Binary or Incremental?
Let’s say that you want something in your life to change, or that you have a problem to solve. Would you be looking for a total fix or incremental change? It would be wise to choose based on your situation. For example, if you decide you need to lose 100 pounds, and have ruled out surgical methods, you will be going for incremental change. Every pound that you lose is a positive step and takes you closer to your ideal state. On the other hand, if you develop lice, you will be satisfied with nothing less than a total fix. Killing 70% of the lice on your body will have little value to you. So, it can be important to know which kind of change you are going for.
A situation calling for a total fix is binary. You either have lice or you don’t; there is no middle ground that is meaningful. But we wouldn’t say that we are either overweight or not overweight. That assessment rests on a continuum. From the perspective of information theory, a binary situation is the simplest one possible, and it can be described with one bit of information, the most basic representation that exists. A bit can indicate either on or off, yes or no, 1 or 0, true or false. But there is not enough information in a bit to give us a sense of where something lies on a continuum. For that we need more information, more nuance, and more sophistication.
Imagine regressing our consciousness back to earlier and earlier states. Eventually we might reach a state where we lack the sophistication to see reality on a continuum. Things are binary; they either “are” or “aren’t.” What if there are parts of us that are so young that they perceive reality in this way? When these parts are operating, and especially when they are blended, we would be seeing reality through that filter as well.
When a child is growing up in an abusive or neglectful environment, they are in need of a total fix. Accepting a treat from their abuser would be an incremental improvement in life that would be insignificant, and it could give the caretakers the message that the situation is acceptable. It could be a better strategy to refuse such tiny changes and hold out for the fix that is necessary, which would be a total overhaul of parenting. Usually, the actual fix is growing up enough to leave the traumatic environment.
Where might this dynamic show up in our lives? One time that I wondered about it was before the 2020 presidential election. Given a choice to vote for Trump or Biden, a fair number of people decided not to vote at all. These folks were quite liberal in their attitudes, but felt that the difference between the Republican and Democratic parties was not significant enough to respond with a vote. At that time I tried to encourage voting by writing something called, “Incremental Change is Pretty Much All the Change You’re Going to Get.” Our prior President, Barack, agrees with that approach, stating, “If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want… I always tell my staff, better is good, because you consolidate your gains and then you move on to the next fight from a stronger position.” But it is hard to overcome the felt binary reality of young parts.
Another common example where extremely young parts view reality through a binary lens is falling in love. Infatuation is a state where young parts see another person as a total fix to the problem of loneliness and isolation. These parts in their binary perspective are the ones who pull the petals off a flower while reciting, “She loves me, she loves me not”; their fantasy is that attracting this person’s love will change our “No” experience of life to the “Yes” of living happily ever after. Their intense focus tends to come from scenes from infancy where the question, “Is mommy there?” is binary and could be a matter of life or death. They tend to feel that the other person is our “soulmate” and the one and only match for us. It is so romantic! If we unblend from those parts, it is pretty obvious that people’s feelings towards us are complex rather than binary, and that entering a relationship will provide incremental change to our lives rather than a shift from “0” to “1.” Note that the extreme opposite of these binary parts would be parts that see relationship as fungible. Sometimes it can be useful to hear their perspective to help unblend from the young parts whose obsession with the other person becomes overwhelming.
Once our young part attaches to the other person, its binary view can be quite disruptive. If we have an anxious attachment style, it will spend much energy worrying about whether the partner is available and whether the relationship is safe. The only answers it can compute are “Yes” or “No.” If, in any given moment, our partner is unavailable or upset with us, the part will extend that reality throughout time and react as if it is a permanent loss. This part is likely stuck in past trauma where the situation actually was binary -- the holding environment as 100% inadequate. Of course, the reality in the present is that the partner is sometimes available and nice, and sometimes unavailable and in reaction to us. These parts often get caught in other binary views as well, such as feeling either wonderful and lovable or horrible and unlovable. One consequence is that receiving constructive criticism or a request to change flips them into feeling unlovable, triggering a Protector that is defensive or retaliatory.
If you are in a relationship while blended with parts that see your partner in a binary way, then you will be making the other person into a solution for your problems. That is an unfair burden that most people will eventually reject. On some level, they know that they can offer only incremental change and would like to be appreciated for that. In addition, even if the relationship brings some nice incremental change to our life, when the total fix inevitably fails, the binary parts will resent the person for not solving the problem for us.
Werner Erhardt used to say, “There is no such thing as a relationship.” My interpretation of that statement is that binary parts think of relationship as a thing. We have one or we don’t. Maybe we have one, but it’s a bad one. We want to find one, or we just lost one. If I don’t have one, but then I get one, I will be happy. Letting go of that binary view helps us realize that there is no such thing as a relationship; rather we share moments in time with another person, whether those moments amount to several hours or many decades. It is incremental based on how many moments we get to share and what we experience in those moments.
The tendency for young parts to blend, and therefore to contribute to a binary way of seeing the world, is an important factor in two major psychiatric diagnoses. Symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder include seeing life, the world, and other people as either all good or all bad, without an ability to grasp that these things exist on a continuum and always contain both good and bad. And, of course, Bipolar Disorder exactly maps onto this discussion, with parts blending in an alternating pattern that see things as all bad or all good, stiflingly limited (depression) or with no limitations at all (mania). It is necessary to welcome these polarized parts simultaneously and come to the conclusion reached by someone who wrote to me after a Holotropic Breathwork workshop:
I've learned that there is always a little darkness in the light and a little light in the darkness and, most importantly, I'm finally o.k. with that.
Another example of a part that sees reality through a binary lens is a suicidal part. After all, we are either alive or dead. However, for a part whose solution to our problems is to cease existing, incremental improvements in life are not just meaningless -- they can feel threatening, because they take us further away from the total solution. As such, parts like this can fight the work we are doing to make life incrementally better.
Anxious parts are often in a binary state, with their focus constrained to the negative or totally bad end of the polarity. Sometimes folks will address them by bringing in hopeful parts that anticipate good outcomes. The truth is that the future is unpredictable, but it will certainly contain a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant experiences. My sense is that both hopelessness and hopefulness are attitudes brought by parts; in Self-energy we accept not knowing and just see possibility.
And what about addictive parts? Normally, in a non-addictive process, parts that want to indulge in a certain substance or behavior will understand that their wish will be granted on a continuum. Self finds a compromise between parts that enjoy the experience and parts that are concerned about future consequences, and the parts consent to the arrangement. Addictive parts don’t see the continuum; it is all about “Yes” or “No” for them and they will do whatever they can to get a “Yes” result.
Now that I’m conscious about the tendency towards seeing in binary, I see it all over the place. In today’s sessions, one client was just breaking free of a view that his step-mother must be a good person because she helped in many ways; this perspective prevented him from witnessing parts that were hurt by her. Another woke from a dream of a 100% supportive family to feel the shock of the narrative of a 100% disconnected family. Of course, the truth is that the step-parent both helped and hurt, and the family was somewhere on a continuum of connectedness. Sometimes we can make a choice that is clearly beneficial for us, but if we hold it as “good” in a binary way, we would invalidate parts for whom it wasn’t good. Usually they just need us to validate that the choice was “bad” for them, rather than reminding them that it was “good” overall.
One of the chief benefits of IFS itself is that it solves a general error of seeing in binary. When dealing with difficult emotions, most people see a choice between having to feel the feeling (bad) or being free from it (good). From the IFS perspective, they are choosing between exiling the part or blending with the part. We choose a third, non-binary approach -- to fully welcome the part without having it blend.
I recall Frank Anderson, an IFS psychiatrist, saying that he asks parts about medications before prescribing them. If a part of the person wants medication to abolish a symptom, that would be a red flag. If parts think a medication could be incrementally helpful, that would be a more realistic reason for prescribing it.
The binary perspective is often seen in our public discourse. As just one of many possible examples, take the issue of police reform. The video of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer, watched by millions of Americans, touched off the largest civil-rights protest ever in the U.S., along with much discussion about the role of the police in our country. Some of this conversation was nuanced and offered specific ideas for reform. Much of it devolved to the binary poles though; a police union member might see the other side as wanting to disempower the police to empower more crime, while an activist would claim that police in general are a corrupt force working to oppress citizens. So cops are either all good or all bad. Examining other issues in the news, including our whole political system, you will find that the same polarized binary view is quite pervasive.
What can we do to ameliorate the tendency of young parts to view reality through a binary lens? Perhaps, if we understand the problem as it is described here, we can help these parts see the world in a more nuanced way. For example…
To the very young infatuated part:
“I know you really really like this person and believe they can make all the difference in our life. Yes, you think they are our soulmate and our perfect match. But we don’t know what is actually going to happen. Even if we start spending lots of time together, our problems won’t go away. At best, our life will become incrementally better. And let’s be prepared for the certainty that one day, one way or another, the relationship will end.”
To the depressed or manic part:
“I know that you’re feeling so bad right now that you don’t see any possibility of goodness. But the truth is that sometimes we feel good and sometimes we feel bad. If we hang in there, better feelings will come.” Or, “I’m happy for you that you feel so good right now. I know that you can’t see the possibility of a negative outcome, but life has both good and bad times, and I'm going to act accordingly.”
To the part that is devaluing another person:
“Yes, this person seems really mean and bad right now. But within that one person exists a mixture of both good and bad qualities. Any decisions we make about this person will need to take them all into account.”
To a suicidal part:
“I understand that it feels threatening to you to let life get a little better, because as it does so, your solution of ceasing to exist, which would end all pain, fades into the distance. I appreciate that you want to save me from the pain. How about if we give this a try for a while and see if we can create some incremental improvement. If that isn’t working after six months or a year, we can revisit the idea of not being here.”
To an addictive part:
“I know you want to feel the ‘Yes’ state. Yes to being able to have this substance or enact this behavior as much as we want. You hate the feeling of ‘No’ and the deprivation it brings, like you never will have this experience again. But I’m not saying ‘No’ forever - just for now. At other times you will get a ‘Yes’. Plus, there are other things in life that bring us pleasure, so a ‘No’ to this is not a ‘No’ to all good things.”
When discussing the issues:
“I think your point is completely valid. But I don’t see this issue in such a black and white way. I think there are valid points on both sides.”
Whenever there is a binary perspective in play, it will inevitably lead to polarization, as there is no perception of reality other than the two poles of the issue. When there are only two options -- good and bad with my way being the good one -- no fruitful dialogue is possible. If, however, the perspective expands to include the continuum, then a healthy polarity prevails and solutions can be found through compromise.
Of course, I am not proposing that recognizing binary parts is the solution to any particular problem. That would be a binary perspective. But perhaps this understanding can offer some useful incremental change.
