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 insights into BPD and how I started developing similar symptoms (mostly black and white thinking) in my teen years.
What is black and white thinking? This is also known as “splitting”. It is as if your personality at this moment is divided 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 defensive 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 really, there was nothing I could do or anyone 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 was constantly splitting up and seeing 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 because she was trying to make her life difficult. 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 ex-boyfriends 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 picking on someone, and the consequence of that was pretty serious.
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 that she loves me despite my flaws and even if she gives me constructive criticism, she makes me feel that she accepts me for who I am. Unfortunately, that never happened. Not only was she inconsistent, I never knew what she really taught me when she expressed her love and hate for me as a child in the extreme.
I felt terrified and started to develop this hatred towards her as a kid when she would say all these mean things to me and feel suffocated and guilty when she was extremely sweet the next day. I just wasn’t sure what to make of it and that confused me about who I was, and I think I started seeing 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. He could not have integrated these two extreme figures. Of course, I knew my mother was both good and bad as a child, but at the time of her horrible attack, I had to deal with the fear of telling myself that it was the “bad” mother coming out of the closet.
If you go through that on a daily basis in your childhood, the way you deal with this issue starts to affect different areas of your life and it is inevitable that you will 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 “terror” because it was really scary to see my mom go crazy and at one point I was scared for my life.
I ended up developing this unhealthy thought pattern in my adult years, 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 black and white pattern of thinking is still going on, but it’s getting better every day, but consciously acknowledging and making myself aware of unhealthy thinking causes more stress than anything else.