Remember when you deal with loss and you think “It would be easier if I believe in something like a religion that can promise tomorrow would be better”. But you choose to be an atheist, because to you, having a false hope and later the consequences of those false hopes would be worse than facing the loss themselves. And that makes you a depressive, and not a rationalizer or a moralizer. (Anyway, atheists that need to read hundreds of books to convince themselves God doesn't exist so they don't have to do grief function on rationalization and intellectualization. That's why their emotional capacity to deal with loss is still zero.)
So yes, people are very aware of their defenses and actively choose what gives them the most advantages. I'm saying that because people keep referring to borderline as having no agency over their splitting. Like it's just something that happens to them totally out of their awareness. It doesn't. Maybe that one time in the past they chose to do it to get through a bad situation and make it a habit. The question is, with splitting many times leading to social and financial gains, do the consequences of splitting outweigh the benefits?