Stephanie Coontz: How would this actually work in therapy? So if you come into a therapiss office and you have some kind of black and white exclamation, like, im a total failure. What your therapists might ask you to do is to play out in pretty vivid detail what it would look like if everything they said was true. She says the next time i catch myself doing all or none extremist thinking, i'm going to remember that there is this binary bias and i should try to work against it.