Seeing people and situations in black and white — all good or all bad, with you or against you — usually isn’t conviction. It’s often just an old habit of not knowing how to sit with disagreement without treating it as a threat.
My father saw the world in two colours. Right or wrong, with him or against him, nothing in between. I grew up thinking that was just what conviction looked like, and for a long time, I built myself the same way.
In practice, that meant friendships ran on a kind of test I never told anyone I was administering. If someone didn’t react the way I’d expected — didn’t take my side fast enough, didn’t apologise the way I needed them to, said something that landed wrong — I got hurt, and getting hurt usually meant the friendship was over. Not always with a dramatic ending. Sometimes just a quiet drifting that I told myself was mutual but wasn’t really. I lost people that way. Good people, looking back, who probably just had a different way of seeing whatever the disagreement was about.
I don’t think I was unkind to be around, exactly. I just hadn’t learned to pause before reacting, hadn’t learned that someone disagreeing with me wasn’t the same as someone being against me. My father never learned that either, as far as I know. He stayed black and white his whole life. I didn’t want that to be true of me too, even if I didn’t yet know how to change it.
Where the Test Actually Came From
Looking back, I think the test wasn’t really about the other person at all. It was about certainty. Black and white thinking removes the uncomfortable work of sitting with someone whose reaction you didn’t expect and not immediately knowing what it means. If someone’s response fits neatly into “on my side” or “against me,” there’s nothing left to sit with. The discomfort resolves itself instantly, which is exactly the appeal, and exactly the problem.
My father, I think, needed that certainty for his own reasons I never fully understood and probably never will now. I inherited the pattern without inheriting the reason behind it, which meant I was administering a test I couldn’t even explain to myself if someone had asked.
I’ve noticed this same pattern in other people since, once I knew what to look for. It rarely announces itself as rigidity. It usually shows up dressed as strong values, as loyalty, as someone who “just knows what they believe.” Those things can be genuine. But there’s a difference between a value you’ve actually examined and a reflex you’ve simply never questioned, and from the inside they can feel identical. I couldn’t tell them apart in myself for years.
The Overcorrection
Eventually, when friendships started feeling too complicated to manage on my own, I went to therapy. I learned to pause. I learned that there’s usually more behind someone’s reaction than what’s visible on the surface — a private stress, an old wound, something with nothing to do with me at all.
But I took the lesson too far in the other direction. From sharp edges, I went straight to smoothing every edge I had. I became the kind of person who softened herself to keep any peace at all, who’d rather absorb a small hurt than risk a single moment of friction. I’d swapped one extreme for another and called it growth, when really it was just a different way of avoiding the same discomfort — disagreement, the possibility that someone might be upset with me.
I didn’t recognise the overcorrection for what it was for a long time, mostly because it looked so much like the compassion I was actually trying to build. Being endlessly understanding of everyone else’s reactions felt virtuous. It took me a while to notice that I’d simply moved the goalposts of the same old test — instead of “are you completely with me,” it became “am I completely accommodating you,” and I was still administering it just as rigidly, just aimed in the opposite direction.
A specific memory sticks with me from that era. A friend said something that genuinely hurt me, and instead of saying so, I told her it was fine, then spent the next three days quietly rehearsing the conversation I never had. She never knew anything was wrong. I told myself I was being generous, giving her the benefit of the doubt, not making a big deal out of nothing. In reality I was just as unable to tolerate the discomfort of an honest exchange as I’d been unable to tolerate disagreement in my black-and-white years — I’d just found a quieter way to avoid it.
Where I’ve Landed Now
These days, I speak up. Kindly, but I speak up. I don’t burn things down the way I sometimes did in my twenties, and I don’t disappear into appeasement the way I did for a long stretch after that either. I’ve found something closer to the actual middle — protecting what matters to me without needing to flatten the other person to do it.
I wish it hadn’t taken this long. But I don’t think it could have gone any faster, not for me. Some of this only comes from enough years of getting it wrong in both directions to finally notice the pattern.
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What Actually Changed, Practically
It wasn’t a single insight that shifted this so much as a habit I built slowly, mostly around timing. I used to respond in the moment, whichever direction that moment happened to pull me — sharp or overly soft, depending on which era of myself was doing the reacting. Now I try to let a beat pass before I answer anything that’s stung, even just the length of a walk with the dogs or a night’s sleep. Almost nothing that felt urgent to address immediately actually needed to be. The urgency was mine, not the situation’s.
I also started separating two questions I used to collapse into one: what actually happened, and what I’ve decided it means. A friend cancelling plans is a fact. “She doesn’t value our friendship” is a story I built on top of the fact, usually before I had any actual evidence for it. Learning to notice the gap between those two things — fact versus story — did more for me than almost anything else in this whole slow shift.
The pause itself took longer to build than I expected. For the first year or so it wasn’t automatic at all — I had to consciously catch myself mid-reaction and physically stop, sometimes literally putting my phone down before I’d typed a reply. It felt clumsy and deliberate in a way that didn’t match the instant, natural-feeling reactions I was used to having. Eventually the pause got faster, then eventually it stopped needing to be a decision at all. But that took years, not weeks, and I think it’s worth saying plainly, because most advice on this makes it sound quicker than it actually is.
What I’d Tell Someone Still in the Black-and-White Years
If I could say one thing to my younger self, it would be to pause before reacting — just one real breath before speaking or acting, long enough to actually notice the urge instead of obeying it. To assume there’s more going on with someone than what you can see from the outside, because there almost always is — a point giving the benefit of the doubt goes into more fully. To remember that disagreement isn’t the same as dislike, and that someone can push back on you and still genuinely care about you. To protect your own boundaries without needing to be hostile about it — speaking up and tearing someone down are not the same skill, even though they can feel like they come from the same place. And to choose compassion even when it’s hard, which doesn’t mean letting people walk over you. It means letting them be human, the same imperfect way you’d want to be allowed to be.
This is closely related to what I’ve since learned about protecting friendships without over-giving — the black-and-white years and the over-accommodating years turned out to be two sides of the same underlying problem: not trusting a relationship to survive an honest, ordinary moment of friction.
Bringing Colour to the Grey
Life isn’t black and white. It isn’t even just grey, once you actually look closely. With enough kindness and enough patience, the grey starts to take on colour — odd, specific, unexpected shades that make everything more textured than the simple version ever was.
I think about this differently now when I see it in other people, too — a friend’s sharp reaction, a family member who seems to need everything to be settled and certain. I used to read that as a character flaw. Now I mostly read it as the same thing it was in me: a way of managing discomfort that never got questioned. That reframe doesn’t excuse anything. It just makes the person a little easier to be patient with, the way I’d have wanted someone to be patient with me.
Black and white feels safer, I understand why my father preferred it. But the real richness was always going to be in the in-between, in the part that takes longer to see and longer still to learn to live inside of.
A Few Things Worth Knowing
People sometimes ask how to actually tell the difference between healthy boundary-setting and slipping back into the old black-and-white pattern. For me, the tell is whether I’m reacting to what actually happened or to a story I’ve already built about what it means. The first deserves a response. The second usually just needs a pause.
I’m also asked whether the overcorrection phase was a wasted stretch of years, looking back. I don’t think so, honestly. I needed to fully feel what “too soft” cost me before the actual middle ground made any sense. Skipping straight from one extreme to balance rarely seems to work — at least it didn’t for me.
And people ask if this pattern ever fully goes away. Not entirely, in my experience. The old instinct still surfaces sometimes, especially when I’m tired or already stretched thin. What’s changed is how quickly I notice it now, and how much sooner I can choose a different response than I used to.
People sometimes ask whether growing up with a black-and-white parent guarantees you’ll end up the same way. I don’t think it’s guaranteed, but I do think it’s worth watching for, precisely because the pattern feels so natural from the inside that you may not notice you’ve inherited it until someone or something forces the question.
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