Understanding the splitting

[Depression = 72% of members]

I have read and read as much material and the posts on these boards to try to wrap my head around the evil monster that we've all been attacked by called BPD; however, I've had a real problem understanding the splitting aspect irrespective of the fact that I had a minor concentration in psychology in college. Maybe someone could help me out with why I'm confused. AN example of my confusion comes from my uBPDexgf's behavior towards me at the end of the relationship prior to me ending it - I felt like I had already been painted black because she would harp on my flaws and really devalue me in an evil way. Nevertheless, there'd be times where she would cuddle up next to me and kiss me and tell me how much she loved me, but that she wasn't sure about how much she really loved me. Was I white or black at that point? Did she paint me white at that moment she was kissing me and showing me affection and know that later I would be black so she kind of prepared me for it by adding the caveat she wasn't sure how much she really loved me? This is the confusion I'm having. If I'm painted black aren't I just painted black and if I'm white aren't I just white?

[DownandOut]

I have read and read as much material and the posts on these boards to try to wrap my head around the evil monster that we've all been attacked by called BPD; however, I've had a real problem understanding the splitting aspect irrespective of the fact that I had a minor concentration in psychology in college. Maybe someone could help me out with why I'm confused. AN example of my confusion comes from my uBPDexgf's behavior towards me at the end of the relationship prior to me ending it - I felt like I had already been painted black because she would harp on my flaws and really devalue me in an evil way. Nevertheless, there'd be times where she would cuddle up next to me and kiss me and tell me how much she loved me, but that she wasn't sure about how much she really loved me. Was I white or black at that point? Did she paint me white at that moment she was kissing me and showing me affection and know that later I would be black so she kind of prepared me for it by adding the caveat she wasn't sure how much she really loved me? This is the confusion I'm having. If I'm painted black aren't I just painted black and if I'm white aren't I just white?

[UmbrellaBoy]

I think the black/white talk is a misleading understanding of splitting. BPD definitely includes idealization and devaluation, but splitting is less about an inability to hold contradictory or ambivalent or nuanced feelings at the same time (they are, in fact, masters of ambivalence), but rather an inability to sustain such models ACROSS time.

For example, if I get mad at a family member I can be so pissed that I'm seeing red and want to kill them. But I wouldn't really, of course, because "deep down" I love them and even in my temporary angry state, would be immediately horrified if anything bad happened to them.

Someone with BPD has real trouble with that "deeper" continuity of second-order feelings. Sometimes this means black and white, when they are feeling intensely negative or positive in the moment, but they could just as well be feeling "gray" in the moment. The important thing is just that though: "in the moment." For the BPD person, whatever they are feeling right then is "the truth" as there is no deeper second-order commitment to structure their desires.

This is why a BPD person can be writing adoring poems on a good day for you, be telling you it's over the next, then coming back to say "maybe" the next. Black, white, or gray... .their desires exist only in the present, with no "grounding" underlying continuity.

Normal people for example, if mad at their partner, will not start imagining the relationship is ending or that they will still be mad in a few days, and so our choices are still structured by love; even if we don't like them at the moment, we'll still put on a smile if it's they're birthday, swallow our feeling, because we know it will pass. A BPD person who gets mad is wont to do something like say "Because I'm mad right now, THAT's what I'm going to act on" and skip your birthday or whatever, making a choice that has no view to all good times in the past or good times that could inevitably return in the future. Nope, there is no underlying leap of "faith" like that, so they act unpredictably based on only their current state of mind, not any deeper underlying continuity.

But this doesn't just have to hold true for feeling really good or really bad about someone. It's just as true for "gray" emotions; if that's the mix they're feeling at the moment, they'll act on that mix. I'd even tend to think it's they're default; the inability to sustain a second-order desire across time leads many of them to eventually be constantly plagued with doubts about their desires exactly because they'll have noticed themselves not having the same sort of constancy that other people have. So it becomes self-reinforcing.

I loved my ex so deeply that even through all the crap, even when I didn't LIKE him that much, my script of behavior continued being organized by an underlying premise of love and wanting to spend life with him. Even seething from betrayals, I'd make him elaborate gifts because a true leap of faith keeps walking forward in the dark even after the lights along the path go out.

My ex, on the other hand, couldn't even begin to understand such loyalty to a commitment in the face of present-moment difficulties. And so when he looked around and saw other people acting according to unwavering values like that, it caused him to enter, more and more, a state of perpetual gray doubt about whether he had ever really desired or loved anything or anyone at all. And this doubt then only perpetuated itself because then, even in the moment, he couldn't identify any certainty without undermining it with this doubt, this learned-helplessness of self-skepticism.

And the answer is that maybe he couldn't ever really love. It depends how you define it. He definitely felt individual moments of love and desire. But that's only first-order. If by love we mean the leap of faith, the commitment to sustaining a continuity of constancy and consistent action even in the face of the day to day vicissitudes of emotion... .then, no, I'm not sure he has ever loved.

[Mutt]

I remember being idealized in the morning sometimes and it was like my ex was on cloud 9 "Mutt I'm so in love with you"

That same night I would be demonized and she would go into a rage for something she conceived that I had done.

I remember her saying several times that I would drain her. Now I know it's due to her splitting back and forth.

As far as I can recall, I was never all black all of the time until the day she told me "she was moving on" and left me for my replacement. That was in Oct 2012 and to this day, I'm still entirely black. We only have one mutual couple left that are friends with me, and they are mostly neutral. I've been told that my ex has nothing good to say about me and only talks about the replacement.

[HarmKrakow]

The splitting, calling black, also has to do with the fact that a mental diseased BPD person, keeps splitting/painting black even though it might not be true to at least ACKNOWLEDGE their selves that you are bad.

If I tell you a 1000 million times you are a scumbag lying son of a $$$$, you'll eventually believe in what your saying. Et voila...

[DownandOut]

Umbrellaboy, thank you for your response, I agree with what you're saying based on my minimal understanding. My intuition was pretty good with my uBPDexgf and my observations about her behavior and my confusion could be seen here in the last letter I wrote her post -b/u https://bpdfamily.com/message_board/index.php?topic=211563.msg12328748#msg12328748

[Mutt]

The splitting, calling black, also has to do with the fact that a mental diseased BPD person, keeps splitting/painting black even though it might not be true to at least ACKNOWLEDGE their selves that you are bad.

If I tell you a 1000 million times you are a scumbag lying son of a $$$$, you'll eventually believe in what your saying. Et voila...

Hence it justifies/projects their inappropriate actions and behaviors unto the non. It's alos to distort and the BPDs proxies buy into the lies.

[Juno]

I have a question... .It's obvious that most of us have suffered greatly from our relationships with our ex's with a BPD. I have been reading through the various post's regardless of the subject matter, and it's apparent we realized that our ex's are sick. By the time we realize this our ex's have done so much to hurt us and themselves that it's too late and the damage is done. I wonder how does God judge them? Does he judge them as a person who is sick and can't help themselves? Or, does he judge them with a certain accountability?

[Waifed]

I have read and read as much material and the posts on these boards to try to wrap my head around the evil monster that we've all been attacked by called BPD; however, I've had a real problem understanding the splitting aspect irrespective of the fact that I had a minor concentration in psychology in college. Maybe someone could help me out with why I'm confused. AN example of my confusion comes from my uBPDexgf's behavior towards me at the end of the relationship prior to me ending it - I felt like I had already been painted black because she would harp on my flaws and really devalue me in an evil way. Nevertheless, there'd be times where she would cuddle up next to me and kiss me and tell me how much she loved me, but that she wasn't sure about how much she really loved me. Was I white or black at that point? Did she paint me white at that moment she was kissing me and showing me affection and know that later I would be black so she kind of prepared me for it by adding the caveat she wasn't sure how much she really loved me? This is the confusion I'm having. If I'm painted black aren't I just painted black and if I'm white aren't I just white?

Very similar situation for me. She would towards the end say it wasn't going to work out yet she was clinging to me more than she ever did. I had caught her cheating and told her she was on borrowed time. I just assumed that when she said it wasn't going to work it was projection and she was hoping I would reassure her. I also believe she was scared because she had yet to find a replacement. Who knows. They are freaking nuts.

[Ironmanrises]

I think the black/white talk is a misleading understanding of splitting. BPD definitely includes idealization and devaluation, but splitting is less about an inability to hold contradictory or ambivalent or nuanced feelings at the same time (they are, in fact, masters of ambivalence), but rather an inability to sustain such models ACROSS time.

For example, if I get mad at a family member I can be so pissed that I'm seeing red and want to kill them. But I wouldn't really, of course, because "deep down" I love them and even in my temporary angry state, would be immediately horrified if anything bad happened to them.

Someone with BPD has real trouble with that "deeper" continuity of second-order feelings. Sometimes this means black and white, when they are feeling intensely negative or positive in the moment, but they could just as well be feeling "gray" in the moment. The important thing is just that though: "in the moment." For the BPD person, whatever they are feeling right then is "the truth" as there is no deeper second-order commitment to structure their desires.

This is why a BPD person can be writing adoring poems on a good day for you, be telling you it's over the next, then coming back to say "maybe" the next. Black, white, or gray... .their desires exist only in the present, with no "grounding" underlying continuity.

Normal people for example, if mad at their partner, will not start imagining the relationship is ending or that they will still be mad in a few days, and so our choices are still structured by love; even if we don't like them at the moment, we'll still put on a smile if it's they're birthday, swallow our feeling, because we know it will pass. A BPD person who gets mad is wont to do something like say "Because I'm mad right now, THAT's what I'm going to act on" and skip your birthday or whatever, making a choice that has no view to all good times in the past or good times that could inevitably return in the future. Nope, there is no underlying leap of "faith" like that, so they act unpredictably based on only their current state of mind, not any deeper underlying continuity.

But this doesn't just have to hold true for feeling really good or really bad about someone. It's just as true for "gray" emotions; if that's the mix they're feeling at the moment, they'll act on that mix. I'd even tend to think it's they're default; the inability to sustain a second-order desire across time leads many of them to eventually be constantly plagued with doubts about their desires exactly because they'll have noticed themselves not having the same sort of constancy that other people have. So it becomes self-reinforcing.

I loved my ex so deeply that even through all the crap, even when I didn't LIKE him that much, my script of behavior continued being organized by an underlying premise of love and wanting to spend life with him. Even seething from betrayals, I'd make him elaborate gifts because a true leap of faith keeps walking forward in the dark even after the lights along the path go out.

My ex, on the other hand, couldn't even begin to understand such loyalty to a commitment in the face of present-moment difficulties. And so when he looked around and saw other people acting according to unwavering values like that, it caused him to enter, more and more, a state of perpetual gray doubt about whether he had ever really desired or loved anything or anyone at all. And this doubt then only perpetuated itself because then, even in the moment, he couldn't identify any certainty without undermining it with this doubt, this learned-helplessness of self-skepticism.

And the answer is that maybe he couldn't ever really love. It depends how you define it. He definitely felt individual moments of love and desire. But that's only first-order. If by love we mean the leap of faith, the commitment to sustaining a continuity of constancy and consistent action even in the face of the day to day vicissitudes of emotion... .then, no, I'm not sure he has ever loved.

Well stated Umbrella. 

The black/white... .

Is a more simplistic explanation... .

Of splitting.

In bold.

Bingo.

[fiddlestix]

"I loved my ex so deeply that even through all the crap, even when I didn't LIKE him that much, my script of behavior continued being organized by an underlying premise of love and wanting to spend life with him."  ---umbrellaboy


Umbrellaboy, this is so wonderfully said.  I always knew, even in my moments of severe hurt and anger, that I loved my wife deeply and was prepared to grow old with her.  Only when I became convinced that she was beyond the point of giving a hoot about the marriage was I able to end it.  If she really could quit her nonsense and adultery I could still forgive her and be with her.  But she will not give up her life of deceit and adultery.  She is with a new guy now; perhaps he is in for trouble as well.

And, umbrellaboy, your comments about "black, white, grey... ." are so spot on as well.  Whatever they "feel" in the moment is "true" for them (disordered persons). Their lack of second order feelings, or bedrock truths, is a brilliant insight.  That describes my dBPD ex wife so well.  I guess that is why they have a "borderline" personality; it is not anchored to anything solid; there is no underlying truth to buttress who they are at their core.  My poor ex wife will most likely drift upon stormy seas the rest of her life.

Umbrellaboy, do you have a degree in psychology?  

Fiddle

[houseofswans]

I loved my ex so deeply that even through all the crap, even when I didn't LIKE him that much, my script of behavior continued being organized by an underlying premise of love and wanting to spend life with him. Even seething from betrayals, I'd make him elaborate gifts because a true leap of faith keeps walking forward in the dark even after the lights along the path go out.

Beautifully articulated, UB - that was my experience as well 

[UmbrellaBoy]

Nope, , but I have had a really good "education" in BPD on account of my poor ex and then some really good insight from my therapist afterward.

My ex was very smart verbally, brilliant even. He was incredibly specific in the sorts of things he'd report feeling. It was a bizarre situation really; he was, in one way, extremely self-aware and so able to provide me (when I was tenacious about it) with a whole lot of evidence about the nature of his inner states to try to make sense of and empathize with. On the other hand, of course, he wasn't self-aware at all, because the awareness would only be piercing "in each moment" as I've described; across time it was all entirely obfuscated and mystified by the fragmentation, and it was up to me to put the pieces together and try to find a model that explained the unstable behavior.

I said in a another post about how they think each step of their life makes sense or has some logic, but that doesn't explain why the story as a whole is so incoherent and illogical. My guy was great at explaining his inner-logic, but except in a few moments of clarity, entirely unaware of the big picture. So I took the data I had and tried to find the balance of entering into his inner logic to empathize while also keeping my objective perspective. There were times I went down the rabbit hole and got so caught up in his inner logic I'd forget how abnormal the big picture was. But it was like a puzzle, trying to figure out a model of his psyche that would explain all the things he said combined with the behavior I saw, yet in a way that didn't just buy into the "straightforward" explanations he was giving, because they really weren't explanations at all, they were just a disjointed string of thoughts and feelings that, without some deeper structural model to make sense of them, were nothing but eccentric and unpredictable. Yet I assumed there was some method to the madness, some underlying order to the disorder, some reason for the irrationality, some way to find a pattern in the unpredictability, and when my therapist introduced me to the BPD it helped me suddenly see the forest for the trees.

Just one example; in what I finally realized were engulfment fears, he'd report a dread at the thought of committing officially to me even when, days earlier, he would be behaving in a manner making it clear that he loved me. There were all sorts of obfuscating factors (like the ex) that made it all harder to sort out. But he would report this dread or suffocation. His insight was both useful and useless. It was useless because he himself spoke as if this dread was simply "the truth" of his desires, even when I'd point out to him past contradictory behavior or statements, his explanation was just "well then my feelings have changed" as if that was simple natural. And maybe once or twice it could have been, but as a pattern... .it requires a deeper explanation, and he never really became aware of the pattern, or deluded himself, each time, into thinking it was just him "stuck in a rut" and that "this time I'll be different." I on the other hand was not satisfied with moment to moment explanations, however subtle. I needed to find something that would explain BOTH the loving actions and the dread about intimacy and commitment, and why the waffling between them, rather than just accepting (as he seemed to) that the waffling itself was sufficient explanation.

The BPD diagnosis provided that framework in an "aha" moment to make sense of all the patterns I had noticed over 3.5 years; they aren't obvious right away because you have to see them over time!

[fiddlestix]

Umbrella, thanks again for your insight.  The BPD diagnosis provided the "aha" that explains so much of the behavior my wife exhibited. Like your guy, my ex wife is brilliant, articulate and has a way of seeming so authoritative when discussing her feelings.  In fact, she is a therapist herself!  But from morning to evening her "feelings" about me and the fate of our marriage would change like a weather vane.  This was mostly in the last few years and months of our 25 years together.  As we entered middle age (we are 47) she got worse.  But there were troubled behaviors all along (eating disorders, raging, theft, rule-breaking, addictions... .) that I now understand through the lens of BPD.  My wife is diagnosed bipolar with borderline traits. 

As far as splitting, my ex would complain that I am too clingy and codependent.  Yet, other times, I was "the most loving and forgiving man... ."   Maddening!

Fiddle

[fromheeltoheal]

To get all clinical, but helpful to me anyway, remember a borderline has a deflated false self because they never developed a real one, and the main goal is to avoid the abandonment depression following being abandoned by a primary caregiver, something they never went through in early development stages, so it keeps playing out in adulthood.

With that as background, Masterson writes about splitting:

"The splitting defense mechanism, which usually recedes as the real self emerges, persists as a principal defense against the abandonment depression.  The conflicting images of the good mother and the bad mother, the good child and the bad one, and the feeling states associated with them (being loved or being rejected) remain conscious but are kept apart so they do not influence one another.  It is as if they were closed off in two separate closets.  The widespread use of splitting fosters and deepens the other defense mechanisms as well as the ego defects.  The bifurcated worldview created by splitting reinforces the primitive defenses because from the person's perspective the world is still structured as it was in the first months of life: the self-representation consists of a good self-image linked to a good mother-image and a bad, inadequate, or deflated self-image linked to the bad mother-image.  In psychodynamic terms, the child fails to achieve "object constancy," and will go through life relating to people as parts - either positive or negative - rather than whole entities.  He will be unable to maintain consistent commitment in relationships where he is frustrated or angry; and he will have difficulty evoking the image of the loved one when that person is not physically present.  He will never fully realize that mother is one, complete person who sometimes rewards and sometimes frustrates the child.  He will continue to think of her as two separate entities, one benevolent, the other wicked."

Serious mental illness, and also fascinating to get your head around.  So there were two of us, a split entity, in our borderline's head, one to cuddle with, the other to chastise, and we were seen as the wicked one when our borderline was triggered, maybe by us, maybe by something else.