![]() If one teacher won’t support you, see what another says. If mom says “No,” then see what dad will say. As any parent knows, children learn early on how to “divide and conquer” when it comes to getting the things they want from their caretakers. Now, in recent times, unfortunately, the term splitting has been used to denote the very conscious tactic of pitting one entity against another. So, extreme degrees of internal splitting can result in a fragmentation of the self through such mechanisms as dissociation or even multiple personality formation. Underdeveloped and poorly integrated personalities not only separate difficult to integrate external “objects” or persons this way, but they also “split” into disparate parts aspects of themselves that are hard to integrate into a cohesive whole. They actually “split” a single entity into two opposing realities, conceptualizing for example a mother who has both a gentle and a terrifying side as alternately “good mommy,” or “bad mommy.” As a result, they will often alternate between over-idealizing and devaluing the same person. ![]() And, it’s much more than just seeing both a good and a bad side to everything. So, they unconsciously separate or “split” objects into two categories, seeing the “good” side of a person or thing as the part they find acceptable and the “bad” side of the person or thing as the part they find painful or unacceptable. Relatively underdeveloped personalities, most especially borderline personalities, have a hard time incorporating into consciousness seemingly contradictory aspects of the same person or thing. Splitting is a term that came out of classical (psychoanalytical or psychodynamic) schools of thought and refers to an unconscious ego defense mechanism by which a fairly complex entity cannot be accepted into consciousness in its entirety because it contains aspects that are both acceptable to a person as well as unacceptable. And, like some of the other terms I’ve been posting on, it’s also been subject to considerable misuse in recent times. The term “splitting” is another one of those terms. I’ve been posting on several terms frequently used by mental health professionals that are not only encountered in mental health settings but also with increasing frequency in common parlance.
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