What is Splitting with Borderline Personality Disorder?

hello this is dr. grande today's question is what is splitting in the context of borderline personality disorder if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel that way you won't miss any new videos now when we talk about the concept of splitting and borderline personality disorder it's important to recognize that splitting is a nonspecific term splitting is either a cognitive distortion or a psycho dynamic defense mechanism depending on how you conceptualize it but either way the concept of splitting has to deal with dichotomous thinking seeing things as either black or white a 0 or 1 and it's a term that refers to a behavior that we see with mental disorders and we see with individuals who don't have mental disorders so it's not specific to borderline personality disorder as I mentioned and it's not the same thing as the symptom criterion in borderline personality disorder that refers to unstable and intense relationships these types of relationships are an example of splitting but we can also see other types of splitting behaviors with borderline personality disorder in many cases so here I'm going to be talking about splitting as it refers to that symptom criterion and that symptom criterion is a pattern of unstable and intense relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation I'm going to refer to this idealization devaluation cycle as the love-hate cycle and again it's important to remember that this love-hate cycle is not synonymous with the concept of splitting we could also look at this particular symptom criterion as an indication of mood lability and again mood lability is not specific to borderline personality or either now if this love-hate cycle is observed that doesn't mean that somebody has borderline personality it's just one of nine symptom criteria that we see with this disorder now there's some characteristics that are specific to this particular symptom criterion or characteristic that we oftentimes see in conjunction with the symptom criterion so with this love-hate cycle we oftentimes see that it's related to just one person at a time oftentimes a new relationship and sometimes the idealization phase of the love-hate cycle can occur very quickly this is oftentimes the case if the individual has symptoms of histrionic person I thought at the same time specifically the one symptom criterion we see with histrionic Personality Disorder where they tend to assume relationships are more intimate than they really are so an individual with borderline personality disorder can of course have comorbid histrionic Personality with even if they just have that one symptom it would be more likely to see a fast idealization phase form another characteristic of this love-hate cycle is that it can continue even when the relationship is over most of the time of course we conceptualize this symptom criterion as applying to an active current relationship and of course the symptom criterion also is a pattern of relationship so we look through and see these active relationships over the course of a person's history but this love-hate cycle can continue even when the other individual the person that the individual bored line personalized would have had a relationship with even when they are gone and there can still be these periods of idealization and devaluation that carry the same extreme behaviors so the same mood lability can be present even if the other person isn't now we also see that this can cycle fairly quickly this love/hate cycle can occur in a course of days we can see the whole cycle in the course of just a few days or it can take months we usually conceptualize this cycle as occurring relatively quickly in a matter of weeks now even though we think of this love-hate cycle as an example of splitting sometimes we see ambivalence with this particular symptom criterion so it's really focusing more on the unstable an intense relationship compound and we don't always see the extremes of idealization and devaluation really clearly defined this is particularly the case in the devaluation phase of this cycle so an individual is really feeling a lot of hatred or contempt for this individual rather than idealizing them but there's still this ambivalence oftentimes because we have that fear of abandonment that's present at the same time these feelings of hatred are sometimes mixed in with a concern that the person will leave or recognition that the person meets some of that individuals needs so even though this is thought of as dichotomous sometimes we do see ambivalence here another characteristic specifically of that devaluation phase and the idealization devaluation cycle is that it tends to be triggered by a fear of abandonment that's oftentimes what moves someone from that idealization phase to the devaluation phase and again this is fairly consistent with feelings of ambivalence that tend to occur at the same time as the devaluation phase another characteristic of the devaluation phase is that it tends to co-occur with a lot of the other symptoms we see with more line person eye disorder specifically the feelings of emptiness suicidal behavior or gestures the frantic efforts to avoid abandonment and the constant anger however we can also see the remaining symptom criteria along with the devaluation phase which would be impulsivity affective instability paranoid ideation and identity disturbance so with this concept of splitting and borderline personality disorder it's important to understand the term splitting and how that relates to this idealization devaluation cycle I hope you found this description of splitting and borderline personality disorder to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 65,044

Keywords: Splitting, what is splitting, borderline personality disorder, borderline, personality disorder, cognitive distortion, psychodynamic defense mechanism, dichotomous thinking, unstable and intense relationships, idealization and devaluation, love-hate cycle, fear of abandonment, impulsivity, identity disturbance, suicidal behavior, emptiness, paranoid ideation, anger, affective instability, cluster b, dsm, dsm5

Id: PBeUZ1srtYo

Length: 6min 27sec (387 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 11 2018