The good-bad split
What happens when a defense mechanism runs amok?
Not too much content from my evangelical past has stuck with me to my post-and-decidedly-anti-evangelical present. The number of authors, speakers, and musicians from that tradition that remain in my life is roughly the same as the number of love languages, or members of DC Talk, or enneagram personality types. Certainly fewer than the number of books in the Left Behind series.
But still on my shelf (well we’re still unpacking, so it’s in a box) is Henry Cloud and John Townsend’s 1992 classic, Boundaries. You’ve probably heard 13 seminars and 5 sermon series on boundaries, and hopefully you’ve talked to your therapist about them countless times! They are an important and popular topic for building healthy relationships, and I honestly think Cloud and Townsend—two clinical psychologists—are mostly responsible for their popularity in evangelical contexts.
This blog post isn’t about boundaries, though. It’s about another book written by Cloud that same year (okay it was just a refresh of a previous book he’d written): Changes That Heal. I am not necessarily recommending this book, as I barely remember it. But it introduced me to a concept I have been pondering ever since I first read it 15 years ago.
One of the four basic developmental skills humans learn as they grow, Cloud claims, is sorting out the good and bad. Like the other growth processes—bonding with others, separating from others, and taking on adult responsibilities—it is important and healthy to differentiate good things from bad things. It is, in fact, a defense mechanism, as our ability to identify and dodge bad things helps to keep us alive.
The thing about defense mechanisms, though, is that they sometimes take on a life of their own.
When defense mechanisms attack
This process of sorting good things from bad things is often called “splitting,” as we are splitting our world into two tidy categories: good and bad. Those people, activities, and ideas that are good are welcomed into our lives, while those that are bad are kept out (via boundaries!).
Sounds maybe, sort of, okay? Bring on the good! Keep out the bad!
The problem is that life is not sortable in this way most of the time. All the people you know—you, me, world leaders, saints, unhoused folks, doctors, Catholics, incarcerated people, dog walkers, Republicans, deep sea divers, Taylor Swift, and clowns—are complex, beautiful, thinking and feeling marvels capable of (and guilty of) both lovely and horrible things.
To be clear, some people are much more harmful than others. Some will bring you much more joy than others. So you still need to sort out who will be in your life and who won’t. But that is NOT the same as labeling some of them as Bad and some of them as Good. They are all both bad and good. Accepting that nuance is the work of a lifetime.
“So what?” you might be thinking. But if we keep on splitting everyone, there can be real consequences in our relationships (and our brains):
We might become so loyal to the “good” people that we overlook their very real flaws or harmful behaviors, even enabling their worst inclinations.
We might write off everyone of a certain group as “bad,” both closing us off to many possible relationships and fueling deep-seated prejudices or innate biases we hold.
We might mark a particular person (an ex-partner, for instance) as “bad” and expect others to join us in our slander or hatred of them, since we think these good-bad labels we have created are obvious and binding.
We might seek excessive validation from the “good” people in our lives, constantly pinging them to make sure the relationship is legit and that they still love us.
I have thought of the good-bad split recently in some of our Harbor discussions as we have tackled some thorny biblical stories and characters.
The Bible: nuance optional
This splitting mechanism was so, so prevalent in the Bible-reading that many of us learned in evangelical settings. Paul—hero. Peter—impulsive hero. Abraham—made a couple mistakes but hero. Jacob—what a rascal but doggonit, hero. David—um listen no one is perfect, hero. Judas—traitorous villain. Pilate—cowardly villain. Pharaoh—oppressive villain.
No nuance. Just a neat and tidy sorting of all characters into good and bad.
For the more progressive folks I now run with, readings of Paul seem to be very mixed. Some still like him, some more or less despise him. If we try to make the case that Paul wasn’t actually misogynistic or homophobic, that it’s only misinterpretations and mistranslations of his words that made him sound that way, are we just trying to hold onto that “good” label for him?
But on the other hand, if we write him off, call him names, and say we’re done with him (as I have done multiple times), have we just flipped him over from the all-good column to the all-bad one?
I don’t have answers to any of this. Just my observations after pondering some Henry Cloud stuff for 15 years. But I do remember Cloud’s recommendation to keep growing in our navigation of good and bad: acceptance. We try to accept people as they are, not a near-perfect nor a demonized version of them.
And that’s true whether the person is a long-dead apostle or the face looking back at us in the mirror.
