One Hand and The Other

I have been quite taken by Ken Wilber's writings in the past couple of months. I would have to say that he has been largely influential in getting me to think more "integrally"--or, to put it more simply, to think not in terms of binaries but in terms of nested wholes. His account of polarity therapy in particular is parallel with ideas of non-duality which I have encountered in Buddhism. What I would like to share is a kind of spin-off exercise which I have even tried with some of my intermediate-level students, called "on the one hand/on the other".
  This exercise gets students to think from multiple perspectives about the same idea or character. Are the character's decisions the "right" ones? Would you do the same if you were in the character's shoes, or would you have done it differently? By getting the students to examine advantages and drawbacks of each alternative scenario, I introduce them to something like a polarity theory: the idea that a person can have opposites and contradictory ideas, and yet embrace these ideas simultaneously.
   People who suffer from depression might often think in terms of poles. Either I am "really good" or "terrible", with no "in between". David Burns, a prominent cognitive therapist, has suggested that depressed people tend to generalize negative situations into all situations, a kind of "emotional reasoning" which projects their mood onto situations. I wonder if being able to embrace an opposite view--to entertain the idea that there at least some things that I have done well--can defuse the tension and anxiety of feeling that one is either "good" or "bad", with no "in between". But it's also worthwhile to consider that even seemingly "bad" qualities that one might dislike about themselves can be beheld just as they are, without judging the person. In other words, one just observes the judgment without following the judgment to conclude that something or someone is good or bad. Is it then possible to accept that some things, from some perspectives, might seem "bad" from some view, but this "bad" is also conditioned arising and is subject to change over time? Again, I hesitate to judge: people are neither good nor bad. Actions might lack skill or be inappropriate at certain times, but that doesn't make a person bad.