Fighting

So I've always been really confused about what an ethical way to fight with an intimate is. My parents are no help on this. They fight in the most dramatic, button pushing way they could. It's all name calling and ultimatums. The only real good lesson I could take from them on this is that they stay together through the fights. It works for them somehow.

There's this thing called "splitting" that happens with a lot of people with personality disorders. Now I am not copping to having a personality disorder, but I am gonna cop to descriptions of personality disorders being strongly reminiscent of my own thought processes. And frankly the more I learn about diagnoses the more the boundaries of various diagnoses seem to bleed into one another.

So splitting is black and white thinking about the people in your life. It means your friends and family either are categorized as good or bad. You can't hold in your head that a loved one may be basically good and well intentioned, and yet frustrate you. Supposedly most kids can't hold this idea in their head for the first three years of their life, and getting that idea down is a developmental stage that a lot of people with personality disorders still have to go through.

So I've definitely had a problem with splitting and still struggle with it sometimes, although treating my depression medically made this dramatically easier. Splitting is really hard for the person doing it because you swing between two self concepts constantly. Like maybe you have a boyfriend who has done very sweet things for you and who you have had good times with. And then he does something shitty, like dumping you. Since you can't hold in your head the idea that the person who gratified you and the person who frustrated you are in fact the same person, your internal dialogue goes something like this:

God, Don is a dick!

No, Don, made me dinner and gave me gifts and cuddled me, he's a GOOD person, I must be a bad person for him to dump me.

No, I did all those nice things for him I must be good and he must be EVIL to dump me.

No, he can't be EVIL, so it must be me that was evil and abusive.

No, I'm not abusive, so he must be terrible.

And so on.

Being the person who someone splits on is intensely disorienting and frustrating, but I still think it's worse to be the person splitting. Swinging between thinking you're an absolute piece of shit or thinking you are surrounded by absolute pieces of shit is terrible. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

But I wouldn't have to wish it on anyone because lots and lots of people do this. And I think anyone when placed in a sufficiently stressful situation would resort to this kind of thinking. People who normally can hold the idea that everyone is a mixture of good and bad probably indulge in black and white thinking when they're going through breakups too.

It seems "it's only a problem when it's a problem" is the mantra in mental health. For me, it was a problem. I got locked in black and white thinking quite a bit and it definitely interfered in my life and ability to sustain relationships.

Part of my black and white thinking is I had constant insecurity about whether I was an abuser. I had this insecurity before I started dating anyone. You would maybe think this would be a helpful check on my behavior. NOPE. If a partner was upset with me the only options were that they were an abuser or I was. And if they're an abuser, I'm allowed to do very dramatic things in response to them, like calling them up and screaming. And if I'm an abuser, then me calling them up and screaming is definitive proof of it.

I had to have a therapist explain that you can fight in an inappropriate or unhelpful or mean way, and still not be an abuser. That there's a continuum going on there. You can regret things and try to do better without having "abuser" be part of your self concept. Non-abusers are still going to frustrate you, sometimes they're gonna be self centered, sometimes they're gonna be mean. Basically good people will sometimes act like jerks. In fact, they almost definitely will.

I try to fight fair. I try not to call people names. I try not to say "always" or "never." I try not to scream. I fail a lot.

But something that seems to be harder for me is giving my intimate acquaintances the same benefit of the doubt. When I fight with people there is always an hour at least where I consider ditching them forever. I have ditched many a friend in my lifetime, and it's not my grievances with them were unreasonable. It's just that friends are going to inevitably give you really good reasons to be pissed off, and that doesn't mean you don't want to hang out and laugh with them in the future. Friends don't need to be everything to you. People have annoying patterns that yeah, maybe they are not going to work on and change, they will be 70 and still pissing you off, and YET. They might be really valuable people who bring a lot to your life. And you are not going to feel close and peachy with your friends all the time. You might have some years where you think they are perfect, and then some years where you are not sure why you're friends, and then years where they're perfect and wonderful again.

You gotta listen to people's feedback and yet also take it with a grain of salt. Other people are also splitters. Hardly anyone is a good at fighting fair. You're gonna get called names, you're gonna be issued ultimatums, people are gonna say you're evil, unless you're hanging out with a bunch of Buddhas. You don't have to believe them, but maybe the action of yours they're reacting against does need to get criticized, and if we were all perfect, maybe that criticism would have been delivered in a non-threatening gentle perfectly effective way.

I mean, don't hit people, don't mess with their bank accounts or online stuff, don't call them 30 times in a row, don't call them names. (That last one you probably are gonna do though.) There is a real line between "person who is a jerk sometimes" and "person who is ruining my life." Your relationships should in general make your life more enjoyable. And if someone is consistently doing these things to you, maybe you can look at them and see that they're suffering, and also see that you putting up with it is very very unhelpful to them. They gotta grow up, and you aren't helping them by sticking around. If you need to see them as evil to get away from them, that's not so bad.