Here’s what the process of idealization leads to devaluation is all about: Children see objects (entities) in their world as “all good” or “all bad.” Like the stories they love, only heroes and villains inhabit the land in which they live. Their tender young egos cannot make sense of complex characters with variegated personalities. Integrating good-and-bad traits within one person overwhelms them, but what do you expect? Adults have trouble with characters like Walt Kowalski, the retired autoworker played by Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. On one hand he’s a loathsome racist; on the other, a sensitive father figure to a young Hmong immigrant who lives next door to him. If you found it hard to make sense of Eastwood-as-Kowalski, how can kids make sense of complex personalities that refuse to identify who they are by wearing either a white or a black hat? They cannot, but fortunately a child’s ego comes equipped with “factory-installed” defense mechanisms that enable him to cope with complex personalities: The process is called “splitting”— bifurcating the world into idealized or devalued objects that gain the child’s affection or incur the child’s loathing. If dad is good to a child he is loved. If dad yells and scares a child, he is hated. Kids don’t allow for dad having a bad day or getting cut by a broken glass. Normally, the need to employ the splitting defense wanes as a child ages. For some, however, it does not, and the child remains a splitter into adulthood. People in his world are put on pedestals one moment and knocked off the next, making intimate emotional relationships a pipe dream. Even non-intimate relationships with narcissists are nightmarish: What constitutes “great work” on Monday can become “unprofessional, inappropriate behavior” by Thursday, for reasons discernible only to seers, soothsayers, or shrinks. If you haven’t seen splitting in action you will: Narcissists regularly rise to the top of workplace hierarchies owing to a unique ability to secure approval and admiration, two forms of recognition they need to survive in the way the rest of us need oxygen and water. Worse yet, narcissists are able to ascend to the upper echelons of organizations without revealing their true colors until they amass enough power to make it unnecessary to sustain their façade. Once a narcissist can say, “screw you” with impunity, he will use splitting to cut the legs out from under everyone he previously set-up to believe they were cared for. To avoid being played in this manner, study the following five (5) characteristics of narcissists and the strategies for managing them. Failing to grasp what you are dealing with guarantees that a narcissist will make your life a living hell.
