splitting

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Hi. I have question - are Aspies able of "splitting".
Definition: “Splitting” is a term that describes difficulty with the ability to hold opposing thoughts, feelings, or beliefs about oneself or others. In other words, positive and negative attributes of a person are not joined together into a cohesive set of beliefs.
Thank you.

Yes. The degree of seperation of those ideas (he's a bad person, but a good worker) may differ from NTs in younger Aspies, based on some accedotal stories.

Thank you Agent. Can you please elaborate more on this topic. English is not my maternal language - and have a hard time to understand what you said.

Sorry to bring up an old thread. Could someone please elaborate on the term? Is "splitting" an Aspie behavior?

Not specifically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_%28psychology%29

It's more commonly seen in people with borderline personality disorder, and can explain their hair-trigger shifts from "I hate you!" to "I love you, don't leave me!". It has to do with the inability to see people as a collection of good, bad, and neutral traits, instead seeing them in black or white terms, switching between the two depending on the current input. The person who hates you one second and loves you the next is actually hating and loving different people in their mind, though the wouldn't put it that way themselves, because they've split the whole of you into good and bad version, hence the term 'splitting'. It's unpleasant to be around, I'd suggest avoiding people who do it.

"Splitting (also called black and white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking) is the failure in a person's thinking to bring together both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole."

Black and white thinking is said to be an Aspie trait, so it figures that we'd likely think like that. I've got a tendency to see people as demons or angels, just as I see inanimate objects as goodies or trash. It's not a defense mechanism, just a cognitive error, probably made worse by my upbringing (family was quite black and white about good and bad people). Having been aware of it since my ASD diagnosis a few years ago, if I'm trying to decide what to do about a difficulty with a person, I try to bear in mind that I'm prone to polarising people in that way.

A few years ago I knew somebody who really believed people were either very good or very bad to the core. It was quite a shock to see it in action on such an extreme scale. She wasn't officially diagnosed with anything but her counsellor was clearly worried about her. She did go from liking me to hating me and back again very suddenly.