Reality Bites

In the last lesson, we talked about splitting: a defensive mechanism or coping strategy our brains use to protect us from the intolerable feeling helpless and hopeless: like neither we nor others can meet our needs. This defense mechanism develops in childhood, and tends to persist into adulthood. 

Splitting can feel great. I already AM my ideal-self. I’m totally safe, secure, perfect. Everything that I need, everything that is good, exists within me. Self-esteem can’t get higher because there is no gap between my ideal and real self. What could go wrong?

Well…er…what about reality? 

Our brains are learning machines, constantly gathering evidence to update our models to reflect and predict reality. This belief that we are fully self-sufficient and all good is threatened by evidence from the real world every single day. 

To accommodate this contradictory evidence, we tend to project any evidence of being “bad” or “imperfect" onto other people. This is the origin of the term “split” – we take the good and bad within ourselves. Everything good we attribute to ourselves, and everything bad we “split off” and assign to other people that we already don’t much trust. This leads us to idealize ourselves (we have everything we need) and devalue others (they’re everything that’s bad). 

While this split state can feel good, it makes self reflection challenging. It often leads us to ignore important information about ourselves, attributing it to other people. We lose track of our own flaws and have a hard time being effective in the world. “I’m not a jerk…they are a jerk” quickly spirals into “no one likes me so everyone’s a jerk.” Our needs for belonging can’t get met till we start to realize that the jerk, perhaps, is us.