Is "all-or-nothing thinking" common for aspergers?

Post Reply New Topic

Are you afraid that people may judge you from first impressions or some things you think you might do wrong? It was big problem for me during situations when socializing was needed. My psychologist used to say there will be certain situations where you might get negative reactions but you must learn how to deal with it and keep up the positive attitude. It discouraged me and I thought there's no point in doing anything if you're not 100% sure of success. A couple of years passed now and I think I'm starting to understand what she meant, getting to know people boosts your confidence and these smaller things that used to offend or make you mad don't impact you anymore and aren't so striking.

I loathe job interviews with every quark in my being, so I just skip the coffee and learn as much about the companies du jour as I can; helps me more with my own coding projects than it does with more interviews

_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos

My counselor said that it is common.

I call it black and white thinking, and yes. I thought like that until I started observing the way that people interact with annoying people. Most of the time, they don't get shunned. Don't try behaving like that just because you think you can, but don't sweat the small stuff, either.

Lots of people on the spectrum apply that way of thinking in many other areas of their lives, too. Just look around the site, and you can see examples of people who struggle with it, and other examples of people who have given up fighting it altogether.

Black or white thinking is VERY common, its one of the things that my psychologist noticed in me and made him think about aspergers,

yes, definitely...black and white thinking is very common with AS people
I see things in all or nothing, wrong or right, yes or no

One more thing, and I've thought about this a lot lately, so I may go into it more by starting another thread:

What correlation would you expect to find between a person's overall success and the number of times he or she has failed at something?

In fact, people who have studied this find a strong positive correlation. The most successful people have failed and failed and failed at many things. People who won't risk failure also don't attain high levels of overall success.

I used to look at the world in black and white. Over the years, the world has shown me(sometimes painfully) that it's mostly shades of grey, and the cosmos is largely indifferent to my existence.

My husband has black and white thinking down to a mad science.

Black and white thinking is how children think. Good. Bad. Friend. Foe.

It isn't until you hit around early adulthood, you realize life is more a vicious, variable shades of gray.

DH wants B&W thinking to work all the time. He wants order and logic to reign supreme. Dealing with human emotions and social situations, that s**t goes out the window. It frustrates him to no end.

I read everywhere it is very common. An interesting thing is that I didn't really thought it applied to me until I got my diagnosis and gave a second thought to some comments some other people made.

I don't think I think in "black and white" about other people. In fact I try to be as non-judgemental as possible about people and social phenomenoms and I often find comments by other people to be biased and simplistic. Probably I used to be much more simplistic and judgemental myself, but studying cognitive science and some psychology changed a lot my approach of human beings, and now I try to understand the behaviours, thoughts and reactions in a less moralistic and more analytical way.

However, as far as my own behaviours and goals are concerned, I can be very perfectionist and exigent. But the thing is that it does not feel like perfectionism. It is just that my goals are the one I set to myself, they are representative of my personal freedom and choices, and I have trouble thinking of not achieving them as anything but a failure. For example, I want to succeed in my work as an academic. Not because someone told me so or I have any external pressure for that, but I am certain at the moment that it is the best thing for me. It is a quite difficult path (not really because of my aspieness, in fact the academic world is probably one of the most aspie-friendly work environments, but just because there are many people and few positions) but if I gave up and did something easier it would probably make me depressed. Things can change of course, maybe I will change my mind about my job later and then I will want to do something else, but right now it is very clear.

I have only recently realized that most NT people do not cling to personal goals like that. Most of them will just do what they can, switch goals like shirts, and give it no further thinking. The ones who do cling to goals usually do it because they were conditioned by their family or social environment (someone convinced them that they absolutely had to be a doctor, or an engineer, or to earn lots of money, or to have a steady job, or whatever). This was the cause of many communication failures between myself and my social environment about those things.