Transcription
Good day to all coronavirus survivors. Those of you who are watching this video, it's the third in a series about borderline personality disorder, the inner dynamics and interactions with narcissistic partners, narcissistic intimate partners.
In the first video, titled "Borderline Woman: A Dissociative Secondary Psychopath," we reviewed the current literature, current academic literature, and the most recent thinking about borderline personality disorder. This provoked a hailstorm of negative reactions from various self-appointed activists, self-styled experts, and borderline women. "Of course, we are not psychopaths! You are wrong! We don't dissociate!" etc., etc., etc. And I'm afraid this flies in the face of all the evidence we have currently. The thinking is that borderline personality disorder is a manifestation of psychopathy in women. It's a female manifestation of secondary psychopathy, mind you, not primary psychopathy, not the type de Jesus is described by Robert Hare among males, but another type of psychopathy, facto to psychopathy. Also, the current thinking is the borderline personality disorder involves dissociation to such an extent that it can be safely and reliably described as a form of dissociative identity disorder, or at the very least, as a form of extreme dissociation.
It seems that modern ability, lack of impulse control, externalized aggression, and other manifestations of borderline behavior have to do with alterations in self-states. The borderline is a diffuse identity. It has an unregulated, dysregulated core of emotions, and so it's not quite sure about its own boundaries. It uses its intimate partner and other people, but mostly its intimate partner, to regulate her internal environment. The borderline's dependence on her intimate partner is similar to the codependence and her terrified abandonment anxiety. The reason she's absolutely horrified by the mere thought of being rejected and abandoned is because the intimate partner, who feels very critical, ego functions. The intimate partner is the borderline's ego, in effect. And this is very similar to the narcissist. Indeed, as any therapist will tell you, so any psychologist will tell you, and as many borderline women will tell you, borderline personality disorder involves a very pronounced dimension of grandiosity and narcissism. So the two disorders are very much alike in some senses. For example, the borderline also has the equivalent of a false self in many respects. Both narcissistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder may be forms of multiple personality disorder, as it used to be called, or dissociative identity disorder, as the currently maligned.
The second video that I've made had to do with the borderline's reaction to abandonment and rejection, especially by a narcissistic partner. The borderline tells the narcissist, "I know you're going to abandon me. I know you're going to reject me. I know you're going to abuse me, and I'm going to do this to you first. I'm going to abandon you preemptively. I'm going to reject you before you reject me. I'm going to dump you before this happens." So this is the second video. And today, in the third video, I would like to describe in great detail the sequence, the sequence of external events and internal processes, inside the borderline and outside, as she encounters or expects rejection and abuse. So stay tuned, it's going to be storming.
It all starts when the borderline thinks that she is about to be rejected or abandoned. Now, pay attention. A borderline reacts to three distinct states. She reacts to actually being abandoned and rejected when the evidence is indisputable, indiscernible. She reacts to behaviors of the intimate partner which she misinterprets or interprets as rejection and abandonment, even if these behaviors are utterly innocuous and innocent. For example, the partner has to travel in business, or the partner goes out with friends, or the partner is not available when she wants him to be. So this is interpreted as rejection and abandonment, or even abuse. And she also reacts to anticipated abandonment and rejection, even when there's no hint or sign of it. Even within the lock, more big fish is always this thought circulating in her mind: "He's going to dump me. He's going to abandon me. He's going to reject me. He's going to abuse me. He's going to correct me. He's not safe. He's going to hurt me." And this is because her personal history is replete with dozens of such cases. She is simply extrapolating from her personal experience in the past into the future.
So she anticipates abuse. When her anticipation leads her to aggress against the intimate partner, for example, to abuse the intimate partner, of course, this creates a vicious cycle, and the partner withdraws. The intimate partner becomes less intimate, withdraws, isolates himself, finds alternatives, becomes an alcoholic, I don't know what, develops addictions. And this is again perceived as rejection and abandonment. The borderline brings on, brings about her worst fears. Her anticipatory and pre-emptive behaviors are the ones that bring about what she had been dreading all along. And so, if the partner is a narcissist or a psychopath, usually this will involve abuse because narcissists and psychopaths have something called reactance. They can't regulate their impulses, and they are defiant, and they react with extreme abuse, disproportional abuse, in a way they catastrophize the abuse to the slightest frustration. So they have a very low threshold of frustration and a very high aggressive response.
So when the borderline does this, when she constantly pricks, she constantly questions, she constantly and abuses in small ways and big, when she becomes passive-aggressive, the psychopath and the narcissist reacts with extreme aggression. The aggression can wear many forms. It could be unknown, silent treatment, could be verbal abuse, could be even physical abuse. At that stage, the borderline reacts with a primitive defense mechanism which is typical to two years old or one year old. And this primitive defense mechanism, which survives only in certain mental health disorders such as borderline, such as narcissistic, so this defense mechanism is called splitting. Splitting is the common name. Today, the clinical term is dichotomous thinking. We all come across splitting in immature or rigidly immature people. These are people who tend to divide the world into black and white. You're with me or against me. You're my enemy or my friend. You're all bad, you're all good. And they switch, they pendulate like a pendulum between these two positions. So the same person can be all bad yesterday and was a wonderful person tomorrow. So this is splitting.
The minute the borderline perceives rejection and abandonment, she's pleased. And her intimate partner, the person she loved most, the focus of her universe, the pivot around which her life revolved, at that instant of perceived rejection and abandonment, at that instant, that very person becomes the embodiment of the reification. He becomes a hated enemy. He becomes a villain. And so, following splitting, the borderline is faced with a series of possible strategies. One strategy is to disengage, to detach, to move out. And many borderlines do that. They run away. Another strategy is to triangulate, to introduce the third party into the relationship in order to revive or resuscitate the positive emotions, love, for example, the fire, jealousy. So another strategy is to manage the relationship with jealousy, not with intimacy, but with jealousy. So in this case, the borderline will ostentatiously flirt with another man, or even abscond with another man, go away with him for the night, or behave in ways which will provoke the partner into extreme feats of jealousy. Or else the borderline will put it, would provoke the partner to notice her.
Coupled with this, coupled with this transformation of the intimate partner into a persecutory object, and coupled with strategies, dysfunctional strategies, dysfunctional attachment strategies such as running away, such as triangulation, capabilities, there is an internal process of dysregulation, pain, anger, paranoia, which is essentially a projection of the borderline's own aggression. All are internalized, and the borderline is overwhelmed by these emotions. She simply cannot survive these emotions. They are too much for her. She feels that she's drowning. She fears that she can't breathe. She feels that she's on the verge of doom. This imminent perception that she's about to utterly disintegrate into molecules, which is about to dying, it's the equivalent of emotional death. Dysregulation is one of the most horrible things to experience. And in borderline, there is concurrent dysregulation of emotions and moods. So she not only reacts with pain, anger, etc., but she also becomes dysphoric. She develops the equivalent of point-like clinical depression, and she feels that she absolutely must get away from the source of her frustration, pain, and rage. She must get away from the source, and that source is, of course, the erstwhile intimate partner. She must dump him. She must get away from him physically. She must abandon him before he does this to her. She must preempt the abandonment. She must reject before she's rejected.
At that point, her impulse control disintegrates. She no longer can control her impulses. In the best of times, borderlines cannot control impulses. They are so taken over by dysregulated emotions and moods that they don't have the energy needed to control urges and drives, and their decision-making process becomes irrational and very disrupted. It's a disruptive process, and they, for example, cannot weigh properly the consequences of their actions. They don't have an analytic mindset which predicts the future and relates it directly to actions in the present. So in the best of times, there's a problem with impulse control, but when there is a question of rejection or abandonment or abuse, real or imagined, the dysregulation leads to extreme impulsivity, which involves an externalization of aggression. The borderline's mental resources are insufficient even when everything goes smoothly and well, for example, during the love bonding or honeymoon phases. But when things begin to go awry, the enormous amounts of pain and rage inside her can no longer be contained, and they are externalized. Technically, she becomes a psychopath, because psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder is an externalization disorder.
So she, for example, could spot a stranger and decide that he is her solution. She would immediately adopt that stranger. She would flirt with him aggressively. She would offer him sex openly, and she would try to co-opt the stranger to collaborate with her in, for example, triangulate. If she chooses the triangulation strategy, if she wants to run away, she will pick up a small bank and just board the next bus, train, or on the next train. She doesn't know where. So whatever it is, it's going to be impulsive, it's going to be improvised. She's not going to think it through. She just has to act because acting is her palliative measure. This is how she overcomes. She self-medicates against pain, and pain is intolerable and unbearable and threatens her well-being, mental and sometimes physical.
Let us continue with the scenario of the triangulation. So she finds a stranger, she hits on him, she flirts with him, she picks him up. And frequently, she will do it in the presence of the intimate partner as a way to kind of provoke him into jealousy, to noticing her, or even to punish him as an externalized form of aggression. But then, when she absconds with a stranger, when she is no longer with the intimate partner, there is a feature that is unique to narcissists and borderlines, and that is object inconstancy, object impermanence. Out of sight, out of mind. The minute she abandons the intimate partner, runs away, aggresses, picks up a stranger for casual sex, whatever it is, the minute she is no longer physically with the intimate partner, the intimate partner is all but gone. She does not remember the intimate partner that she recalled or experienced the emotions she used to have for the intimate partner. Actually, even in the best of times, many borderlines carry with them objects, mementos, trophies of the intimate partner to remind them of the intimate partner when they are not with him in the same room. This is very an infantile and disorganized personality. Children have this. Babies have this object impermanence or object inconstancy. When mother leaves the room, as far as the baby is concerned, she's gone forever. She had never existed, and the baby starts crying. So it's the same with the borderline. She leaves her intimate partner, and he's gone forever. That's he had never existed. And all the emotions she had for him, and all the memories they shared together, all the experiences they went through together, they are all erased. And when I say erased, I mean utterly erased. He never crosses her mind. First split second.
And so from that moment on, she feels alone. She feels independent. She feels free. There's no concept of sexual exclusivity or monogamy, or he's waiting for me. There I have to go back, or she's his. Out of sight is out of mind. His out of existence. He had never existed. It's kind of rewriting of history, formatting the hard disk. And she starts from zero. She starts afresh. She starts new. With a borderline, every day, every minute, every hour is a new beginning because she doesn't have a continuous core identity. She has a series of self-states that interchange and replace each other. And so she's in flux. The borderline is a river. You can never step into the same river twice, and you can never encounter the same water line twice.
From that moment, for example, if she had found an alternative, a substitute for an intimate partner, another man, from that moment, that other man is her force. He is her new source of internal stability. He regulates her internal functions. He is her new friend, and he is also her new protector because borderlines go through life perceiving themselves as maidens in distress. They need rescuing. There's always a villain somewhere, usually they paint their partner. There's always a villain somewhere, and she's always looking for another man to rescue her, to protect her, to shield her, to support her, to provide her with succor, to sacrifice himself for her. And when the man she picked up, she had picked up, is grandiose, when he is not assisting, it caters to his need to be perceived as superior, as omnipotent, as godlike. And so they complement each other. Borderlines tend to pick up narcissistic men by assigning to them the role of protector and rescuer.
As the time passes, the borderline develops results, immediate intimacy with that new man. And the old intimate partner, only a few hours ago, is long forgotten, had never existed, actually. She teams up with the other man, and she does everything with him. Together, they have become a couple. Now, this couple is completed. His diet can survive for a few hours, can survive for a few days, or can become a new romanticism. That's in the example of triangulation. When she runs away, for example, it's the same thing. She looks for the new, she looks to the new place or new location or she's going to. She looks to people she meets there. Is their rescue ambience? I call it pathological narcissistic space, as the place where she would be safe from her intimate bond. It's all about the princess in the tower complex. She is in need of a knight in shining armor to kiss her on her forehead or lips, preferably, and to wake her up from the stupor of abandonment, rejection, and abuse, which she had endured in her mind, if not in reality, with a previous intimate partner.
And then, of course, it's easy for her to engage in sex with total strangers. The stranger she had just picked because she had converted him in her mind into a new intimate partner, a protector, a rescuer, and so on. Both sexes generally, as far as borderlines are concerned, especially older borderlines who had been abused sexually as children. So as far as borderlines are concerned, the sex is pretty meaningless. It's meaningful to the men, but it's rather meaningless to the borderline. The borderline, the borderline tends to reward the men, to gift him with her sex because right now he's the focus of her world. She cares about it. She's attracted to him. She's grateful to him, her rescuer. She wants to serve him as he is so whole, to make him happy, to care about his well-being. It's all about the men. She gives the men her body. The men can service himself with her body because she needs protection. She needs being. She needs to be rescued.
Similarly, when she would go to a new environment, she would become extremely promiscuous. Her promiscuity is a way for her to engage with multiple potential rescuers and protectors until she homes in on one. And then, you know, there's a lot of bombing phase. Temporary. Doesn't the sex? The sex serves also to restore her self-esteem. She feels desired. She feels the center of attention. She feels, which is narcissistic, she feels wanted. She feels noticed. She feels deeply abused. It takes away the effects of the abuse, the humiliation of the rejection, and the fear of abandonment. Now her self-esteem is restored. She's validated. She feels strong. She feels determined. And now she can break up with the previous intimate partner, if she bothers to do it. Very often they simply vanish. There's no closure, no breakup, no announcement, no nothing. Poof, they're gone.
However, there is a very complex inner process in the borderline. This borderline is a premise, is the outcome of childhood abuse, exactly like narcissists. But as opposed to narcissists, borderlines retain a modicum of empathy. This empathy is very functional empathy, but it's full-fledged empathy. It includes emotions, the emotional component. So borderlines have empathy. And as distinct from most narcissists, they also have negative emotions which are ego-dystonic. In other words, negative emotions which the borderline feels bad with. Narcissists have negative emotions, but they're happy about these emotions. Narcissists are angry, for example, so they externalize their anger antisocially, and they use it, they leverage it to get places. So narcissists are pretty happy. For example, they're envious because they're envious, they are motivated to compete. So narcissists leverage the negative emotions in pro-social ways, actually.
The borderline has negative emotions which are ego-dystonic. They are uncomfortable. For example, the borderline feels she has a negative affectivity. She has guilt, she has shame, she has regret. Mostly she is afraid to be caught in the act. If she cheats on her intimate partner, she's afraid to be caught cheating. She's very aware of what other people think of her. And in this sense, she's highly narcissistic. She self-regulates via the gazes of the combined gazes of other people, exactly like the narcissist. The borderline has a hive mind, an outsourced mind. These two types outsource their minds because they have no internal environment. They don't have that identity is diffused. They don't have a core. So the borderline is very worried what would other people think of her if she's caught in the act. Also, it may lead to retribution. She's very paranoid. Her image is tarnished, and she's optional, sorry, feels very shame and very guilty for having hurt her previous intimate partner. And because she still retains some hope that maybe they could get back together.
But if the borderline has made a decision, an internal determination that the previous intimate partner is not safe for her, in the sense that he can reject her or abandon her again, forget about it. He's gone. Object inconstancy. In splitting, he becomes more bad, and he's horrible. Or if he is not forgotten, he's hated, and he becomes his transform or transmogrified into a paired memory, an evil memory. So in this stage, the borderline would start to confabulate. Don't forget that the borderline, for example, during sex, so she either personalizes, she feels that she's on autopilot, or she's observing herself, observing herself from the outside, or she derealizes, she feels it what's happening to her is a nightmare, a moving, not really. Or she becomes much more of, much more common, amnesiac. It's called dissociative amnesia. She simply forgets things. She can forget whole stretches. For example, there are borderline women who repeatedly forget sex scenes or sexual encounters. They dissociate them, they cut them with imaginary mental scissors, and they dump them in the wastebasket memory. So there's a lot of dissociation going on. These gaps, this lost time, the borderline has to compensate for.
And she compensates for these segments of lost time by confabulating. Confabulation is not like, it's not the same. Confabulation is the psychological mechanism, its generating of or creating an imaginary piece of fiction that is all the same plausible. It's like asking the question, "What could I have been thinking? What did I do reasonably? What would I have done, probably? What did I do? How did I act plausibly?" And then the borderline says, "Well, okay, if this is what I had done, probably that's how I acted plausibly, probably that's what I need." And that's, of course, a form of magical thinking. What happens in your hand is reality. So if you imagine what could have happened, if you imagine what was plausible, what probably went down, well, I mean, that must be the truth. So there's confabulation, filling in the gaps, failing in the pieces of lost memory with plausible, probable, reasonable pieces of fiction. This is not the same. Borderline life is knowing what had happened and lying about it, altering it. It's a borderline is not aware of what had really happened. She is trying to second-guess reality.
Borderline, the borderline's confabulations are ego-syntonic. In other words, she feels comfortable with it. She feels that they are really a part of her. She owns them, and they become an integral patch within the fabric of her identity. They, her confabulations are self-justifying. They are blame-shifting. "He made me do it. It's not my fault. He made me do it." This is called a low plastic defense, and borderlines have this a lot. They are never to blame. They never, you know, someone circumstances made them do it. Intimate partner made them do it. Rejection and abuse and humiliation, the perceived abandonment, all kinds of signs of cheating. They're very paranoid. They suspect their intimate partner of constantly cheating and constantly, you know, they're constantly jealous, and they address, they have aggressive romantic jealousy. They externalize it and become very psychopathic about it. That's why we increasingly believe that borderlines are actually psychopaths, secondary psychopaths, not the male type of psychopathy, but a female type of security. But be it as it may, the borderline's confabulations are an integral part of her. It's there.
Sometimes the confabulations are intended to restore the relationship with a previous intimate bond, to create a fluid narrative that will somehow accommodate everyone's needs. So she would say, "Yeah, I had sex with someone else, but I was drunk, you know, he got me drunk, okay, raped me." Or, "Yeah, I went away for a few weeks because I needed, I needed my private time and space to realize how much I loved this kind of thing." These are contributions. They confront contradicting, intended to bridge the amnesic, amnesiac gaps, but also to restore some normalcy to a situation that has been severely destabilized and damaged and disrupted by impulsivity, aggression, and defiance.
And of course, the borderline, most borderlines abuse substances. Many of them are alcoholics, drug abusers, junkies, and so on. And so they would very often shift the blame to the drug or to the alcohol. So they would say, "I forgot. I forgot. I don't remember the sex with the other guy because I had an alcoholic blackout." Or they would say, "I usually smoke weed. I don't know what happened. This must have been a special type of weed which made me do it." So they would shift, they would very often accuse the substances they had been abusing at the time they misbehaved. They know they misbehave. They're fully aware of it, but they can't own it because it's too disruptive. It's too ego-dystonic to tell them apart. It will create generation because they're not hostages. They feel guilt, they feel shame, they feel regret. And so if they own the misbehavior, they will be torn apart, and they would be rendered asunder and rendered asunder, and they cannot, they cannot accept this.
Post facto, they would tend to try to revive relationships with intimate masters, with intimate partners. Even if the borderline narcissist will try somehow to revive the relationship, they will keep in touch. Sometimes they would keep in touch in order to witness the intimate partner's pain and punishment. Sometimes they would keep in touch because they hope that whatever happened was a clarion call, a wake-up call, and you know, now things will get better. Sometimes they are simply afraid because of their projected paranoia. They are afraid of the retribution of the intimate partner. So what they would keep tabs on the intimate partner. They would try to regulate the intimate partner's vindictive impulse by controlling in line so as to create a narrative or a deed when partner would not feel so hurt, would not feel so aggressive and hateful. And sometimes they keep up, keep in touch with intimate partner after such a destructive episode because they resent the partner's moving, the partner moving on, negated that the partner gets over them or recovers. But they try to pull him back. They try to tear him apart as well.
Very often, borderlines treat shame and regret what they had done. Very, very often, many of them have autoplastic offenses. They blame themselves. They say, "You see, I'm so disordered, and so disrupted, and so broken, and I'm so damaged. It's hopeless. My life is hopeless." About 10% of borderlines attempt on my suicide. In certain subtypes of borderline, the figure is as high as 70%. For example, borderlines who are also diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, 70% of them tried to commit suicide. This 70% indicates an inner struggle against shame and guilt and other ego-dystonic emotions. And many borderlines are actually good-hearted and kind-hearted, and they try to provide closure. But they try to provide closure as they do all other things, dysfunctional. So they would try to provide closure by lying, for example, or confabulating, or providing soothing narratives. But this would backfire when the lies are exposed, and the confabulations are revealed, and the intimate partner is even more hurt and humiliated and offended against. And this massive deception in attempts to rewrite history and reality and so on and so forth. This is indicative of the borderline's inner landscape. It's a landscape of virtual alternative reality.
The borderline has no real reality. You cannot have a reality if you don't have an identity, and you cannot have an identity if you don't have self-love, and you cannot have self-love if you don't have object constancy. And if you cannot have object constancy if you constantly split. And all these are typical of borderlines and of narcissists. They just choose different solutions because borderlines are much more human than narcissists. We can recognize in a borderline our own struggles, our own pains, our own hurt, and how we try to cope with life's crises and tribulations. When we look at the narcissist, we can't empathize or sympathize with the narcissist because there's nobody there. And in the worst case, the narcissist is robotic and mechanical and utterly blank.