Splitting

Most humans are, well, human. We have good AND bad characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures.

When we view ourselves in black and which terms, we therefore have to distort reality a bit. If we are all good, what happens to the bad parts of ourselves?

Psychologists refer to this cognitive distortion as “splitting”.

The term refers to the idea that to achieve the “purity” of being all good, we “split off” the things we don’t like about ourselves and assign them to other people, outside of ourselves.

In this state, we idealize ourselves for being pure and free of “bad things” and devalue the other person for having all these bad things.

The splitting process works in the other direction too. We see someone else as perfect, idealized, the hero or savior that meets all our needs; and we devalue ourselves as dependent, impotent, bad, toxic and lost without the other person.

In survival mode, life is a zero sum game – and if you’re good, I’m probably not, and vice versa.