People with Borderline Personality Disorder, for example, experience intense black and white thinking, which can in turn affect their perceptions of their relationships with others and with themselves.
Borderline personality disorder is a mental illness that causes people to experience intense feelings of anger, anxiety, and depression. They often will have symptoms of poor impulse control and frequently display black and white thinking.
Black-and-white thinking is sometimes a symptom of a personality disorder, like narcissism or borderline personality disorder, as well as eating disorders, depression, or anxiety, according to APA. Many people engage in black-and-white thinking even when they don't have a mental health diagnosis.
Splitting (also called black-and-white thinking, thinking in extremes or all-or-nothing thinking) is the failure in a person's thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both perceived positive and negative qualities of something into a cohesive, realistic whole.
Quiet BPD vs.
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIH) describes borderline personality disorder as marked by erratic mood swings, poor self-image, impulsive behavior, extreme “black-and-white” thinking, self-harm, and an inability to maintain stable interpersonal relationships.
People with BPD are often affected by several types of distorted thinking. Some ways that a person with BPD thinks include having paranoid ideation, dichotomous thinking, and dissociation.
Someone suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) may start giving you the silent treatment. Manipulation, difficulty controlling and regulating emotions, and the consequences of fear of abandonment are the most common causes of this behavior.
While extreme, black-and-white thinking can be a form of coping during the traumatic times, eventually it becomes a habit that no longer serves you as an adult. It fosters intense insecurities that need constant reassurance and results in missed opportunities, because of misjudging a situation.
Symptoms of BPD
A tendency to see things as one extreme or the other – a.k.a. Black or white thinking. Severe mood swings. Unstable or distorted self-image. Continuous and rapid changes in one's opinions, values and/or interests.
Examples of BPD splitting behavior include: Perceiving everything in black and white: Splitting forces the person into a position of thinking that everything is either perfect or awful, and since life is full of struggles and disappointments, they will usually see things as awful.
BPD splitting is a symptom of borderline personality disorder (BPD). It's when a person sees everything as black or white, good or bad, or best or worst. Splitting is a defense mechanism people living with BPD use to deal with emotions (such as the fear of abandonment) that they cannot handle.
Emotional Dysregulation
Bursts of emotion from both ends of the spectrum show in people with ADHD, like explosive anger or wild excitement. People will describe this as having emotions that are hard to hide and difficult to regulate. Those with ADHD may also struggle with black-and-white thinking.
One of the most common misdiagnoses for BPD is bipolar disorder. Both conditions have episodes of mood instability.
"Black and white thinking" is a common manifestation of immature thought; thinking that is rigid, stubborn and often extreme, with few 'grey areas'. Examples of black and white thinking are: The teachers all treat me like crap. Everybody hates me.
Borderline personality disorder is a mental illness that severely impacts a person's ability to regulate their emotions. This loss of emotional control can increase impulsivity, affect how a person feels about themselves, and negatively impact their relationships with others.
It is a common defense mechanism and there is no middle ground. Examples of this type of thinking are: 'If it's not perfect, then it's useless. '
The cognitive pattern of black and white thinking is a very common trait of autistic people. It refers to a tendency to view situations, emotions, and ideas in absolutes or extremes.
A childhood abuse survivor will often learn to categorize situations or people in black-and-white terms (for example “safe” or “unsafe”) to protect themselves from experiencing further harm or abuse.
These experiences include turbulent aversive affects, negative core beliefs (i.e., that one is “bad” and “worthless”), incoherence of inner experience, hostility/anger, emptiness, a sense of helplessness, loneliness and self-destructiveness as well as fears of abandonment and anxiety [13–16].
High-Functioning BPD Symptoms
Those experiencing high-functioning BPD often alternate between pushing people away and pulling them in closer, and may similarly fall into patterns of idealizing and then devaluing others. They tend to exhibit quick switches in emotions, such as going from very happy to very irritated.
Separations, disagreements, and rejections—real or perceived—are the most common triggers for symptoms. A person with BPD is highly sensitive to abandonment and being alone, which brings about intense feelings of anger, fear, suicidal thoughts and self-harm, and very impulsive decisions.
People with BPD score low on cognitive empathy but high on emotional empathy. This suggests that they do not easily understand other peoples' perspectives, but their own emotions are very sensitive. This is important because it could align BPD with other neurodiverse conditions.