Splitting

Also known as “revision of history / rewriting past events”. Has quite a lot of overlap with “black and white thinking”, all or nothing.

When we look at something, the left eye takes an image, the right eye takes a different image. Both images are flat. Depth is not fully perceived by a single eye. The brain takes both images, mushes them together and produces a three dimensional image.

When we look at a person or an event, we see merits and demerits. We see advantage and disadvantage. We see good and bad. Our brains take both sides of the argument and objectively construct a balanced opinion on it. We do this all the time, unconsciously, with everything we experience. We scan for threats, we scan for safety, we scan for ways to benefit from it and a thousand other things.

Skewed perceptions

When we have mental health problems, our perception can be skewed. Our interpretation of what happened may not match the reality of what actually happened. For example, you see two work colleagues whispering, paranoia kicks in, you think they’re conspiring against you. Reality: They’re not. But you’re in a spiral of unhealthy ruminating and can’t seem to snap out of it. Your perception is skewed.

Examples

You’re cycling home from work one evening. You’re happy in our own day dreaming world. You fail to notice the car cutting across the cycle lane until the last moment when you dive out of the way. The driver of the car, instead of being sympathetic and apologetic actually shakes his fist at you and screams aggressively at you to get the f**k off the road before driving off at speed.
Bastard!
This is obviously a frightening and upsetting experience and ruminating is certainly justified. It would be reasonable to hate this guy. However, careful now, too much ruminating is unhealthy.

Now take an unhealthy individual. A trivial event happens, a nothing, the person didn’t show enough enthusiasm when saying good morning for example. Due to the skewed perception, the unhealthy individual may harbour the same feelings for the “good morning” person that you did for the obnoxious driver. In that moment, the person is bad, very bad, treacherous, deceitful. But it doesn’t stop there, the binocular vision of the event malfunctions, it does not take the two sides objectively. It takes only the bad. The entire history with that person is bad, very bad, treacherous, deceitful. The perspective is lopsided, completely off balance.

A moment later, the “good morning” guy, looks up, yawns, stretches and suggests accompanying him for a much needed morning coffee.

Now the guy is painted good again, he’s nice, he’s good, he’s kind, he’s not a threat. The entire history of this guy is again rewritten but this time in more favorable light. Not just this moment, the entire history of this guy is repainted.

Then they guy offers some minor well intended constructive criticism, just to help out… boom, we’re off again. The entire history with this guy gets painted bad.

Splitting is happening. It causes people to be good or bad but never in between.

This condition isn’t unique to narcissism.

You can recognize it when:

• She blows up over seemingly nothing. You’ve just been painted bad, your entire history has been rewritten in a negative light.
• You think she has to be bipolar or something. Nope, she’s just toggling your entire shared history together between all-good and all-bad.
• You just never know which version of her will turn up.
• What a psycho, one minute she’s fine, the next she just goes crazy.
• She just turned on me. I dunno what I did to her.
• “I found him arrogant” said the narcissist. Translation: “I painted him bad”.

Consequences

I’ve found Susan to often be a completely and utterly unreliable source of information because all the information is skewed by this black and white thinking.

I could never depend on her to reliably conduct a business transaction that involves another person because she’d be as likely to have a falling out with them as not.

I’m pretty sure this was in some way responsible for the discarding of many tradesman that came to quote us. The guy was quite likely to be branded treacherous and dismissed for no real reason.

And that of course put massive strain on our relationship.

Sensitive

Susan appeared to be hypersensitive.

Painful

Personally, I see this in my wife when it comes to work colleagues, friends, tradesmen, neighbors I’m not sure if I really feel for her or if it pains me to see it. She’s certainly a thundering bitch when she’s in one of her malignant devaluing marathons but regardless, it’s really hard to watch this, it’s heartbreaking. I can truly see the hurt in her when somebody has been painted all bad. They have deceived her. They have turned on her, she’s been betrayed. The reality may be different but the feeling is real, very real and it’s hard.

Devaluing

When I got painted bad for breathing too hard or some such, or it may even have been for cooking dinner thus causing a threat to her control because that’s her thing and she likes to be praised for it. Either way, when I got painted black, I have seen it so many times, her expression changes almost in slow motion, her whole demeanor changes, then she attacks.

In my experience, splitting is a chronic mental illness on its own irrespective of what causes it.