Splitting
I’ve recently come to learn about a concept known as splitting. It is a fascinating tendency in which the splitting person cannot reconcile the good and bad in experiences, other people, or even themselves. Everything, to someone who experiences splitting, is black or white, hot or cold, noble or evil. The official, clinical definition is as follows.
Splitting:
A mental mechanism in which the self or others are viewed as all good or all bad, with failure to integrate the positive and negative qualities of the self and others into cohesive images. Often, the person alternately overidealizes and devalues the same person (Shahrokh & Hale, 2003).
I truly believe that everyone experiences splitting. One reason I believe this is that splitting, prehistorically, would have enabled the primitive human species to survive. Rather than believing a poisonous plant had some redeeming qualities and was beautiful in the right light, we labeled it as 100% bad so no one would die from it. This makes sense, right? Well--not so much anymore. Contemporary humans have much less justification to put things into all-good or all-bad boxes.
Brenee Brown talks about this numerous times, but I especially liked her article from May 2018 titled, "Dehumanizing Always Starts With Language". In this article, one point that Ms. Brown makes is that humans tend to dehumanize people we disagree with in order to facilitate a morally just conflict: one in which our actions against others are ok because that person is not John, that person is a democrat or a republican, a Mormon or an atheist, an Avs fan or a Wild fan, an Israeli or a Palestinian. These labeling names that you and I have both used so many times are actually a subconscious method of "splitting" in which our justification for hating (or worse: committing hateful acts against) someone is based on the label of a person and not the person or their merits.
I learned about splitting with my therapist recently when she diagnosed me with Borderline Personality Disorder, in part, due to my tendency to split heavily. This is a very common trait of patients with Borderline Personality Disorder. Over the years, I have told/shown her that for me, there was no gray area in anything. Everything was either right or wrong. This was so typical of me that it became comical to those around me (though I certainly didn't feel that way). I would either love someone or hate them. I would either feel amazing about an activity or despise an activity and try to get out of it. In a hateful state, I would not remember the reasons I loved something just weeks, days, or even hours earlier. In my loving state, I would definitely not remember anything bad about the thing. I was aware that I did this and it really wore on my self-confidence as I couldn't ever trust how I was feeling in the moment despite the intensity of those feelings.
In a meeting with my therapist recently, I admitted that I had split on her before we even began a patient-therapist relationship.
My therapist was a member of my church congregation growing up. We did not interact hardly at all and would only have recognized the names of each other; however, I heard somewhere (we still have no idea where) that my therapist (again- no idea that she would someday be my therapist) was a Democrat. Oh boy did I have a tendency to split on Democrats back then. Fast-forward nearly 20 years and my wife comes to me and says "Christopher, I really want you and I to see
Fast forward another two years and I've seen this therapist more times than I can count. I've spoken with her about things I've never told anyone, she's diagnosed be with BPD (something that should have been done a long time ago by other therapists), and she's quite literally saved my life countless times and yet, my splitting almost prevented me from seeing her.
The anecdote above should show how splitting doesn't work in modern society. We, unfortunately, live in a time of grays. While people with BPD tend to split substantially more (both in quantity and quality) than the general population, the world as a whole splits more and more every day. While we see it rampant through political news and wars across the world, this isn't necessarily a new thing. Christ showed us how splitting is counterproductive many times:
- In John 8 Christ shows us that the woman taken in adultery can repent: forgiveness will allow her to be made whole again and treating her as completely tarnished is wrong.
- In Matthew 12, Christ plucks corn on the Sabbath and is ridiculed by the Pharisees for doing so. He teaches them that the letter of the law is not always the most important thing. Plucking corn may be ok to do on the Sabbath in the right scenario!
- In Luke 23 Christ pleads on behalf of the Roman soldiers who had tortured and desecrated him because he knew that they didn't know what they were doing.
These are just three examples that I could come up with (there are countless more) where Christ shows us that all around us deserve the benefit of the doubt. It's safe to say that, for the most part, people are doing their best with what they have. They aren't trying to hurt those around them or enact evil fantasies. At the same time, people are also not perfect: everyone will fall short of the glory of God.
Acknowledging all of these flaws, we have to be patient with others. We must avoid placing those around us into predefined boxes that cannot be changed. The world is broken because we (society) cannot listen to those around us. We place people like my therapist in the "Democrat" box and decide that anything she says can't be true. This isn't how it should be. We all have something to offer! Let's treat others like they have something to offer--you never know what you might learn by giving a little bit of grace where it's due.
References
Brown, B. (2018 May 17). "Dehumanizing Always Starts With Language". brenebrown.com.Shahkroh, N. & Hales, R. (2003). American Psychiatric Glossary, 8th Edition. American Psychiatric Publishing.