Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends. Welcome to the first podcast of 2022! 

I’m so excited that you are joining me for another year of podcasting. 2021 was the first full year of podcasts. This podcast isn’t seasonal, meaning, we don’t really stop and take breaks- or at least scheduled breaks. I took a few weeks off in October for my health, but really it’s week after week of content that I love sharing with you all. And we are ready to roll into a new year, and I am so excited. 

In a few weeks, I am going to start sending out come more information about my group coaching program. It’s been tweaked and revamped and I’m really excited to bring it to you for more, really I’m designing it for more access to people. Coaching, I’ve found, for many people can seem much like a luxury- which, I completely understand. So, my goal with this next iteration of my group coaching is to make it more accessible to individuals that want that change, they want to feel better, but maybe don’t have or don’t feel like they have the financial resources to accommodate investing a couple thousand dollars. 

So, if you’re interested in learning more, get on my email list. To do that, you can go to my website, www.ivfthiscoaching.com and sign up to take my managing anxiety mini-course, there is also a link to get the mini-course on my SM bio’s. But the email will be how I communicate with everyone about when the group coaching program will start, etc.

Alright, let’s get into todays topic. 

This is something that I have spoken to every single one of my clients about, I have made several SM posts about this, it is something that is so prevalent yet it is so, I would call it insidious. Like if you were to think about it, it doesn’t seem link it would be a bad thing, not a bad thing, but it doesn’t seem like it would cause a lot of problems- but holy crap this type of thinking creates so damn much suffering. Like very much a root of suffering for every human in the world. And as with everything that I do on this podcast and my work, I like for us to become aware. 

We can’t fix what we don’t see and we won’t see what we don’t look at. So The goal for today is to show you how black and white thinking is so much of HOW we think about things and that embracing the grey area’s of life will actually open up your heart and your life and ultimately, how you experience infertility and IVF. 

So, let’s start with the first question: What is black and white thinking?

Black and white thinking is thinking in extremes. It’s thinking when everything is either one thing or the opposite. So black and white thinking is like things are good or bad, things are healthy or unhealthy, foods are healthy or unhealthy, emotions are healthy or unhealthy, relationships are health or unhealthy. 

Things are wonderful or things are terrible, things are right or things are wrong. In black and white thinking, there’s only every two choices. You’re on the wagon, you’re off the wagon, you’re right, the other person’s wrong. If they’re right, then you’re wrong. 

People are either on your side or they’re against you, things are either fair or unfair. Black and white thinking is characterized by pairs of opposites. It can also show up in a less obvious way as believing that there are only two choices. 

I’ve probably talked about it several times in the podcast but this is how our brains make sense of the world. Things are good/bad, right/wrong, black/ white. 

When we are looking at some kind of problem, whatever it is, we’re trying to understand why someone else is behaving the way they are, or what we can do about a situation in our life, and we tell ourselves there’s only two choices. That’s actually black and white thinking. It also comes up in thought patterns like I can only win or lose. One person wins, one person loses. I can only do one of these two things. I can’t have an amazing career and be an amazing mom. Can only be one. Or if you’re in a power struggle with someone, you both want different things, it’s sort of like, well, either I get my way or they get their way. Those are the only two options.

And I’m gonna be straight with you guys. Black and white thinking has ruled SEVERAL aspects of my life throughout my career and personal endeavors. Honestly, my second masters degree was a product of black or white thinking. I truly believed that if I didn’t get a business-type degree then I was relegated to stay in Social Work or hospital case management for the duration of my professional life. That was it, in my mind those were the only two options. Now, I do not regret getting that degree. It really forced me out of my comfort zone and I don’t believe that education is a waste, EVER. But that decision was born out of black or white thinking. 

For our family, I was either going to be pregnant and happy or I was going to not be pregnant or have children and be miserable- I think all of us can relate to that. Like those were the only two options. Of course, before I got pregnant with my oldest, I didn’t know about the type of thought work that I know now, and that RELLY important to know. We don’t know what we don’t know. I genuinely thought those were my only two options. There was no halfway. Pregnant/baby= happy not pregnant/no baby=misery.

When it got to the point we were really looking at fertility treatments, I was convinced that the ONLY option for us was IVF. If we want another baby we HAVE to do IVF. Now notice this wasn’t an either/ or statement and that’s what makes this so tricky to identify. Black and white thinking is always tied with should’s and have to’s.

Think about even something like weight loss- well, If I want to lose weight then I need to/ have to … and it’s usually something really extreme. Deprivation, running 5 miles per day, spending hours at the gym. Something like that. 

To our brains- everything is a dichotomy. To our brains, there is no nuance. There is no grey. 

Even, in the infertility community there is this black or white thinking. It kind of feeds into this tribalism, this tribal mentality that every human has evolved to seek out. When we have a group of likeminded, similarly challenged individuals who share the same values, expectations, frustrations, and pain, then anyone that we see as outside of the groups is an “outsider”. 

Now there is certainly nothing malicious or wrong about this, not at all. There is a comradery amongst people with a shared grief experience. But it CAN, not saying always, but it CAN highlight and emphasize the level of isolation that many of us feel and experience. 

Like we can put the women who can get knocked up folding underwear and each baby of thiers that implants they bring home 10 months later, as the cultural norm, then we are obviously, kind of expectedly, going to feel like WE are the outsiders. And then conversely, people who try to relate to us without having that same shared grief experience we might label as well-intentioned, but they just don’t get it. And again, not saying that’s wrong to think or believe or even objectively incorrect, but just that thinking feeds that narrative of isolation. 

Anytime we belong to a group, any group, we tend to gloss over or we don’t see the shortcomings of our own side, our own group that we’re in, our in group, and when we look at the out group, we only see the shortcomings. And we have very exaggerated characteristics, exaggerated ideas of them that are in opposition to our ideas about ourselves. This is absolutely human nature. 

So if it causes so much suffering, then why the hell do we use so much black and white thinking, you might ask. Well, that’s because it gives us the illusion of certainty. If you remember back to the episode on the motivational triad, our brains are designed to avoid pain, seek pleasure, and be as efficient as possible. Gray areas do not feel certain. They can feel dangerous, which strikes at the heart of pleasure and pain. They are not cut and dry, like black and white thinking is so it is less efficient when you have to navigate nuance. Black and white thinking is simple and efficient. It doesn’t have to waste energy with examining every possible outcome- even if you do that already. We can have a litany of scenarios that we think about but we get stuck, really stuck when we continue to think there is only one or two options, this or that. The other stuff is like window dressing. 

So, That’s the payoff our brain gets for thinking in those terms- it gets to do the three things it was designed for. This is like your brains shortcut to meeting those three things. And then to add to it, our brains HATE to be wrong. And for a lot of us, it’s like, if I’m wrong about that thing, then either I’m a bad person or I’m stupid or unworthy, or what else am I wrong about? It’s very destabilizing. Your brain is dealing with so much stimuli and input all the time, it just wants to already know what’s happening and have certainty. Human brains do not like uncertainty 

The illusion of certainty is comforting, it gives you a clear focus for your negative emotions. Humans don’t kind of like to accept the idea that human life involves suffering because we have human brains. And instead, we want to pin the suffering on the bad person, the stupid person, the wrong person, whatever it is. 

We want to be right and good, they’re bad and wrong, they must be what’s causing our suffering. I also think black and white thinking tends to happen particularly in groups or communities because it provides a sense of cohesion and community. So bottom line, black and white thinking is saving your brain labor, keeping you energy efficient in your brain, or your brain thinks it is, giving you the illusion of certainty and stability so you don’t have to reconsider what’s going on all the time. 

So the biggest downside to black and white thinking is something I discussed a little earlier in the podcast, it can create more distance and isolation- especially when we’re going through infertility it just compounds what we might have already been feeling.

But here’s the most important part, when we have black and white thinking, we have no or limited capacity for compassion or acceptance or understanding of those who are different from us. And then we also apply those standards to ourselves. And we are complicated people, so we can almost never live up to our own black and white, good and bad standards. And then we have to judge ourselves all the time. 

So when we have black and white thinking patterns, we’re more likely to see ourselves as not good enough, as bad people, as failures, and we interpret everything in our lives and our own stories through that lens. We don’t see the complexity and nuance. We just see whether we’ve won or lost or succeeded or failed in this very black and white way. And that makes us much less resilient and more prone to judgment, and superiority thinking about other people. 

It keeps us locked into old limiting belief patterns and just a perpetual cycle of mixed emotions. 

So here’s an example from one of my clients. She’s experiencing secondary infertility. Her daughter is about 2 and they’ve gone through 2 rounds of IVF and have 1 blast that they are planning to transfer in a couple of months. She has a pretty strained relationship with her family, her words, but feels a lot of obligation particularly around the holidays. Within her family, her husband and their daughter, they have chosen to be pretty strict with COVID rules so this has provided some relief around being in close physical proximity of her family, which has it’s good and bad, right, just like all of life. She went through a really big rough patch with her family following her first round of IVF as it wasn’t successful. She felt they were not supportive, dismissed her pain, and would typically ask invasive questions like, “are you sure he’s finishing inside of you.” I think we can all agree that’s pretty cringe. But she didn’t want to scut them off or anything but be very cautious around her interactions with them. 

So she said she wanted to share a little holiday greeting, she had gotten her daughter a really cute little holiday outfit and wanted to do a facetime with her family. But she was feeling very nervous about the idea of facetiming that it would open the door for her relatives to ask, what she felt would likely be, inappropriate, insensitive, and invasive questions. So when we were coaching, she was AGONIZING over “having” to do the facetime. She was so resistant to it, even getting like preemptively angry at her family for past conversations, and for potential future conversations- right all of these things are very human things to do. But she couldn’t see past facetiming or no facetiming as her only options. So we started by processing the feelings she was experiencing- resistance, resentment, anger and we got down to the feeling of sadness. She was sad that she didn’t feel like she could just setup a facetime call with her family and not be subjected to the Spanish inquisition. So once she was able to see what it was she was actually feeling, sadness from familial disconnection, then we started talking about other options. And after a minute or so, I want to make sure you can understand how quickly it happened after we processed her emotions, after about a minute she said. Well, I could probably just record the holiday greeting and text it out to my family. And this was such a brilliant alternative. Because then she got the control. She could choose to respond or not, should family have any questions or make any comments. And then, from that place of emotional distance and more of a grey area, she even acknowledged that their questions probably come from a place of care and concern, but not presented all that well.  

So because she was able allow those emotions to process, she was able to better see other options/ alternatives AND, most importantly, access compassion for herself and her family. 

And I think this is such a beautiful example of our ability to hold space for ourselves, others, and to think creatively when we take a step back, process those emotions, and allow our logic brain to help us- instead of automatically reacting to our primitive brain. 

So this week, when you feel like you are caught between a rock and a hard place, when you feel like you are out of options, when you feel alone and isolated- give yourself the gift of pausing. 

Notice the should, have to’s, need to’s, notice if you’ve made an me against them scenario, just notice it. Remind yourself that you are not in physical danger (most likely) and allow yourself to feel scared, or angry, or anxious- without judgement. You’re feeling that way for a reason, your body is telling you something, your brain is telling you something. The feeling will not hurt you, lean into it. Once you’re not overwhelmed by the emotion, you get can THEN begin thinking about alternatives. But the feelings HAVE to come first. When you’re in the throes of an emotion, cognitive processes are incredibly difficult to access- so the feelings have to come first. 

Ok, that’s is that I have for you today. Have a great week and I will talk to you soon.