When Our Thinking Becomes Fragmented
From Learning to Experience
Our way of thinking is not fixed. It gradually develops through education, learning, and life experiences. Yet this development involves a paradox: the more we learn, the richer our thinking becomes… but it can also become more fragmented.
During childhood, then preadolescence and adolescence, we are primarily in a phase of learning. We discover the world through our parents, school, rules, values, beliefs, and relationships with others. To understand this complex world, our brain organizes information into categories: “right or wrong,” “allowed or forbidden,” “success or failure,” “friend or enemy.”
This organization is useful. It allows us to make sense of what we experience quickly. But it can also create relatively rigid patterns of thought. A remark repeated by a parent can become a belief. A painful experience can become an internal rule. A success can become a definition of who we are.
In adulthood, the process changes. We learn less primarily through teaching and more through direct experience of life: romantic relationships, work, failures, responsibilities, losses, successes, encounters, and change.
These experiences sometimes confirm our earlier learning, but they can also contradict it. And this is where our thinking can either become more flexible or become even more rigid.
When a person remains strongly attached to the categories developed during their formative years, they may tend to interpret new situations through old patterns. They no longer see only what is happening: they see what they think it means.
Psychological flexibility is precisely the ability to step back from these patterns. It allows us to recognize: “I learned to think this way, but that does not mean this way of thinking is always appropriate for the situation I am facing now.”
This ability is essential in our relationships with others.
Rigid thinking can lead us to put people into categories: “he is selfish,” “she is too sensitive,” “that’s just how he is,” “she will never change.” Once we have created such a label, we are no longer truly encountering the person: we are encountering the mental image we have constructed of them.
By contrast, more flexible thinking leaves room for nuance and change. Someone may have behaved in a hurtful way without being entirely “a bad person.” A person can change their mind. We ourselves can evolve.
Psychological maturity does not necessarily mean accumulating more and more knowledge or experiences. It also means learning to reorganize what we have learned.
Ultimately, our thinking becomes fragmented because this helps us understand the world. But over time, the challenge becomes knowing how to bring these fragments together without turning them into prisons.
To be psychologically flexible means being able to keep our reference points while accepting that reality is sometimes more complex than our categories.
Perhaps one of the great transitions of adulthood is moving from “I know how things are” to “I know how I learned to see them, and I can still learn to see them differently.”
