Companion essay, based on the transcript
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Today I’m going to talk about a particular cognitive pattern that shows up in a lot of ROGD families: black-and-white thinking. It’s an invisible thread that connects procrastination, emotional meltdowns, identity rigidity, family conflict, and the inability to plan ahead. It tends to run the show until parents learn to recognize it and respond strategically.
Black-and-white thinking is the tendency to see everything in terms of two mutually exclusive categories: good or bad, all or nothing, perfect or ruined, success or failure. There’s no middle ground, no good enough, no partial credit. Every adolescent has some of this; it’s part of the developmental package. The brain’s prefrontal cortex, which handles nuance and context, isn’t fully online yet. But in kids with ADHD, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or anxiety, the pattern is amplified, and of course, all of these conditions are highly comorbid with gender identity issues. These kids don’t just occasionally think in extremes; they tend to have their entire operating system running on a binary.
In practice, it might look like this. Tomorrow, you have a family trip planned, and your kid who’s away at college is supposed to join you. You’ve bought their plane ticket, but they’re behind on homework. Instead of thinking, “I’ll do some homework tonight and some on the plane, and a little while we’re there, and eventually it’ll all get done,” they think, “I’m behind on everything, so I can’t go on the trip.” Now, of course, the fact that you’ve paid for it and they’re accustomed to taking you for granted is going to factor in here. But the homework and the trip exist in separate all-or-nothing categories; they can’t hold both at once.
Another example: your child is in a bad mood. Instead of thinking, “I’m in a bad mood, but I can still pack my bag and get in the car,” they think, “I’m in a bad mood, so the day is over. I can’t do anything.” This is also known as emotional reasoning; the bad mood becomes a total state that governs everything.
And here is the big one. Your child feels uncomfortable in their body. Don’t we all, especially in adolescence? But instead of thinking, “Lots of teenagers feel weird in their bodies. I just developed these new physical characteristics. This feeling will evolve as I grow up over time,” they think, “I feel wrong in my body, therefore something is fundamentally wrong with my body, therefore I need to change my body.” The discomfort gets routed through the all-or-nothing filter, combined with current cultural narratives, and comes out the other side as a fixed, absolute conclusion.
Now, screens make this worse. Most of the kids I get to know in my practice, through their parents of course, have access to screens that far exceed what their brains can handle. And this isn’t just a distraction problem; it’s a self-regulation problem. When a child reaches for their phone or computer the moment they feel bored, anxious, frustrated, or sad, they’re using the screen as a quasi self-regulation tool. The dopamine hit numbs the uncomfortable feeling. The discomfort goes away temporarily, but the child never learns to sit with the discomfort, tolerate it, and understand what their feelings and sensations are telling them they need to do for themselves. They don’t develop the internal resources to say, “I feel bad right now, and that’s okay. I can still function.” They don’t learn whether anxiety is telling them that they need to harness their courage to tackle something important, or that they need to move away from something that’s genuinely a threat. Likewise, they don’t learn whether their anger is telling them that an important boundary has truly been violated, or if they’re just feeling hormonal rage. They never learn if their sadness is telling them that they need more close friendship in their life.
It takes time to learn from our feelings. Learning from our feelings, understanding what they mean, what to do with them, and how to communicate them to others is called emotional intelligence. All of this takes time, being present in our lives, being able to communicate with others, and not just numbing out every chance we get.
So excessive screen use creates a vicious cycle with black-and-white thinking. The child feels overwhelmed by anything, reaches for the screen habitually, temporarily feels better, doesn’t address the source of the overwhelm, and doesn’t learn what the feelings are there to tell them. The problem goes unresolved. The source of the anxiety may legitimately get worse. The child feels more overwhelmed and reaches for the screen again. This can even happen with basic things like hunger and thirst signals; kids can become very disconnected from their bodies, quite dissociated, and we know that the brains of trans-identified people show less activity in the regions associated with mind-body connectivity, and that this gets worse with years of hormone use.
The all-or-nothing thinking gets reinforced by this cycle. The only two states are numbed by the screen and completely overwhelmed. There’s no middle territory because they’ve never had to develop their emotional intelligence. But without emotional intelligence, without bodily awareness, without being able to interpret feelings in themselves and others and learn to respond to them, they never learn to connect emotionally with other people, they never learn other ways of regulating themselves, and they don’t get the important messages that their feelings are trying to tell them. This leads to real unhappiness. Chronic states of depression and anxiety can result, because as humans we’re complex creatures, we need things, and our feelings are important indicators of those needs.
This is one of many reasons that I often recommend parents restructure screen access while they still can; in other words, while your kids are still under your care. This isn’t punishment; it’s a developmental necessity. Giving a teenager unregulated access to screens is like giving a candy bin to a toddler. It’s not fair to the child. Just as a toddler cannot be expected to regulate their own candy intake, a teenager cannot be expected to regulate their own screen use. That is an external structure that you as a parent have to provide.
It’s actually quite tragic when parents don’t provide adequate structure, when they give their kids excessive access to the metaphorical candy bin, only to end up complaining and criticizing their kid. This can result in worsened self-esteem for the kid, because they’re constantly hearing expressions of their parents’ dissatisfaction with the choices they’re making. This is one reason that in ROGD Repair I have a whole section on boundaries. It’s actually kind to the child to be clear on what your boundaries and expectations for them are. If you’re constantly dropping hints that you wish they spent less time on their phone, but you’re not actually regulating it, then you’re creating a constant sense of unhappiness in the household for everyone. This is sometimes called emotional punishment, and it’s not fair. Set the expectation, enforce the rule, and do what you need to do to create a happy atmosphere at home.
One of the most powerful things you can do as a parent of a black-and-white thinker is model the alternative. You don’t do this by lecturing about the importance of nuance and talking about how they should think in shades of gray. I have to say, when I was a teenager, my mom constantly criticized my black-and-white thinking, and I remember her talking about shades of gray, and I hated it. She just sounded so wishy-washy, and I thought, “Gray? What an ugly color. You might as well opt for something more colorful if you’re going to challenge the idea of black and white.” My point is that black-and-white thinking is a hallmark trait of adolescence, and you cannot just lecture your kid about thinking in shades of gray or being more nuanced.
The way you actually help them with this is by modeling: in how you think out loud, how you plan things, and how you respond to setbacks. It’s important to remember that the thoughts you speak out loud as a parent become part of your kid’s internal voice. One of the skills I teach parents is thinking out loud. How do you think out loud constructively, in a way that you would actually want your kid to internalize if it were their own thought process?
It also comes up in how you handle problem-solving. If your kid says, “I’m too tired to go,” you don’t argue with their fatigue. You might say, “I bet you’re tired. Let’s plan around that. What if we build in a rest time when we get there? Or what if I get you some coffee on the road? You can be tired and still go. Those two things can coexist.” Another example: when your child says, “I’m in a bad mood, everything sucks,” you don’t try to cheer them up or dismiss the mood. You can say, “Sounds like a rough day. And you know what? Sometimes a change of scenery is actually the best thing when you’re feeling stuck. Let’s get you out of your usual environment. You don’t have to be in a good mood to do something good for yourself.” When your child wants to cancel a commitment because they’re behind on everything, you help them plan backwards: let’s look at what’s actually due, let’s figure out how much time each thing takes, let’s build your obligations into the weekend. You can go on this trip and handle your responsibilities. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
An important thing to note about this skill is that this is how you model and scaffold executive functioning. Planning backwards from a desired outcome is one form of executive functioning, one of many where your skills are probably sharper than theirs. It can help sometimes, as a parent of a teenager or a young adult, to think of your role as more like an executive functioning coach. Each of these interventions serves to break down the binary and introduce a third option that the child’s all-or-nothing brain wasn’t generating on its own. Over time, this kind of modeling can get internalized; the child starts to develop the capacity, however tentatively and imperfectly, to hold two things at once.
Another effective tool for working with black-and-white thinking is parts language. Instead of treating your child as a unified being who feels one way, you talk about parts. For example: “Maybe there’s a part of you that really wants to go on this trip. You miss your family, you’re excited about the food and the festivities. And maybe there’s also a part of you that’s dreading it, because you haven’t figured out how to talk about certain things, and the thought of facing those questions feels overwhelming.”
This does something important neurologically. It takes a monolithic experience and breaks it into components. Now, instead of one feeling that controls the whole system, there are multiple feelings, and the child can choose which one to act on. This is how mature people process ambivalence. They say, “Part of me wants X, part of me wants Y. Both are real. Now let me weigh the pros and cons and decide.” Teenagers don’t think this way naturally, but when you consistently model it, naming both parts and acknowledging what’s valid about each, they start to internalize the framework. And this has implications that go beyond any given example, because the same skill that lets a teenager say, “Part of me wants to go and part of me doesn’t,” is the skill that eventually lets them say, “Part of me wants to identify as trans, and part of me isn’t sure.”
Here’s where this all comes together. The same cognitive pattern that makes your child say, “I’m tired, therefore I can’t do anything,” is the pattern that makes them say, “I feel uncomfortable in my body, therefore I am the wrong sex.” It’s the same cognitive distortion: an all-or-nothing interpretation of an experience that actually has many possible meanings. Body discomfort during adolescence is universal. It is not, in and of itself, evidence of anything other than being a teenager. But through the black-and-white filter, every uncomfortable feeling becomes proof of a fixed condition that requires a drastic solution. “I don’t like my body” doesn’t get processed as, “I’m going through puberty and this is temporarily awkward.” It gets processed as, “Something is fundamentally wrong and needs to be fixed.”
By the way, the statement “I don’t like my body” is in itself a black-and-white statement. Something probably more true is, “There are things I do like about my body and things that I don’t.” So one thing you can do, without making your kid feel self-conscious, is gently amplify and reflect things that show some degree of comfort in their body, whether it’s just being happy that they’re strong enough to score a goal in soccer, or any way that they show comfort or strength in what their body can do. [Don’t do this in ways likely to spark resistance, such as by contradicting them, or pointing out: “see? You’re fine being a girl!”]
This is one of the reasons that working on the black-and-white thinking pattern in general, not just around gender, is so important. Every time you help your child tolerate ambiguity in one domain, you’re building their capacity to tolerate it in other domains. Every time they successfully hold two contradictory feelings at once, they’re developing a skill that will eventually help them hold the contradiction that matters most: “I feel uncomfortable in my body, and that doesn’t mean I need to change it.”
Rigid thinking patterns don’t change overnight. They’re deeply grooved, reinforced by years of practice, often amplified by neurological factors that your child didn’t consciously choose. You’re going to have the same conversations many times. You’re going to model nuance and watch your child default to extremes anyway. But over time, if you’re listening carefully, you may hear parts of this more mature and nuanced way of thinking reflected in their speech. And then you’ll just smile quietly to yourself and bring that small moment of victory to a coaching session or to the forums on ROGD Repair, celebrating those small wins.
That’s the work. And the measure of success isn’t whether the black-and-white thinking disappears overnight, which is itself a black-and-white goal; it may never fully disappear, especially in a neurodivergent brain. The measure of success is whether the extremes become less extreme, whether there are more moments, even brief ones, where your child catches themselves and says, “Okay, maybe it’s not that bad.” Whether the cracks in the all-or-nothing pattern start to widen just enough for a more complex, nuanced, and truthful version of reality to get in.
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This solo episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist doubles as a bonus lesson in ROGD Repair. The transcript-based companion essay can be found in the course and here on Substack. Where this lesson is found in the course, it comes with questions for reflection to help you personalize the material. Get this and 120+ more lessons on parenting gender-confused youth at ROGDrepair.com and use code SUBSTACK to take half off your first month.
