All-or-nothing or black-and-white thinking is a major symptom of borderline personality disorder. (BPD) My mother suffers from this devastating disorder and I use the word “devastating” because it was devastating for me to deal with my mother as a child. I look forward to sharing my knowledge about BPD and how I started developing similar symptoms (mostly black and white thinking) in my teenage years.
What is black and white thinking? This is also known as “splitting.” It’s like your personality right now splits into two extremes if I have to describe this experience in short words.
Wikipedia defines “Split” as follows:
“”Splitting” is the failure in a person’s thinking to unite the positive and negative qualities of himself and others into a cohesive and realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism used by many people. The individual tends to think in extremes.”
So why do people with BPD have all or nothing or black and white thoughts? Although we don’t know the exact causes, studies report that patients use this as a defense mechanism to protect themselves, and in fact, young children have this same self-defense mechanism before they learn to trust their primary caregivers (mainly parents). ). That is why it is extremely important that the main caregivers are constant and let the baby know that they are and will always be there for him/her. As the baby learns to trust and accept the concept of object constancy, she gradually learns to trust other people and begins to see the world in a more coherent way.
My childhood experience with my borderline mother was that she was unpredictable, and it was literally like walking on eggshells. As a child, I tried to make sense of my mother’s behaviors in the hope that I could somehow control her temper, but in reality, there was nothing I could do and no one else could control extreme thinking or blank thinking. and my mother’s black.
My mom probably didn’t even know why she felt so crazy all the time and it was almost like she was at the mercy of her emotions that she had no control over. She constantly split up and saw me in black and white too. I was the oldest daughter she was lucky enough to have one day, and the next day she should go to hell with me because she was trying to make life difficult for her. She didn’t intentionally make life difficult for her, but she was a child, so it wasn’t realistic for me to live up to all of my mother’s expectations.
This is very interesting because I started to develop black and white thinking and my exes let me know that it made them feel like they were walking on eggshells. I never wanted to put anyone through this because I know what it’s like to constantly fear that I’m upsetting someone, and the consequence of that was pretty dire.
There are many theories about the root cause of black and white thinking, but it actually makes sense to develop this effective defense mechanism, especially if you grew up in an unstable home. I never really learned to trust my mom that she will be there for me unconditionally and she accepts me for who I am. That means she loves me despite my flaws and even if she gives me constructive criticism, she makes me feel like she accepts me for who I am. Unfortunately, that never happened. Not only that she was inconsistent, I never knew what she really taught me when she expressed her love and hate towards me as a child in extremes.
I felt terrified and started to develop this hatred of her as a child when she would say all these mean things to me and I felt suffocated and guilty when she was extremely sweet the next day. I just wasn’t sure what to make of it and it confused me about who I was, and I think I started to see my mom in black and white. I was able to deal with such scary situations because one day I was dealing with a “bad” mom and I was dealing with a “good” mom when she was extremely nice. It could not have integrated these two extreme figures. Of course, I knew my mother was both good and bad when I was a child, but at the time of her horrible attack, I had to deal with the fear by telling myself that it was the “bad” mother who came out of the closet.
If you go through that daily in your childhood, the way you deal with this issue starts to affect different areas of your life and it is inevitable that you develop and adopt this dysfunctional defense mechanism because it worked at one point in order to survive the terror. Again, I’m using the word “horror” because it was really scary to see my mom go crazy and at one point I feared for my life.
I ended up developing this unhealthy thought pattern in my adulthood, so the main goal of therapy has become to unlearn this pattern because you can learn to let go of these unhealthy thoughts. Black and white thinking no longer works for me as I am no longer subject to that level of unpredictability. Realistically, I am legally protected if someone causes that level of fear and threatens to harm me in any way.
But my struggle to unlearn the unhealthy pattern of black and white thinking is still going on, but it’s getting better every day, but consciously acknowledging and becoming aware of unhealthy thinking causes more stress than anything else.
