What we’ve said about Splitting

“through a series of minor chronic frustrations that improve your ability to understand that the all good mom and the all bad mom are the exact same thing. So splitting develops when that process is interrupted”

“splitting means in essence that the person has a very difficult time integrating one's sense of self and sense of the object as a whole entity or as a whole person. So, you know, in normal, quote unquote, object relations, we're able to say, you know, person X has good qualities”

“Other characteristics with BPO are identity diffusion, a reliance on primitive defenses. Really, the big difficulty is difficulty integrating positive and negative aspects of relationships”

“idealization and devaluation is very human and we all do it. That's not the unique part. I think it's the degree and how it seems to be”

“Cohut talks about the twin countertransference, where people with these kind of pathologies, the way that they view the other people needs to be idealized to such an extreme extent that it takes on a magical, almost spiritual quality of shared specialness”

“they'll talk about this amazing relationship that was absolutely perfect. And then as they talk about more, you'll hear real discrepancies talking about how the relationship was perfect, but the partner cheated a lot”

“some lower level defenses that can be quite present. in people with lower level personality functioning are general paranoia. It's just a generally paranoid person. Are they always kind of guarded, looking out for people, taking advantage of them or trying to harm them”

“if someone thinks that their childhood is 100% great, generally, there's probably some defensive nature in that or splitting aspect, right? What is considered mature or at least normal is to be able to recognize both the positive and negative aspects of yourself and others”

“Her image of herself is such that even normal human lying is something that she is completely outside of her awareness”

“Splitting, right? The idea that things can be perceived as or treated as all good or all bad. This is a very common scenario in clinical treatment. You, the clinician, are going to be made all good or all bad sometimes”

“often what prompts the push away or is associated with the push away is a period of devaluation of the object. So splitting idealization and devaluation, that's DSM-5, criteria, right? And so splitting is utilized, if you will, unconsciously to push the object away or devaluation rather is utilized unconsciously to push the object away”

“they try to find and form an exclusive relationship with someone that meets all their needs. And this inevitably creates tension. The other person feels like they're going to get swallowed up, like they're going to get, I don't know”

“I think it's important to look for these processes in yourself. Everyone splits with enough strain”

“emotional development is a different set of skills or development than the cognitive intellectual development. So someone can be very high functioning intellectually and still be emotionally childlike or underdeveloped”