When Nons split

[GreenEyedMonster]

This is an issue that's been bothering me lately.

We all know that splitting -- characterizing someone who has hurt us as "all bad" -- is a classic trait of individuals with personality disorders.  If you look it up, it's a defense mechanism that is very immature and typically used by little children.  However, a lot of non-disordered adults tend to do it as well.  It's actually a fairly normal to initially react that way to a situation where we get knocked down a few pegs.  People will remark, "Oh yeah, my boss disciplined me because he's just a jerk," or something like that, before they are calm enough to understand and process the nuances of the situation.  Some of us even use it to cope with the aftermath of our BPD relationships, and then hopefully progress to more mature coping methods.

Here's the interesting part.  Everyone I have dated since my BPD relationship (and including my BPD relationship, of course) has split people.  This includes the person I am seeing now.  Even before my BPD relationship, splitting made me kind of queasy, because you kind of know that if this person splits everyone who wrongs them, you will eventually be split too, because inevitably you will end up in an argument or something down the road.  I consider it to be a red flag.  Granted, the guy I'm seeing now doesn't split people on anything close to the scale that my exBPD did.  It's just little things like how I will tell some funny story about something that happened a couple relationships ago and my new "special friend" will respond with something like, "What a [insert name here]."  I'm always a bit taken aback when he does that, because I wasn't looking for some kind of sympathy or ego boost when I told the story.  And I really think that's what it boils down to -- ego.  The more defense mechanisms you see early in the relationship, the more you can infer that the other person has a huge ego.

My current interest does not do it with his own exes, which I consider to be a good sign.  He is friends with both of the women he's had long-term relationships with.  The interesting part is that he tends to split people who hurt me faster than people who hurt him, a sort of protective thing.  Thing is, my exBPD did this also during the idealization phase.  I think this guy has no idea how much he is turning me off by reminding me of a personality-disordered person.

Thing is, I was in a relationship for more than a decade with someone who had virtually no ego, to a fault.  He would always say that it's not good to talk about people in black and white like that.  He would generally respond very empathetically, to the extent that he could.  He never split people, even when venting anger.  To be honest, I wish I were still with him.  I'm demisexual, which means that I only feel sexually attracted to people with whom I feel an emotional bond.  I am finding it very hard to feel attraction to people who use splitting to cope with difficult situations, because it makes me feel emotionally unsafe with them, even more so after my BPD relationship.

I'm starting to wonder if splitting is so common that there is just no way I can really avoid it.  Everyone seems to do it.  It is such a turn-off to me, and makes the person doing it look like a petulant little child.  Does anyone else here have experience with the phenomenon of splitting, especially with Nons?  Is it a relationship deal breaker?

[Hadlee]

I haven't really come across it much in nons to take any notice.  I recall my ex doing it in the early stages of our relationship and it did make me feel uncomfortable as I thought, "If he is talking about other people like that then what will he say about me?"  He was also very protective of me and would split people that did me wrong, even in the slightest way.  Things they would do wouldn't bother me, but it did him.

My former BPD friend was exactly the same as my ex.

I think I would find it very difficult to trust anyone that exhibited these traits - my mind would automatically assume they are disordered   I also don't want to have negative people in my life anymore, and I find people that split a lot to be so darn negative.

[balletomane]

I'm starting to wonder if splitting is so common that there is just no way I can really avoid it.  Everyone seems to do it.  It is such a turn-off to me, and makes the person doing it look like a petulant little child.  Does anyone else here have experience with the phenomenon of splitting, especially with Nons?  Is it a relationship deal breaker?

I think, as you've noticed, we all do this to different degrees and different times. Remember that people with BPD are struggling to manage ordinary human emotions, and that while their difficulties are deeply entrenched and follow a plain pattern, no one manages their emotions perfectly at all times.

It may be that you are less tolerant of it now because your ex's behaviour has put you on high alert for anything that even remotely resembles BPD. I know that I am upset or made anxious by traits that wouldn't have bothered me prior to my relationship with my ex, just because they remind me of him. The resemblance only has to be slight for it to be frightening. I need to stop viewing the world through the lens of his BPD.

[C.Stein]

GEM,

I don't see your examples as splitting.  Someone can take note of something another person does and say they are a jerk, etc... .but not split them all bad.  It is more a reflection on the incident(s) or particular behavior rather than the person as a whole.  That said, would you say the assumption that a person is splitting someone when they make a comment like this black and white thinking?

I have a good friend who can be a real ass at times (and have told him as much) but that isn't a reflection of who he is as a whole.  He knows this, I know this.

[MapleBob]

Does anyone else here have experience with the phenomenon of splitting, especially with Nons?  Is it a relationship deal breaker?

I think that, as others have said, everybody "splits" to a certain extent. It's kind of a reductive way of dealing with something/someone that you don't really want to give a lot of thought or attention to anymore, like a one-sentence summation: "Oh her? Yeah, she was a real jerk." I think that most healthy people, if you pressed them for more information on the subject that they're splitting, would have a more nuanced and balanced story behind their simplified conclusions: "Well, she was alright, it just didn't work out for XYZ reasons, and I probably should have ABC'd more." I think if you pressed a disordered person on a subject they'd just say worse and worse things, instead of having a more balanced story.

I look back at my uBPDex and probably should have seen the  in the way she talked about her exes. Very cut-and-dry, very harsh, and very dismissive - and more so whenever I mentioned it.

[WoundedBibi]

Yes, for me it is a deal breaker. Not just in relationships but also in friendships.

I find people who split (NONs or pwPD's) to be negative and immature. They lack the ability to reflect on behaviour. Of course if someone says something to me I don't like I will split them too. For about 5 seconds. Then I think of why they are saying this and if they might be right. I tend to think in many shades of grey and I like people who are able to do the same. It's the difference between a friend who will say what you want to hear ("your manager said that? What a t*sser!" and a friend who will say what you need to hear ("I understand you didn't like what your manager said but to be fair it didn't help that you did blah blah". It's not so much that if someone is splitting that I think that they could do the same to me but that I think they are not able to look at themselves and grow. My ex of course split everybody who didn't agree with him 100%. He was angry for example some colleagues got chances to do things that he, another colleague and I didn't. So management were jerks and we were victims and there must be an ulterior motive, some scheming going on because we so deserved it and they didn't give us the chances they others got. And I thought "no, it makes perfect sense we didn't get those chances the others did. The two of you are negative, the colleague is not pulling his weight, you are resisting authority in a very passive aggressive way and my health isn't good enough. If I were them I wouldn't give us those opportunities either."

For me splitting is an extension of "it's always somebody else's fault but I am to blame for absolutely nothing". Not wanting to think abut your own role in something. An ego thing where protecting the bruised ego is more important than examining if the other party has a point and growing from what you discover. It is one of the things that made me realise that my ex and I would not work. It is perhaps also why I always avoided the colleagues he befriended; they all do this all the time. They are immature. Hence that they all ganged up on me when he fed them the lies about me and how awful I was. Nobody of them apparently said "hang on, you were so in love with her last week and now she is a witch? Isn't she correct in saying your flirting with that one girl went way too far? Isn't it natural for her to be hurt by your behaviour?". I can't deal with people that are not able to be self-reflective or who can't question if someone's reaction is ok. I love my friends dearly and I will not publicly question them but if I think they are wrong I will do so in private.

[Suspicious1]

I tend to think of Personality Disorders as being a set of traits that everyone has to some degree or another, but with PDs they exist to a more extreme extent where it interferes with their life and relationships.

I was chatting about splitting to my psychologist yesterday. I said that at the end of relationships, I split people in order to get over them and move on. She said "well you could say it's necessary for all of us to do it to some extent in order to motivate ourselves to leave a relationship". I know that when I was leaving my abusive marriage, for example, what kept me locked in for so long was my insistence (and his, TBH) in seeing the good AND the bad in the person and using it as some kind of way to balance things out. I was trying to be mature. Yes he abused me just then, but how did I contribute to it? And it's a one off and he's usually so nice. Of course that played right into his hands. It wasn't until I had the wake-up call that said "he's an abuser, he abused me this time, and this time, and this time, and there is no excuse and good behaviour can never be a trade-off for abusive behaviour". When we were splitting up he'd beg me to see the whole of him and not just the bad, telling me I was selfish and dysfunctional to do otherwise. But it was necessary to my survival to be able to focus on the bad in order to get out and avoid being suckered back in.

And it's not just in extreme situations like that. I've done it at the end of relationships before, and I'm using splitting right now in order to emotionally move on from my exBPDbf. If I remember the wonderful bits of him as well as the bad, I get terrible cognitive dissonance, I become convinced it could all be ok if only we'd tried harder, etc etc. To survive emotionally, I need to remind myself how crazy it all was.

In talking about splitting yesterday, I recounted an example of my ex's idealisation. I had him over for dinner one summer evening, and served something like cold meat along with a pre-prepared salad that I'd dumped on the plates straight out of the bag. He did his usual "your cooking is so good angel, how do you manage to make such beautiful food all the time?". I said "I just opened a bag of salad and dumped it on the plate". He said "yes, but there's something about the way you do that that's so much better than anyone else".

And the psychologist said "yes, and where you were at that moment in time, on that pedestal, he probably meant every word. But a week later you could have done the same thing and his response would have been 'you just dumped a bag of salad on the plate like it didn't matter because *I* don't matter to you". THAT to me is the extreme of splitting - where the very thing you were idealised for before becomes a stick they beat you with later.

[MapleBob]

THAT to me is the extreme of splitting - where the very thing you were idealised for before becomes a stick they beat you with later.

THAT is so true.

[once removed]

great thread and great thoughts.

splitting is a primitive coping mechanism that, as noted, is not at all unique to people with BPD.

what you have to keep in mind with regard to splitting and BPD is the lack of object constancy. one can, as Suspicious1 said, consciously split someone, or choose to focus more on the "bad" as opposed to the "good". this has some use in detaching. i did it. but when you lack object constancy, you lack that integrated sense of a person, and your past interactions with them. i never forgot that there were good and bad times in my relationship, but for a time, i consciously chose to focus on the bad. people with BPD are very much in the moment. the splitting results more from the lack of a stable sense of self, or a stable, consistent sense of others. but thats not unique to BPD either.

many of these are forms of black and white thinking:Ten Forms of Twisted Thinking

[GreenEyedMonster]

Yes, for me it is a deal breaker. Not just in relationships but also in friendships.

I find people who split (NONs or pwPD's) to be negative and immature. They lack the ability to reflect on behaviour. Of course if someone says something to me I don't like I will split them too. For about 5 seconds. Then I think of why they are saying this and if they might be right.

I definitely agree with this, WoundedBibi.  It seems very negative and immature to me as well.  It presumes that we can discern a person's worth based on a few actions, and I think that there is a certain arrogance in that.  I don't split people, personally, but sometimes I label them to help me figure things out.  I might call someone vindictive, self-centered, arrogant, rude, etc. and those would all be deal-breakers for me, but I wouldn't go so far as to call them bad or worthless or to stoop to calling them profane names.  Even if I call a woman a b****, it's based on how I think she treats people, and not necessarily her inherent worth or even her personality.  

People who are uncomfortable with grey areas make me feel emotionally unsafe.  Like so many posters in this thread have echoed, it shows that they aren't particularly willing to see those nuances in themselves, either.  Most people at least try to be decent human beings, even though we fall short, so I try to give people the benefit of the doubt until an unmistakable pattern emerges.  I can decide that I'm better off without a person in my life without labeling that person as worthless.  I guess for some narcissistic types, this feels too much like admitting failure, and they have to label the other person entirely bad.

I've mentioned before that I'm a teacher, and I can't afford to split the people around me.  It would make me insane and bad at my job.  While I might identify a personality trait in one of my students like stubbornness or defiance, that doesn't make that student a bad person or worthless.  You have to, in that situation, try to see the good in the person and try to understand why they act the way they do.  As one of my colleagues says, every difficult student deserves at least one teacher who's happy to see them over the course of the day.  

I've been doing some soul searching today about my current romantic interest and whether or not I can live with this trait.  Sometimes he does it because he thinks he is funny, I guess.  There is something about it, though, that strikes me as negative, and that is beginning to really irritate me.

Oh, and an afterthought to add as an edit:  I think that splitting is also very self-referential.  For example, assuming that someone is acting a certain way with the knowledge and intent of irritating you or hurting you, when maybe their motivation for that action is completely unrelated.  There's a certain paranoia in that.  Or assuming intention behind every slight when that is often not the case.  I find it narcissistic to assume that everyone's actions have something to do with you, or that your opinion of their actions is the sum total of their worth.