I adored my mother growing up. In my early memories she is beautiful, capable, everything I wanted to be near. I did not notice the contradictions. I could not have - I needed her to be safe, and my nervous system worked very efficiently to keep that version intact.
By adolescence, the picture was harder to hold. She shared my private things. She read my diaries. She put me down in ways I only understood much later. I saw it. That is the part I have had to sit with. I saw it, and I explained it away. I built a case for the version of her I needed, and I held that case together for years.
What I was doing has a clinical name. I am going to try to explain it here in a way that is actually useful - not as a diagnostic category, but as something to recognise in your own experience.
Not rose-coloured glasses
There is a distinction that matters here, and I have found it worth being precise about.
Rose-coloured glasses describes a state where perception itself is altered - you genuinely do not notice the concerning behaviour. The negative information does not register. This can happen, particularly in early relationship infatuation, and there are neurological mechanisms behind it. But it is not what most of the women I work with describe when they talk about relationships that were harmful.
What they describe is different. They saw the lie. They registered the inconsistency. Their body responded - a tightening somewhere, a particular quality of going still. And then their mind moved very quickly to somewhere more manageable. An explanation arrived before they had to sit with the discomfort.
That speed is the mechanism. Not blindness. Not a failure to value themselves. Something much more fundamental, and much older than the relationship they are currently in.
Where splitting comes from
Splitting as a psychological term has a specific clinical history. It is associated with early attachment disruption and was first described in object relations theory. The version I am writing about here is not necessarily pathological in a diagnostic sense. It develops more broadly when a child's primary attachment figure is also a source of relational harm.
Think about what the nervous system faces when this is the situation. Attachment is not a preference - it is a survival mechanism. A child needs proximity to a caregiver to survive. When that caregiver is also inconsistent, frightening, or hurtful, the nervous system cannot metabolise both pieces of information simultaneously. "This person is my source of safety" and "this person is harming me" cannot coexist. So they do not. The mind holds one version, then the other. Usually the version that keeps the attachment intact.
The child who learned this did not choose it. The pattern was built under conditions that required it. It kept connection possible when connection was necessary. It was, in every meaningful sense, the right adaptation for the situation.
"It was like a hammer in my head," I wrote in my journal at one point, "the truth of it." That moment of clarity - and then watching myself explain it away anyway.
Why it does not stay in childhood
Adaptive responses do not disappear when the conditions that created them change. They travel.
The pattern that protected the attachment in childhood - hold the good version, neutralise the evidence for the bad, keep connection possible - is reactivated in adult relationships by anything that carries enough emotional significance. Partners. Close friendships. Sometimes the therapeutic relationship itself.
This is why women who have worked in therapy for years, who understand attachment theory, who can describe the mechanism clearly in conversation, still find themselves doing it. Knowledge does not reach the speed at which splitting operates. The explanation is constructed and delivered before the cognitive system has even registered that there was something to examine.
What I have observed in my own history, and in clinical work with women in midlife, is that the pattern often becomes more visible in the second half of life - partly because the capacity for managed distance decreases. The hormonal changes of perimenopause reduce prefrontal cortex capacity and increase amygdala reactivity. Suppression becomes harder. What was manageable becomes less so. The old pattern becomes visible in ways it was not before, and sometimes that visibility is the beginning of something useful.
What you actually feel from the inside
The internal experience of splitting is not what people expect when they try to identify it in themselves.
It does not feel like denial. It does not feel like avoidance. It feels, from the inside, like fairness. Like giving the benefit of the doubt. Like being the kind of person who can hold complexity without collapsing into reaction.
The explanations feel reasonable because the nervous system constructs them to be reasonable. They have to be. A flimsy explanation would not neutralise the threat. So the mind produces something coherent - a context that makes the concerning behaviour understandable, a narrative about the other person's stress or history or difficulty, a case for the good version that feels genuinely persuasive.
The body often knows before the mind gets there. The unease is real. The tightening is real. The sense that something is off is real. The difficulty is that the mind moves very quickly to process that away, and by the time it is finished, the person is holding a coherent account of why everything is fine.
This is not weakness. I need to say that clearly. I have seen this in women with deep self-awareness, strong clinical training, and many years of therapeutic work. The mechanism operates below the level at which that work reaches.
What the work actually looks like
The work is not about trying harder to see clearly. More vigilance does not help when the pattern is operating below conscious attention.
What I have found useful, clinically and in my own experience, is slowing down the moment of transition. The moment when the concerning thing has been noticed and the mind is beginning to move toward the explanation. That transition is where something else becomes possible - not a different conclusion necessarily, but a longer pause before the conclusion arrives.
This is not the same as assuming the worst. It is not about training yourself to distrust everyone or to treat ambiguity as threat. It is about developing a tolerance for not knowing. For sitting with "this doesn't feel right" without immediately resolving it in either direction.
The other piece is working with what was present in the body before the explanation was constructed. Leslie Greenberg, whose work on emotion-focused therapy I return to often, writes about productive emotional processing as contact with primary experience - the thing that was there first, before the secondary construction arrived. In the context of splitting, that means finding a way to stay with the initial response long enough for it to inform something, rather than having it immediately neutralised by a more manageable narrative.
For me, this has not been a clean or linear process. I still recognise the pattern when I am already deep in it rather than at the moment it starts. I notice the explanation has already been built before I notice I was building it. What has changed is that I catch it somewhat earlier than I used to, and I have a slightly higher tolerance for sitting in the ambivalence once I do.
That is not transformation. It is an incremental loosening of a very old grip. And for many of the women I work with, that is what the work actually looks like - not resolution, but a growing capacity to hold more than one true thing at a time about someone who mattered.