a cause, and the adult sample was narrow in age. It matches the room, though, which is the part I would put weight on.
What is it like to be on the other end of it?
Someone who has been all good knows they can become all bad, and they start managing you to stay on the right side of the line.
This is usually the last part a person hears about, and it arrives from a partner who has run out of patience. Being idealised is pleasant for a fortnight. After that it becomes work, because the person can feel the drop coming and cannot find what triggers it. Some go quiet. Some start editing every sentence. Some provoke the fall deliberately to get it over with.
What you lose is not only their patience. It is their ordinariness. Nobody can be known while they are being graded, and the thing you most want from them, that they stay, becomes the thing they are least able to promise.
What actually helps once it has already flipped?
Slow the verdict down rather than argue with it.
- Catch the body first. The dropped stomach arrives before the sentence and is easier to notice, because it has no argument attached to it.
- Name the feeling before the judgement. Say what moved in you. The verdict loosens once it stops being the only thing in the room.
- Delay the decision, not the feeling. Feel it fully and act on it tomorrow. Most of what the flip demands cannot survive a night.
- Find the second fact. Not a balanced view, which is too much to ask in that state. One true thing that does not fit the verdict.
These help with the swing. They do not touch what makes the middle unbearable in the first place, and if the flip is taking your closest relationships every few weeks, or turns most often on yourself, working on it alone tends to be slow. That part usually goes back further than the relationship you are currently losing patience with, and it is hard to see from inside your own head.
If this is the pattern you keep landing in, you can book a video session from wherever you are, or start with a free 30-minute call to see whether working with me suits you.
Questions people ask
Is this something therapy can work with?
Yes, and it is one of the more workable patterns I meet. The useful work is not correcting the thought but finding what the flip is protecting you from feeling.
Does this work by video, or do I need to be in the room?
Video works well for this, because the material is what happens between sessions rather than in them. You bring the moments where it turned, and we slow them down together.
What kind of therapy suits all or nothing thinking?
Work that goes at the feeling underneath rather than the wording on top. I draw on psychosynthesis, Jung’s analytical psychology and the British school of object relations, which are all concerned with how parts of a person get split off.
Can I come alone if it mostly shows up with my partner?
Yes, and that is often the better place to start. One person looking honestly at their own part of a pattern shifts the pattern more than most couples expect.
What happens in a first session?
You talk, I listen closely and ask about the moments where things turned. Nothing is decided in the first hour, and booking one commits you to nothing further.
If the flip keeps taking your own sense of yourself, online psychotherapy is a place to look at what the middle asks of you, or online couples therapy if it is your relationship that keeps going over the edge.
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Sources
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
