Contents:
I - Introduction.
II - What is splitting?
III - How is splitting a defence?
IV - Why does splitting happen in trauma?
V - Effects of splitting on the developing psyche
VI - How splitting causes an undeveloped self
VII - Death anxiety and the true agony behind splitting in trauma
VIII - How to recognise and heal splitting
I - Introduction
In this article I will try to explain what splitting was in my recover journey, how it's a defence mechanism, and why does it result in an arrested emotional development and prevents the emergence of a healthy self. Finally, I will show some strategies which helped me overcome it.
In my recovery, splitting was one of the biggest obstacle. Recognising it, understanding it, and healing from it, was pure agony, and the most important step in becoming whole. This topic is very seldom touched upon in support forums and that is why I decided to write this text.
II - What is splitting?
Splitting is a defence mechanism by which a person polarises a pseudo-moral judgment of people, objects, and ideas to such an extreme that it becomes all-bad or all-good. I said "pseudo-moral" because for morality to exist there needs to be a developmental condition met - a healthy self, which is absent in people who split. Therefore the moral judgment is intellectualised, narcissistically masked flight, fight or fawn response at worst, and at best is just a naive value judgment.
The polarisation is so strong that no object can withstand such a projection and remain intact. By intact I mean the gravity of being all-this, or all-that. All good or all bad. It’s the quality of a god or a demon, not of everyday things or people. Since no object, as it is internally represented, can withstand that magically inflated extreme -- the judgment has to oscillate between both extremes. One minute, a person, an idea, or a fact even, can be seen as a saviour, the best friend ever, the next day -- a persecutory bad-will agent, whose only goal is to destroy and hurt. The oscillation in itself prevents from a cognitive dissonance.
In my life, this process was mostly applied to romantic partners, my own identity, my jobs; in other words, anything important.
Splitting is used to defend against unwanted feelings or emotional states. But I will describe what these feelings and emotional states are in the context of childhood trauma later. For now, it is important to understand why splitting is an effective defence mechanism, because at first glance it appears to be a cognitive distortion and not a self-protective measure.
III - How is splitting a defence?
Splitting is a defence in that it's connected by association to the judged object, in other words: the unspoken effects of splitting are defensive in nature, not the obviously irrational process of it. To illustrate, imagine there is big wolf about to eat you. If your goal is survival, and you consider this survival in the context of your relationship with the wolf - which is something a vulnerable person would do. Then your best choices at maximising the survival are twofold: either assume the wolf is completely evil and dangerous, and avoid it or kill it, or if the wolf is a more distant danger, not one directly in front of you, but is a part of the “dangerous nature” -- try to befriend it and apply almost magical awe to the animal. A mature response, one grounded in general safety and reason, would be somewhere in the middle, a wolf can be dangerous, but potentially we could try to tame it if we are careful enough. But the vulnerable person doesn't have the benefit of safety, a factor that can somehow bring his thinking closer to reality. In the life of a person with trauma, a lot of things are either or in this way. Especially as children we need to maximise our opportunities at survival, and the best way of doing that - to defend against death - is to go all in. All in in a fight response, all in in a fawn response.
In the same way, a soldier who goes to war actually needs to split his enemies as all bad. This increases his chances at survival, because he will not see them as human and will be able to shoot, but also it defends against the unacceptable feeling states that he encounters if he realises he is an actor of death and destruction - but still human. He is no different than his enemies. This nuanced thought while correct in times of peace, is an obvious disadvantage in times of war, you will hesitate before shooting. You will die if you don’t enter that magical realm.
This is a crude analogy, but in a nutshell, I believe, this was the splitting I experienced.
And while that response is reasonable and actually works to an extent in times of almost-certain death or trauma, this doesn't make sense in nuanced interaction with other people or ideas when you’re safe, and you’re an adult. These interactions are too complex to be so crudely relegated to be governed by magical thinking and wishful fantasies of either-or. Therefore splitting is maladaptive and is indicative of trauma, or of an emotional development arrest.
IV - Why does splitting happen in trauma?
Just like the dangerous wolf or the horror of war, we were exposed, from the very start, to dangerous, life-threatening conditions. These could have been emotional malnourishment (death of ego), and physical or sexual abuse. We were welcomed to the world in strife, suffering, and a constant fight for survival. Hence splitting. And the problem here is twofold. On one hand, there was emotional or physical danger, which threatened our biological safety or developing self, but on another, the paradox of familiarity in childhood abuse. We were abused by the ones we are programmed to love - and this is the unthinkable emotional states that splitting is guarding us against: this realisation. That what we think is love, is in fact death. We mistake the fake self, for the true self. We think our parents love us, when in fact they show through act and speech: “we would rather see you dead, or if not that, we would rather see you be a slave to our deficiencies and misery. We will likely sacrifice you in order to feel a bit better about ourselves - you are expendable.”
V - Effects of splitting on the developing self
I believe trauma causes emotional arrest. Lack of a true self, which requires unconditional love from the mother or father causes a deficit. This deficit hampers emotional reality testing, and in effect causes splitting as a defence against the realisation of a lacking self. A failure to integrate positive and bad qualities of the other person. A failure to see them as real. And the need to see them as extensions of one’s own adaptations to perceived faults. It’s a very vampiric way of relating to others.
In this context splitting is a literally biological safety valve which comes before any semblance of maturity and presents as an infantile developmental stage. Not a subconscious response to emotional arrest, but a safe guard against abuse and danger. If not resolved, it results in a personality that is primed for extremely dangerous conditions. In other words, a personality structure and its characteristic splitting is an a-priori adaptation. In other words, it’s literally synonymous with trauma. Splitting is the byproduct of an almost “schizophrenic” representation of others in one’s internal world. And while that is my completely personal interpretation of it, it didn't come out of thin air — I lived in that mode of relating for decades. Once you get out, once you free yourself of this curse, it’s unbelievably sad that your world, up to that point, lacked any nuance, and the people that inhabited it were truly one dimensional. They were either threats, potential abusers, or potential saviours, rescuers. And since no one can withstand that expectation - even real abusers aren’t all bad, as in ALL bad - then these two perspectives blended into one another, shifted at the slightest of whims.
To sum up that point, from my perspective, splitting was a defence mechanism against trauma, and feeling states of the realisation that this trauma was caused by our loved ones, and which resulted in us being emotionally arrested — inhabiting a world somewhere on the border of what’s real and what’s imagined, where sadly our imagination was filled with nightmares and salvation fantasies. In simpler terms, splitting guards us against abandonment on one hand, and against abuse on the other. And since trauma-delivering parents need to be loved to secure our biological survival, we idealise them — and on the other hand they abuse us, so we subconsciously embody them with a fluctuation of an all-good and all-evil judgment since that secures our identity by virtue of anchoring us to something as opposed to total unpredictability, and offers hyper-vigilance as a tool in survival. That’s why I split.
VI - How splitting causes an undeveloped self
If I see you as an all-evil being, your humanity is lost. What makes me human comes about through socialisation, in childhood that is healthy mirroring. Seeing you being you, sometimes good and positive to me, or sometimes frustrating and hurtful. But capable of both. Even if there’s more bad than good I still can hope for your humanity to rectify things, and I can count on the same liberty, hope and flexibility. This being mirrored feeds my personality — I can try things out. I can make mistakes. I can become authentic; sometimes good and sometimes bad. I am allowed to be both, so I am both, and therefore I’m real.
If mirroring fails due to abuse or sub-par parenting, really bad things happen. I feared abandonment and/or trauma and learnt to split. This cannot be overcome for one simple fact: the parents do not provide a safe enough environment (don't tolerate our annoying nature as kids, or our emerging identity) for this to happen. Because of that abuse we cannot overcome splitting, for if we did, we would get punished, we would suffer, we would get abandoned, and a child is programmed biologically to avoid it. This creates a developmental context in which a child can pinpoint undesirable qualities and features of itself but these shift, therefore nothing true is allowed, because eventually it will be punished or, what’s worse, will shift ghost-like into being not-true. Utter chaos. A chameleon-like personality is preferred, as it's the safest. And the same is expected of others. A true personality cannot be integrated because its survival depends on the concealment of these traits, a half self appears at best, at worst no self emerges. People stuck in this protective stance against abuse, with nowhere to escape, often develop psychological problems. I know I did. And splitting in all this is just an externalisation of a protective cocooning of the real self, it is a necessary consequence of the trauma response we suffer from.
VII - Death anxiety as the true agony behind splitting in trauma
People with a this personality structure have a well-developed reality testing. They aren't crazy. They know reality as well as anybody. But we are to one extent or other, psychotic emotionally. I was stuck at some developmental milestone. Couldn’t get through. And I didn’t even knew I was this handicapped. I saw what it entails with my own eyes, yet I didn’t know why I did what I did. Why I had these overreaching, magical opinions of others and of myself. And there comes a big problem to resolve: confusion. I need to justify why I split, but I have no emotional resources to really do it correctly. I need to justify it because at the very core of it it’s fundamentally immoral. Not to say that people who split are responsible for it, since it’s an unconscious problem, but there is this gnawing call for justice from the outside world. It’s as if other people try to break through your shell saying: “please see me for who I am. I am not your abuser.”
For years, you fall short. These calls don’t get through - because you lack empathy to really understand what this way of relating is taking away from the world: dignity, hope, compassion, and reparation. So in recovery, I am extremely to close to realising I am splitting, and what that means is we are close to touching on our own emotional “psychosis”. We touch our empty self, and this triggers more than just death anxiety, since we are programmed to be, to exist. Freud said that there really is no fear of death itself, because no one has ever experienced it. What we fear is the loss of our essence, the loss of self which is always a result of death. But is not exclusive to death. It is also a property of a psychosis. And we can be said to be emotionally “psychotic”.
To be psychotic - or to not have a self - is fate often said to be worse than death. This touches on our fear of not only death, but of disintegration, of atomisation, of becoming void. What is supporting this theory is the proven fact that death phobia is inversely correlated with a healthy, strong ego. And I should know it, I suffered from it. The more you've been, the less you fear of not being. Much in the same way that losing your last penny is a disaster, while losing the same amount when you're rich is nothing. And we are beggars when it comes to true being.
The unease with which we treat fully psychotic people, the stigma, the heartbreaking stories of people who lost their personality due to brain injury, or the horrible flashes of that state induced by drugs -- all this goes to prove how primal is the fear against not death itself, but of irreversible psychosis - of not being. And this is the fear which fundamentally splitting serves to cover up.
VIII - How to recognise and heal splitting
How to recognise it? This was the hardest step in recovery. Because I had a half-self whose only goal was self-preservation in the assumed context of always-near hurt and abandonment, this was the clue that I had to get: I am a survival-machine, all my attitudes, beliefs, even interests had a component of ensuring or cementing self-preservation dynamics that served me so well in childhood, but which are maladaptive now. Everything that even in the slightest terms I could relate to avoiding abuse or unacceptable feeling states of disintegration was a good candidate to go on a list of: "potential splitting".
When I started therapy, I had a working, intellectually-sound belief that the world is an evil place. People are inherently bad, selfish, etc. And it is heart-breaking if you scan the support forums for CPTSD, codependency, or cluster B - even well recovered folks still believe that what keeps them safe is sticking to boundaries, in a world that is overwhelmingly toxic. We are told to practice techniques of boundary setting and assertiveness, and while that is obviously the first step in recovery, this is often accompanied by an unsaid perspective that: the world is full of hurtful, toxic people, and we should keep us safe. In my opinion this one belief is the secret source of splitting. And should serve as a recovery step, or a temporary goal is creating security in life. But which cannot be the end stance. It's an absolute statement and is based in fear and typical codependent other-focus. I had so many discussions with people in support groups, codependency anonymous meetings, or the internet, where people would say: but look at it realistically, the world is full of narcissists and toxic folks, it's our duty to keep ourselves safe. And like I said, while this belief is to some extent beneficial as a stepping stone in recovery and killing codependency, it is a black and white statement, is rooted in a victim mentality, prevents vulnerability, and stems from a persecutory ideation component in splitting. I, myself, and many more whom I observe who try to recover, go through a stage of intense interest as to the nature and roots of the abuse that befell them, it becomes an intellectual pursuit which "proves" the need for splitting. But in reality it only masks splitting, and paints it a logical response to an adverse experience of life. Life is mistaken for trauma here, and is not lived, it's feared. For these reasons I think more focus should be given to the mechanism of splitting and intellectualisation in childhood trauma.
I don’t know if it’s a universal advice, but for me splitting is a defence mechanism against the core wound: ultimate abandonment.
Not just being left or broken up with, but this subconscious terror from childhood which threatens with ultimate atomisation. When we are babies we are quite literally at the risk of death if we get abandoned. So the abandonment anxiety is really that normal fear of abandonment mixed with layers and layers of repressed, overhyped, inaccessible fear of death or psychosis. At least it was so for me.
This perspective was completely repressed. It’s not something that I ever felt. But it’s the only logical explanation as to the intensity of my fear which caused splitting. So I had to accept it and work with my therapist to unearth it - extremely hard since that fear originated before the age memories are fully formed.
So if we assume that is correct, what splitting is really is the drastic attempts to escape atomisation and the fear of death. A person who frustrates us, could leave us, and since they leave us, we feel subconscious certainty that this means ultimate abandonment: death or psychosis. Obviously that only makes sense in childhood, and was an appropriate approach then, but now… it makes us rage against others because we assume very deep inside that they are responsible for us getting killed. It’s masquerading as a rational fear of abandonment.
As adults, we guard against a non existent threat, and ultimately what we feel is the rage against the real or imagined abandonment in childhood. Physical, emotional, or just perceived due to non-perfect conditions. Because of that, we are fighting an “imagined dad”, we struggle against an internalised image of a punishing, death-bringing tyrant of a parent.
So my advice is this, whenever you feel like breaking up with your partner, whenever you split, whenever you devalue, are about to quit a new job, or lack fire your therapist - accept those feelings, because they are in fact absolutely correct. Don’t fight them. But recognise who they are directed against TRULY. More likely than not it’s gonna be a ghost of the past. A father/mother image that is so hated and feared it gets projected onto your partner, your therapist, yourself... But that is not your partner. It is not you. It’s the hate and unresolved fear of death from childhood. With a help from a therapist, access those early childhood disappointments, traumas or problems. It’s extremely hard to do that. Unbelievably hard. But fight ghosts where it’s appropriate to fight ghosts: the past.