Shades of Gray
We're trained to pick a side.
To make up our minds. To hold firm. To know what we think and stand behind it. The cultural pressure runs in every direction — political, relational, internal. Indecision is weakness. Ambivalence is failure. Being on the fence means you haven't done the work. The extremes beckon us with outrage and perfection.
I want to make a case for the opposite. For not being certain.
In my therapy practice, in my own life, and in the small body of work I'm building, I keep arriving at the same conclusion: being on the fence, in the middle gray area, is sometimes the most accurate, most honest, and most healing place to be. Not as a permanent dwelling. But as a station the mind passes through often, and the place certain truths are best held.
What CBT actually teaches about the gray
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy gets lazily summarized as "change your thoughts, change your feelings." It's more interesting than that. CBT identifies what it calls cognitive distortions — patterns of thinking that bend reality and amplify suffering. The most common is binary thinking: all-or-nothing, with-us-or-against-us, success-or-failure, loved-or-unloved.
The therapeutic move isn't to flip the binary. It's to recognize the distortion and find the gray.
"I failed at this thing" instead of "I'm a failure." "Some people don't like me, and that's okay" instead of "everyone hates me." "This is hard, and we may or may not work through it" instead of "the relationship is doomed."
The gray middle isn't fence-sitting in the bad sense. It's the most accurate description of how things actually are. The all-or-nothing version is the lie the mind tells when it can't tolerate the discomfort of not knowing. We crave a nice tidy answer, clarity, finality — but sometimes we have to accept what reality is like without those.
We are constellations, not statues
The other thing we easily forget is that we are not fixed.
A self isn't a single answer to a single question. It's a constantly shifting constellation of thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, hopes, dreams, fears — and the moods that pass through them all. What was true of you yesterday isn't necessarily true today. What you know in your body in the morning might be undone by 11pm.
Therapy at its best isn't the project of arriving at a fixed self. It's the practice of noticing the constellation in motion — of becoming the kind of attentive observer who can sit with your shifting parts without insisting that one of them is the real you.
The Internal Family Systems model calls this kind of attentive presence the Self. Other traditions call it different names: the wise advocate, the inner witness, equanimity. The work is the same. The capacity for nuance is partly the capacity to hold yourself in motion without insisting the motion stop.
Healing is a spiral
The image people are sold for healing is linear: identify the problem, do the work, reach the resolution, never look back. The actual experience of healing is closer to a spiral.
You revisit the same themes again and again, sometimes years apart, each time from a slightly different vantage. The grief that knocked you flat at 28 returns at 38, less severe but still present, with new things to teach you. The pattern you thought you'd outgrown shows up in a new relationship with subtler colors.
This isn't a failure of the healing. It is the healing. The spiral is the shape, not the deviation.
What this means in practice: you can't tell where you are on the spiral by looking at yourself once. You need to return to yourself regularly — taking honest snapshots and comparing them across time. The growth isn't visible in the moment. It's visible across a year of moments. The stagnation, too. Both are useful information.
Externalization, or: why I make things
The thread running through my approach as a therapist — and the work I make outside of session — is externalization.
The term comes from narrative therapy. It's the practice of taking what feels internal and overwhelming and giving it a form outside the body, where it can be looked at, held, named, and moved with at a distance. Most CBT tools do this in the form of worksheets. I make objects.
Coffins for things we want to bury. Bowls for the parts of ourselves we'd rather not hold alone. Levers for the binary thinking that runs the mind. I think of it as sympathetic magic — making abstract psychological work tactile, so something that lives only in your head can be seen, felt and examined.
Working with externalized objects (whether they're worksheets, sand trays, art installations, or photographs) does something that talking about feelings alone often can't. It changes the geometry. The thing is over there now, not in here. You can see it. You can touch it. You can move it. You can put it down.
Shades of Gray
I published a free interactive piece this week, called Shades of Gray.
You move 60+ levers between opposing words — Loved/Unloved, Anxious/Calm, Wanted/Unwanted, Brave/Afraid, Stay/Go, Good Person/Bad Person, Cancelled/Pedestaled — and locate yourself, today, on the spectrum between.
Your answers become a personal constellation. The places where you're certain blaze bright. The places where you're living in the gray glow quietly. Most of the constellation, for most people, is the gray. That's the point.
It takes about ten minutes. It's free. It's designed to be returned to — so you can take a snapshot today, and another in a month, and watch the spiral unfold.
The piece does something a CBT or DBT worksheet can't: you feel the spectrum instead of just being told about it. You hover at the center of a lever reflecting on where you are on the spectrum vs where you think you should be or wish you were. That feeling is the work.
Working together
In my practice in Echo Park, I work with adults and couples on the patterns Shades of Gray surfaces — and many it doesn't. I specialize in:
Trauma (using EMDR and parts work)
Couples therapy (Imago Relationship Therapy)
Premarital therapy
Insomnia (CBT-I)
Across all of those, the through-line is the same: helping people develop the capacity for nuance, externalize what's hardest to hold alone, and become more attentive observers of their own ever-changing selves.
If something in this resonated, I'd love to meet you.
