Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You
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Why Bother Living if the Future is Filled with Pain? | Trauma Ep. 3
In the third episode of Trauma: Your Lord Has Not Forsaken You, Najwa Awad, LSCW-C defines "black and white thinking", describes why it is harmful, and offers tips on how to overcome it.
Discover more helpful tips on overcoming grief through Sarah Sultan and Najwa Awad's paper, "Why Bother Living if the Future is Filled with Pain? Reclaiming Our Thoughts".
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. As-salamu alaykum, Najwa Awad here from Yaqeen Institute. Today we're going to be talking about black and white thinking. The crossroads where trauma and the will to want to keep going intersect for some people once in their lifetime and for others many times throughout their life. When you're faced with unbearable pain, you might be wondering, how much longer can I hold on? How much longer is it before I'm going to get relief? Why bother living if my life is going to be filled with pain? When we start to have these really difficult feelings, we start to engage in an unhealthy way of thinking called black and white thinking. Black and white thinking is when we develop polarized views about the world. It can be about people, ideas, religion, or just anything. When we are younger, it's very normal for us to look at the world in black and white. It's just a development thing that everybody has to go through. Some adults, however, have a harder time going out of this as they get older. We live in a very pain-averse society. That pain is something that we need to get rid of immediately and at all costs. But really pain is where the gray is in between black and white thinking. For example, if you just got married to somebody and things are not going off, things are not going as expected in the first few months. Someone with black and white thinking might be like, you know what? This is not worth it. This is not good for me. I'm just going to end the marriage. But that gray, that tolerance for feeling uncomfortable and some of that mild pain is where the growth can be. So while pain should not be self-inflicted, that's where growth and opportunity is. Another common example is someone who might be a very good student in high school and then they go to college and then now they're doing really poorly. Someone with black and white thinking might think, well, this is not for me. College is just, I can't do it.
It's too hard. Whereas if they can tolerate some of that discomfort, that's where the opportunity for growth can be. This is not as easy as I expected it, but if I keep working on it, then I can become a good student and get to where I would like to be. So we can shift the idea of why is life worth living if we're going to have pain to how can I take my pain, something that I didn't necessarily want, but how can I take that and make my life worth living? How can I take these negative experiences and not look at it from a black and white perspective, but look at it from the gray? So you can take those negative things that are happening to you and cultivate them and turn them into things that can propel you forward. Reframing is one of the most powerful tools in psychology. It's not to say that your pain doesn't hurt you or that it's not taking a toll on you, but it's taking that pain and looking at it from an alternative perspective and saying, what can I learn from this experience? How can I take what's happening to me and grow from the experience and help the people around me in some kind of way? When you reframe your problem, you are taking ownership of it and that's where you get your power and your control. You're saying that I cannot necessarily control the negative things that are happening to me, but I can control how I react to it and that can make a huge difference. For more insights and tools on black and white thinking, check out this article on yaqeeninstitute.org.
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