 Hello Shoshanim What are you doing here? It's sunny outside. Are you crazy to be cooped up with an old fat guy? And I'm still in between Moving to Budapest it's not easy to find a rental apartment in Budapest because they're all rented out via Airbnb money talks BS walks or in this case SV walks okay Today, I am going to upload a video Which is actually a compilation of previous videos that I've made it is an overview of borderline personality disorder And in reviews the most recent advances and and research Anything and everything is covered there from switching to self states To secondary psychopathy to acting out this and that everything is covered in in this Almost three hours, and that's why I call it the borderline bubble My name is Sam Bakhnin. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and Currently a professor of finance, and I hope you enjoyed the movie Learning about borderlines is a lot of fun Living with them a little more Honourous and difficult But who can resist them? Not me for sure My name is Sam Bakhnin, and I'm the author of Malignant self-love narcissism revisited and Don't tell me that you didn't miss this introduction Today we are going to discuss borderline personality disorder and psychopathy Wait a minute. You say Borderlines are the exact opposite of psychopaths. They have emotions. They have empathy. They are dysregulated They are not goal-oriented like psychopath. What gives? Well, it seems that we've all been wrong Borderline and histrionic personality disorders may be manifestations in females in women of secondary type psychopathy Secondary type psychopathy is a variant of antisocial personality disorder, a variant of psychopathy, which is measured by factor 2 factor number 2 in the standard PCLR test In other words borderline and histrionic women may actually be psychopaths A growing body of recent studies supports this extremely startling conclusion Let's add even more survivors of CPTSD survivors of complex post-traumatic stress disorder victims also manifest Psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors what I call psychopathic and narcissistic overlay So borderlines victims of CPTSD Encyclopaths or psychopathic narcissists or secondary psychopaths may actually be one and the same In the case of victims and survivors of CPTSD The psychopathic behaviors and the narcissistic choices The traits that develop they're all transient Not so in the case of borderline women Intimate partners of borderline women will not be surprised They are aware of affected by and familiar with The borderline woman's impulsivity Her defined grandiosity Antisocial and interpersonal aggression Her manipulativeness Her dysregulated negative emotionality paranoia lack of object constancy or object impermanence In other words out of sight out of mind attachment dysfunctions hostility splitting or dichotomous thinking They're all white or black High levels of distress anxiety depression and substance abuse This laundry list is typical of and common among secondary psychopaths, but also among borderline women And men of course, but the majority of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder are women These women also defy gender roles and behavioral norms They tend to be more masculine They tend to adopt an ideology of anything a man can do I can do better And in this sense, they emulate and imitate psychopathic men But the borderline woman adds a twist to this extremely toxic and pernicious cocktail And this twist is dissociation Whenever her stress levels Whenever her inner dissonance For example feelings of guilt and shame pain Expectation or anticipation of abandonment Whenever there's inner turmoil inside her When it becomes intolerable She hands over control to her inner secondary psychopath And then she proceeds to depersonalize To derealize or to develop amnesia All three are considered dissociative phenomena And we will discuss them at length a bit later As she hands over control to her inner psychopath She becomes malicious malevolent Some would say even evil When the borderline's life partner is another proud member of the cluster b tribe In other words, when her partner also suffers from a personality disorder A dramatic or erratic personality disorder When her partner is another borderline Or another psychopath Or another narcissist He reacts with equal measures of abuse to her frequent misconduct And the relationship ineluctably devolves into a kind of vicious power play And with numerous warping, cruel, mind games, sadism And this exacerbates the mental health outcomes for everyone involved Yes, even narcissists, borderlines and psychopaths can be traumatized Often are So let's go back to dissociation Dissociative depersonalization and derealization Are common reactions in borderline personality disorder But also in dissociative identity disorder DID, formerly known as multiple personality disorder Similarly, dissociation is common in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder Such as PTSD or CPTSD The experience of derealization and depersonalization Is variously described as being on autopilot Sliding into anesthesia or reverting to the status of an empathic or said spectator It is provoked by intolerable dissonance, as I said For example, when the borderline woman cheats on her partner When she is having ambivalent sex When she is breaking the law Or when she is breaching some deeply held morays and values In all these cases, which are just examples of dissonance She would tend to dissociate Why does she dissociate? What's the aim? What's the psychodynamic aim? Well, by dissociating the patient distances herself from the events From her pain and from anticipated abandonment and rejection By dissociating, she is no longer there There are these mechanisms of entrenchment and alienation It's like she is saying This is not happening to me This is just a nightmare This is not real Substance abuse and ambient destructions tend to exacerbate these reactive patterns And so we find borderline women with borderline personality disorder Bar hopping Or getting addicted to video games Or similar distracting activities Activities that are intended to take the borderline's mind off Off the cataclysmic agony that she is experiencing Off the impending doom of abandonment and rejection Off the guillotine of intolerable unbearable pain that is awaiting her once she is dumped And so these substance abuse and ambient destructions tend to exacerbate reactive patterns The patient ends up usually misattributing to alcohol or to drugs The behaviors wrought by her alters Wrought by her different self-states So here's the sequence She is in pain or she anticipates pain She can't take it, she can't tolerate it So she distracts herself, she distracts herself by drinking By engaging in all kinds of activities By having sex with a stranger She does all these things As she consumes drugs and alcohol for example So then she has amnesia Or she depersonalizes Or she cuts herself off reality, the realization And then in an attempt to explain to herself what had happened Why, why she can't recall anything She says to herself it must have been the alcohol Must have been an alcoholic blackout Must have been something the drugs did So she explains the subsequent amnesia Via the substance abuse But that's not the truth The truth is that another state of self has emerged Once the borderline is threatened with abandonment Or experiences pain and rejection Another self emerges The equivalent of an alter Alternative personality in dissociative identity disorder And this self that emerges is very often a secondary psychopath Borderline personality disorder can best be described As a subspecies of dissociative identity disorder The modulability and emotional dysregulation Are merely outward manifestations of changes in self states They represent switching from a host personality, A&P To an alter personality, EP The dissociative trigger in borderline personality disorder Is typically either actual abandonment Or the passive threat of rejection and separation From an intimate partner within an interpersonal relation And this results in unbearable abandonment Or separation anxiety This borderline is very low Tolerance of uncertainty and anxiety She preempts She generates the various situations that she is so fearful of So she's afraid of being abandoned She abandons She's afraid of being abused She abuses Indeed, severe dissociation is even now A diagnostic criterion of BPD Criterion number nine So borderline personality disorder is diagnosed partly Based on dissociative states When one of the alters of the borderline is a psychopath The borderline patient will be antisocial Impulsive, dysempathic, mendacious She will lie about everything all the time Aggressive and defiant She will be able to go for long periods Without any romantic or sexual liaisons During these periods She would be like a lone wolf in her lair This is something that borderline personality disorder patients Whose alters are not psychopathic Cannot ever countenance or do So when we want to differentiate the borderline personality disorder patient With a psychopathic self-state From a borderline personality patient Without a psychopathic self-state With some other type of self-state Let's say a grandiose self-state All we have to do is look at the patterns of behavior and existence Borderlines with a psychopath With an inner psychopath They are lone wolves They're schizoid They spend a lot of time alone And sometimes they are avoidant They avoid social contacts or society And borderlines with a grandiose self-state With a grandiose alter Not schizistic They would tend actually to seek company And they are incapable of surviving Even for one day without an intimate partner They feel horrible They come They feel abandoned They feel dead They feel dead inside They don't feel alive Unless there's someone who loves them Or someone they perceive as loving And caring It is a myth That people with borderline personality disorder Or even dissociative identity disorder Cannot fully control the behaviors And the choices of their altars They can This is why the courts Courts all over the world reject Borderline personality disorder And dissociative identity disorder As a mitigating circumstance As a defense They throw people in prison Even when it is proven beyond doubt That when they had committed the felony of the crime They were under the control of an alter An alternative personality Not the main post-personality According to Kavanaugh, Sullivan and Mulvey In a long forgotten clinical note Titled a clinical note on hysterical psychosis In the American Journal of Psychiatry June 1979 Well according to these three scholars Again Kavanaugh, Sullivan and Mulvey Some narcissistic and histrionic people Mostly women React with a transient form of psychosis To unwanted sexual advances But here's the surprise They react exactly the same way With psychopathy and psychosis Also When they are interested in someone sexually When their fervent sexual interest Is not reciprocated When they want someone And they are rejected by that person In the footsteps of Martin 1971 The three authors explicitly attribute Such decompensation and acting out In some cases To oral narcissistic structures in the personality And to immature object relations In other words What the three authors postulate Is that in women with borderline personality disorder They are internal narcissistic structures Which cause the borderline to decompensate And to act out sometimes psychopathically To sexual rejection Or to unwanted sexual advances In both cases I would add to this list Women who succeed Actually to bed To have sex with the men that they desire But are then abandoned Or ignored emotionally Contrary to their wishes and fantasies So three cases If there's unwanted sexual advance If the woman is interested in sex But the men is not Or if they both end up having consensual sex But then the men dumps her Vanishes, abandons her And ignores her emotionally In all three cases There is a process of decompensation All the defense mechanisms are switched off And acting out Acting out means reckless behaviors Such as unprotected sex Or binge drinking Or reckless driving Or a shopping spree And many of these behaviors today Can be described as secondary psychopathy The connection between brief reactive psychotic episodes And symptomatic manifestations of dissociation Including amnesia And even dissociative identity disorder This connection is well-established See for example the definitive work Dissociation and the dissociative disorders DSM-5 and beyond Edited by Dell and O'Neill Published by Rutledge in 2009 So when these women Borderline women disintegrate under stress Or trauma or pain Or anticipation or abandonment anxiety When there is this process of decompensation And disintegration The transition to dissociative psychosis Is abrupt and shocking It resembles switching From the core personality The host personality To an alter alternative personality In multicultural personality disorder Patients describe it as brain fog Though they may appear to be perfectly oriented and goal focused Very often you can't tell from the outside That this is happening to the inside On such occasions behavior changes markedly Becomes disorganized And then escalates to become aggressive Impulsive Disempathic reckless promiscuous and antisocial So while you can't very often One cannot tell when the switching took place After the switching had taken place And your personality emerges and takes over And this personality as you've just heard Is a psychopath Amnesia sets in much later And its aim is to repress painful And acutely uncomfortable egotistonic memories Which, had they remained in conscious awareness Would have provoked extreme shame, extreme guilt and remorse Where amnesia or fear Where amnesia is absent The borderline woman undergoes Deep personalization and derealization She fears that she was acting as an observer on autopilot Substance abuse, such as binge drinking or getting stoned As I said before, exacerbates all these mental health issues and defenses More generally, I've been arguing in the past few years To reverse Kernberg's hierarchy, Otto Kernberg He suggested a hierarchy whereby borderlines are closer to psychosis than narcissists I postulate that the narcissist is far closer to psychosis His personality is less organized than the borderline Only the narcissist's rigid grandiosity is keeping the narcissist together And when this grandiosity is effectively challenged The narcissist decompensates, acts out and disintegrates Grotstein postulated that the borderline is a failed narcissist The pathology did not progress or devolve into narcissism Which is a full-fledged form of binary dissociative identity disorder With two selves, the false and the true The narcissist's solution to this duality of selves The narcissist's solution to having multiple personality disorder With two selves, true and false His solution is to switch off the dilapidated trophid and dysfunctional true self And to relegate the true self to the deepest resources of the mind Where it has no influence whatsoever on the narcissist's psychodynamics So what is left? The false self Only the false self is left And this is the narcissist In contrast, the borderline fails to repress and dissociate the true self Where the narcissist succeeds to eliminate effectively the true self, the borderline fails Consequently, she never becomes a narcissist And this so-called failure causes the borderline's two selves, the true and the false To compete for control of her identity and her memories There is no such competition within the narcissist The narcissist is the false self Take away the false self and there's nobody there, nobody home With the borderline, there are two selves in conflict, in battle It is this inner struggle that mimics other dissociative disorders And led scholars such as Masterson, Dell, Patton, Ross, Ryle and many others To suggest that borderline personality disorder may merely be another label For the identity diffusion and alteration common in dissociative disorders So what we have in a borderline is a dissociative psychopath Dissociative psychopath usually with the pronounced grandiosity of the narcissist And the seductiveness and flutatiousness of the histrionic when they are provoked By abandonment anxiety Borderline personality disorder is a basket diagnosis It is a diagnosis that unites all cluster B diagnosis And its foundation is in trauma Therefore, via the conduit of borderline personality disorder We can begin to see a unifying picture These are all post-traumatic conditions And they all involve forms of all pervasive ubiquitous dissociation We are getting a sniff, we're getting a hint of the future The future will center around trauma and dissociation Psychopathy, borderline, narcissism These are different behavioural modalities They are not real clinical constructs This is exactly what led to the abnormal phenomenon of comorbidity This is precisely why we had to make long release Which overlaps so massively that we had to invent differential diagnosis Because these are not real clinical entities They are simply facets of the kaleidoscope that is the soul of a cluster B Borderline is another name for dissociation, post-traumatic dissociation And some borderlines act as psychopaths, others act as narcissists And all of them usually act as histrionic It's time to unify all these diagnoses into a single one A diagnosis of personality disorder with emphasis Personality disorder with grandiose emphasis With psychopathical, antisocial emphasis With histrionic emphasis and with dysregulated emphasis Formally known or called borderline Anyone with borderline will tell you that she switches between whole identities She doesn't feel herself in various states And before I proceed borderline personality disorder is equally diagnosed nowadays in women as in men I'm using the female pronouns because the vast majority of scholarly literature hitherto had focused on the manifestations of borderline personality disorder in women And yes, I think this is a form of gender bias and sexism in psychiatry and psychology Having dispensed with this disclaimer, this walk, walk politically correct disclaimer Let us proceed Borderlines switch between what looks to be Completely different personalities and identities It is eerily reminiscent of multiple personality disorder today called dissociative identity disorder But there are of course very important differences Anyone living with a borderline will attest that borderlines switch Especially when they feel rejected, humiliated, abandoned Or, on the very contrary, engulfed, assimilated, merged and fused with a love object They tend to switch I described all this in terms of self-states And no, I regret that I am not the one who came up with this idea It was Philip Bromberg Philip Bromberg was the first to conceptualize and propose the idea of self-states Rather than a coherent, unitary self Borderlines, like everyone else, have self-states But there is something very important, different about borderlines In addition to self-states, they have identity disturbance and internal emptiness And today, in this video lecture, I am going to discuss both of these concepts This lecture is a CEAPS, Center for International Advanced and Professional Studies lecture Part of the new syllabus on human sexuality and personality disorders that I have spent three years compiling My name is Sam Baknin I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited I am also a professor of psychology And very well acquainted, firsthand, with Borderline Personality Disorder And Narcissistic Personality Disorder Sometimes, on the receiving end Okay, Shoshaneem, time to delve in and plunge in and get immersed in the Sam Baknin or show Until 1980, with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 3 Borderline Personality Disorder was considered a form of Schizophrenia It was called Pseudonorotic Schizophrenia The ICD-8, the International Classification of Diseases, which is the world's DSM The DSM outside North America, mainly European So the ICD-8, Edition 8 and the ICD-9 Stated that Schizophrenia, and I'm quoting, entails a fundamental disturbance of personality That involves its most basic functions Those that give the normal person his feeling of individuality, uniqueness, and self-direction These experiential self-disorders were called Pseudonorotic Schizophrenia It was Otto Kahnbeck, who had suggested in the 1970s That some patients are on the border between neurosis and psychosis Psychosis is a fancy term for losing it So they were on the border between neurosis and psychosis That's why he called them Borderlines But people don't know that the original conception of Borderline Included what today we call psychopathy And narcissistic personality disorder In short, delectable characters People you want to spend the rest of your life with Okay Ling, who was a controversial iconoclastic psychiatrist Described the experiences of what he called Schizoid Schizophrenic Borderline cases He described their experiences as a lack of autonomous identity Personal consistency and temporal continuity They usually experience their self, he said, as disembodied, not connected to their bodies They feel empty, unreal, dead, and differentiated from the world So well into the end of the 20th century There was no real distinction between Borderline personality disorder Schizophobia, Schizoid personality disorder, and Schizotypal personality disorder Ling said, these patients are unable to sustain a sense of self as persons Which is why they are equally unable to experience neither separateness From nor relatedness to other people in a usual way They may fear losing their identity in a relationship As well as feel dependent on the other for their very being and existence That's an excellent description for Borderline Although Ling was actually talking about Schizophrenia In 1918, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 3 There was a very extensive description of identity disorders Which was later mysteriously removed from consequent editions It said, identity is manifested By uncertainty about several issues relating to identity Such as self-image, gender identity, long-term goals of career choice Friendship patterns, values, and loyalties Example given, who am I? I feel like I am my sister when I am good The DSM 3 continued to elaborate It said that identity is the sense of self Providing a unity of personality over time Prominent disturbances in identity or the sense of self Are seen in Schizophrenia, Borderline personality disorder, and identity disorder And yet, not a single edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Bothered to define what the heck is a self When the DSM 3, Edition 3 had been revised when a text revision was issued They added this Marked and persistent identity disturbance Manifested by uncertainty about at least two of the following Self-image, sexual orientation, long-term goals of career choice Type of friends' desire and preferred values Fast forward to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition 5 Published nine years ago, 2013 And they ventured a little into the territory of reforming the diagnostic criteria They didn't dare go all the way because of pressure from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries But they kind of hinted at what they call the alternative model of personality disorders Page, I think, 766 And this is what they had written What they have written in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition 5 Identity, markedly impoverished, poorly developed or unstable self-image Often associated with excessive self-criticism Chronic fillings of emptiness Dissociative states and distress Self-direction Instability in goals, aspirations, values, or career plans And then they find identity as the experience of oneself as unique With clear boundaries between self and others Stability of self-esteem And accuracy of self-appraisal Capacity for and ability to regulate a range of emotional experience Again, there was no definition of what is a self In the International Classification of Disorders They say that there are disturbances in and uncertainty about self-image, aims, internal preferences, including very important sexual preferences So this is identity disturbance When the identity, when the self, whatever they may be When this core, immutable core, the feeling that you are the same person from one minute to another The continuity of being you from one day to another are disturbed There are three types of identity disturbance to my mind One is cyclical Where the borderline and to a very large extent the narcissist Actually cycle between behaviors Which are mutually exclusive behaviors Don't characterize the same type of personality I would take the example of promiscuity Borderlines have stretches of unbridled self-trashing from obscurity Which is way over the top Extreme And then suddenly They hibernate They go into a state of celibacy and abstinence which could last years Now the two behaviors are mutually exclusive That's why we cannot say that borderlines are sex addicts Because they can go through long stretches of time without sex But they alternate, they cycle between these modes Between these identity states or self-states Between promiscuity and abstinence Abstinence and promiscuity are associated with mood disorders such as depression and with anxiety disorders So we can't safely say that the reason for the fluctuation of the cycling Is the mood that they had acquired depression and so consequently they became abstinent or celibate No, that's not the reason Actually borderlines are notorious for self-medicating and self-soothing with rampant Unboundary, unregulated or disregulated sex So it's not about mood It's simply an internal process Possibly a neurological process we don't know Which kind of regulates these transitions between identity figments or identity elements Which are utterly incompatible Then we have allotropic, allotropic identity disorders It's when there are two or three variants of the same person And there is an alternation between them subject to stressors, to stress, anxiety And environmental and social cues So the borderline may switch between borderline A, borderline B, borderline C And very frequently borderlines give names to these self-states as if they were separate people And this is the allotropic identity disturbance And finally there's object-related identity disturbance Preferences regarding friends, spouses, boyfriends, intimate partners, co-workers, role models, politicians, rock stars, etc. Preferences regarding other people These preferences reflect underlying values And yet there is no consistency, constancy and continuity with the borderline One day she could be held bent against extramarital sex The next day she could see nothing wrong with it One day a certain politician is her role model The next day she detests him One day the spouse or intimate partner is the center of her life The next day is the center of a twister So this is object-related identity disturbance The problem is that autobiographical memory, memory of one's personal history The narrative that is the glue that holds identity together is disrupted It's disrupted because of dissociation There's a lot of dissociation in cluster B Especially in narcissistic and borderline personality disorder Dissociation involves amnesia, forgetting things It involves depersonalization, the feeling that you're not really there And derealization, the feeling that what's happening to you is not real And so all these dissociative processes disrupt massively The ability to maintain continuous, smoothly flowing autobiographical memory Or even stream of consciousness And of course given these conditions It's impossible to form a core identity It's impossible to feel that you are yourself at subsequent moments It's like you're a different person every now and then This is intimately connected to splitting and other primitive defenses Where you can't see other people as a single unitary entity Where you divide people in dichotomous thinking into black and white Good and bad as if they were fragments of people Split of people, not real people And there is self-splitting The application of the splitting defense mechanism to yourself Splitting yourself, breaking yourself apart Unable to connect the parts This is very reminiscent as I said to other dissociative disorders I'm going to read to you from the DSM edition 5 I'm going to read to you what they say about other specified dissociative disorder They say chronic and recurrent syndromes of mixed dissociative symptoms This category they say includes identity disturbance Associated with less than marked discontinuities in sense of self and agency Or alterations of identity or episodes of possession in an individual who reports Non-dissociative amnesia And the alternative is identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion Individuals who have been subjected to intense coercive persuasion Brainwashing, thought reform, indoctrination while captive Torture, long-term political imprisonment Recruitment by sects and cults or by terror organizations These individuals may present with prolonged changes in Or conscious questioning of their identity I think they forgot one thing Abusive families Children who are subjected to abuse in early childhood Usually find themselves in a cult-like setting With a dead parent, a parent who is narcissistic, self-centered These children are subjected to what they perceive to be torture And so they are likely to show an identity disturbance Due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion Which is an integral hallmark and part of what today we call complex trauma Complex post-traumatic stress disorder In borderline personality disorder the DSM has this to say Criterion, diagnostic criterion number three Identity disturbance Markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self They elaborate in the DSM There may be an identity disturbance Characterized by markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self There are sudden and dramatic shifts in self-image I call it switching Characterized by shifting goals, shifting values and vocational aspirations There may be sudden changes in opinions and plans about career, sexual identity Values and types of friends These individuals may suddenly change from the role of a needy supplicant for help To that of a righteous Avenger of past mistreatment Although they usually have a self-image that is based on being bad or evil Individuals with borderline personality disorder May at times have feelings that they do not exist at all Such experiences usually occur in situations in which individual Fills a lack of a meaningful relationship, nurturing and support In other words, abandonment and rejection These individuals may show worse performance in unstructured work or schooling situations The French philosopher Paul Ricard suggested a typology Or not a typology, but let's say a deconstruction of personal identity He said that personal identity is a triangle There is what he called idem identity, sameness Ypse identity, self-hood and interpersonal relationships Idem identity or sameness refers to persisting yet malleable personal features Such as personality traits, your character, temperamental dispositions and values Which can change and do change over the span of a lifespan And also can and do change in the throes of social interactions These features are expressed in linguistic propositional terms And when you self-reflect, you can spot them Now Ericsson, the megamaster of human personal development The guy who brought it all together in my view Ericsson described the identity as referring to A conscious self of individual identity An unconscious striving for a continuity of personal character A criterion for the silent doings of ego synthesis And an inner solidarity with a group's ideals and identity Cernberg is one who introduced a self-concept Cernberg said that it's the integration of representations of the self But it's not clear Did Cernberg mean to discuss a person's beliefs about himself or herself? Beliefs that she can verbalize, thematize, I don't know express Or was he referring actually to sub-personal unconscious dispositional structures That only occasionally became actualized as a belief about oneself I don't know, through for example talking to me in therapy or treatment So that part remained unclear Go back three decades, from Cernberg to Deutsch Deutsch had written a seminal article titled Some Forms of Emotional Disturbance And Their Relationship to Schizophrenia She published it in, it was published in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, or Psychoanalysis Quarterly 1942 Deutsch said that there are groups of patients And she called them as if personalities It became a very widespread meme As if personalities It's patients readiness to mold herself according to the surroundings The patient anticipates the widely used characteristics of everyone around her And kind of shape shifts and morphs There's a famous movie by Woody Allen Zeleg, Zeleg is a chameleon He kind of shape shifts As the borderline patient, Deutsch described the borderline patient As having a chameleon-like adaptability to others Deutsch said that her patients were not aware of their as if personality Which is very similar to the idea of persona Or mask in Jungian Psychoanalytic theory It's very similar to Goffman's work in sociology or social psychology But she preceded, Deutsch preceded Oliver He preceded Oliver So they said, Deutsch said that the patients were not aware Of this mask, of this as if personality They felt an inner emptiness Which they tried to overcome by an exaggerated identification With other people Deutsch considered these patients to belong to the schizophrenia spectrum Actually, there was no borderline conception at the time Ericsson described what he called identity diffusion It's a psychoanalytic concept actually, which preceded Ericsson But Ericsson was the first one to suggest that identity is a mutual relation In that it connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself Self-sameness and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential character with other people So there is this Deutsch mask or as if personality And there is a feeling that you are the same person And if you put these two together, you get your identity Identity diffusion is when there is a disintegration of the sense of inner continuity and sameness There are difficulties in committing to occupational choices And difficulties with intimacy And of course all adolescents go through identity diffusion But if identity diffusion persists beyond adolescence It becomes identity disturbance And that is one of the main reasons We can diagnose borderline personality disorder Fairly safely in puberty Kernberg though provided the main contribution to formulating identity diffusion As a key pathology in borderline personality disorder Kernberg took all this aforementioned information And he said that identity diffusion is the lack of an integrated self-concept And an integrated and stable concept of total objects in relationship with the self So when we have a self-image or a self-concept And an image of others, a theory of mind of other people And other people's concept A concept which represents us and a concept which represents other people These are essentially internal objects But when they contradict each other When there is a conflict or a dissonance Between our self-image and the image of others in our mind This there is a split There is a split and inability to synthesize these two So it's on the unconscious level Or what Kernberg called the sub-personal level Klein described the mechanism of splitting And the association between excessive splitting And the disturbance in the feeling of the ego, as she called it She believed it to be the root of some forms of schizophrenia What about the experience of self? How do people experience a self? And how does the borderline experience her disturbed self, disturbed identity? On the experiential level Kernberg thought that identity diffusion is reflected in the patient's incapacity To give an integrated description of herself And of significant others These people, these patients said Kernberg They are uncertain about their major interests They don't know, they can't promulgate a consistent pattern of behaviors They are very chaotic Their commitments to work and to other people are very unstable So Kernberg's seminal, very important, crucial concept of borderline personality organization Includes patients with schizoid, paranoid, narcissistic, hypomanic, bipolar Antisocial personalities, impulse-ridden, impulse disorders As if personalities, psychotic characters in adequate personalities Patients with multiple sexual deviations and so on and so forth So it's a kind of a basket In Kernberg's terms, borderline personality disorder is a basket term Actually comprising most of what we call, most of the diagnostic and statistical manual He put together numerous categories Which at the time were considered strongly linked to schizophrenia What he was trying to do He was trying to create a schizophrenia light Schizophrenia light diagnosis Which he termed borderline personality disorder The capacity for reality testing And the relative intact ego boundaries in patients with borderline personality disorder He said these are the differences between borderline and schizophrenia Borderlines are still enmeshed and embedded in reality They can still judge reality more or less accurately By the way, they can judge reality better than narcissists do And their ego boundaries are pretty much intact Which is not something I can say about narcissists I therefore, as opposed to Kernberg, think that narcissists are the true borderlines Narcissists are the ones who are much closer to psychosis They're much closer to a disintegrative framework of self and identity They are very very close to hyperreflexivity In other words, a blurring of the lines between external and internal objects So I think borderlines are less severe personality organization Than narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder Feeling of emptiness have also been described But they've been described not only in borderline personality disorder They've been described in psychosis, depression, schizoid conditions, narcissistic conditions And borderline So emptiness is not unique to borderline What is called the empty inner core or the empty schizoid core characterizes all these people There are descriptions of a sense of being dead Deadness An absence of inner feeling A kind of gaping hole, a black hole, void Which many patients describe spatially, like in space They do this with their hands And many patients can even describe the size of the hole Small, big, fluctuating Borderlines very often say that when they're in love or in a relationship The hole, the emptiness becomes smaller It's a very common borderline utterance or description So there's an absence of inner feelings, a feeling of being dead Unresponsiveness There's a lot of intolerable boredom Superficiality Unhedonia, inability to enjoy anything or to find pleasure in life And deep personalization The feeling that you are not you That you are just an observer of what's happening to you On autopilot, so to speak These experiences are not permanent They're not a fixture, like let's say in psychosis They are fluctuating They're episodic, they are But they are chronic In other words, these conditions are likely to recur The condition of identity disturbance And the attendant emptiness and void They're lifelong They're likely to happen again and again and again But they don't happen all the time They're not like a permanent fixture or feature The feelings of emptiness in borderline patients They are the experiential consequence of an identity disturbance Or a disturbance in some sense of self When you don't have a core, when you don't have a self Of course you feel empty because there's nothing there As I keep saying, there's nobody home There's nobody there, it's a whole of mirrors It's empty space And so there's a continuum of experiences From a sense of incompleteness, vagueness A search for one's being To a psychotic conviction of actual personal extinction Or nonexistence, which is not common in borderline That's why borderlines keep searching for something Searching for meaning, searching for the truth They go from one cult and sect to another cult and sect They follow role models and thought leaders and public intellectuals They try to discover themselves via numerous therapies Conventional and alternative They're constantly on a lookout and a search Can but describe that patients with identity diffusion experience Various forms of emptiness Depending on the pathological structure of the personality So he said, for example, patients with schizoid personality Experience the emptiness as an innate quality That makes them different to other people There's a bit of grandiosity here Actually, I'm special, I'm unique I can never be understood by other people The experience of emptiness is related to phenomena Such as apathy and anhedonia, as I mentioned In these patients, in schizoid patients In patients with a narcissistic personality The feeling of emptiness is characterized by strong feelings of boredom and restlessness And this is a result of the potential lack of gratification from other people In other words, deficient narcissistic supply This, by the way, is also common to psychopaths And so the cutting-edge knowledge we have The latest thinking on the topic in contemporary phenomenology Philosophy, cognitive science We think there's a distinction between a narrative self And a core or basic or minimal self The core self is the first personal manifestation of all experience It's how you experience yourself in the world in you This experience is never anonymous It manifests as my experience It's identified with a core, with a self With a conviction of continuity and constancy Across time with what Rikko called Idem identity, the sameness Experiencing articulates itself in a first person perspective That's why we use the word, the pronouns I, me, myself Experience is always first-hand And this is a persistent, an experience gives us a persistent feeling A persistent sense of self-presence And self-sameness to use Ericsson's term This is the healthy, the healthy type of core self So it's a core self is a sense of self-coincidence The privacy of our inner world And a kind of boundary or demarcation between me and not me A unity of body and mind, a psychosomatic unity Or what we call embodiment in clinical terms An experience of existing in a special way A combination of being and becoming Having begun in or around birth And liable to extinction with death But transforming in the middle in ways which never negate the core So the core is the foundational fundamental layer And on this layer we have the narrative self The narrative self is an outcome of socialization and acculturation It's largely about language It's wholly about interacting with other people It's a story about you in the world, you with others The narrative self implies to use Ricard's term the who Who are you? Well, I'm introverted, I'm ambitious, I'm friendly These are all outgoing descriptions Descriptions that have no meaning If you were left alone in the whole world In a post-apocalyptic world You're the only human being These descriptions have no meaning You can never have a narrative self It's questionable whether you can have a core self The object relations school in the 1960s Also believed that you cannot have any kind of self Without object relations Without interactions with other people It normal experience The structure and the content of experience are interwoven They intermingled, entangled The structure of experience does not become an object of reflection Or object of experience It just happens You're just in it You are it in many ways The distinction is artificial But when you go to patients with borderline personalities Or when you observe patients with schizophrenia There are structural disturbances of self-experience There are distortions of first-person perspective There's an incomplete sense of substance Substantiality, embodiment There's a feeling of having divorced your own body sometimes There's a femoral sense of self-presence Very often these patients describe themselves as not here Or I was just observing myself Or an out-of-body experience kind of So the disturbance of the structural level of selfhood An instability of basic subject-world relation Also manifests as a disturbance of narrative features Including interpersonal functioning, emotional regulation, direction in life What I'm trying to say to the uninitiated Is that emotional dysregulation in borderline personality disorder Is an outcome of identity disturbance Contrary to what a few scholars say I think the opposite I think the directionality is from problems in identity formation To problems in regulating emotions And not vice versa The disturbance of the narrative level of the selfhood Is not in itself a structural problem It's not a major problem Being if you're confused about your career choice Or you're impulsive or you're unfriendly Or I don't know, you're extroverted and introverted It indicates some identity diffusion But there's no problem in differentiating yourself from others The demarcation, the boundary between self-presence and others Is perfectly okay But when the core identity is disturbed When the core identity is ruptured And you have identity fragments, self-states Pseudo-identities, sub-personalities Ego-states as they are called in some schools When you're not constellated as Jung said When you're not integrated There is no host, there's no center There's no pivot There's nobody there to regulate your emotions And cognitions actually So you have cognitive distortions And you have emotional dysregulation The criterion of chronic feelings of emptiness Is also an outcome of identity disturbance Of course if you have no identity and no core There's no one there and you would feel empty I would like to refer to a few recent articles That have attracted my attention Let's start with an article titled Autobiographical memories, identity disturbance And brain functioning In patients with borderline personality disorder An fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging Studying on this issue It was authored by Bosatello, Movesi and others And it was published in Helium Volume 5 March 2019 The authors say Identity disturbance is a core feature Of borderline personality disorder Autobiographical memory Is a process of reflective thinking Through which we form links Between elements of life and elements of self It can be considered as an indirect index Of identity integration With reference to the condition resolve Condition of identity disturbance When it's resolved, when it's ameliorated They found increased cerebral activity In certain areas of the brain An area known as ACC The anterior cingulate cortex And they also find enhanced activity In the right medial prefrontal cortex And the right dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex And bilateral insular All these were registered in BPD patients And not in controls Clearly in borderline There is some abnormality of functioning In the brain as we had suspected for a long time When the identity disturbance is not resolved Again borderline brain differs to normal brains There is increased brain activity In these patients In the bilateral ACC Bilateral DLPFC And right temporal parietal junction Hyperactivity in ACC and DLPFC In borderline patients With both conditions In other words, fluctuating between resolved disturbance And unresolved disturbance Is due, maybe due, to an inefficient attempt To reconstruct a coherent narrative of life events So this is the neurological background Let's proceed to another article Published in psychiatry research volume 271 January 2019 And it's titled Facets of identity disturbance Reported by patients with borderline personality disorder And personality disorder comparison subjects Over 20 years of prospective follow-up This longitudinal study This kind of study is very valuable It was authored by Mohamed A. Gadda Hannah E. Packer Your mind is in the gutter Get it out Catherine E. Hein and others And the highlights are Patients with other personality disorders Reported less identity disturbance over time Than patients with borderline personality disorder The recovery status in borderline personality disorder Is significantly associated With a decline in negative identity For three out of four inner states Three out of four inner states Recovered patients Had higher rates of decline In this problem of negative image Or negative identity Feeling evil or bad Showed a steeper decline in the case of non-recovered patients So that's good news It means negative self-image And the resulting disturbance to identity Tend to decline with age In both types of patients Patients who haven't recovered And patients who have recovered The abstract is interesting It says participants were followed And reassessed every two years For a total of 20 years of follow-up Borderline patients reported levels of these states That were more than three times higher Than personality disorder comparison subjects With both groups demonstrating significant declines In these states over time The good news For three out of these four inner states I feel like I'm worthless I feel a complete failure And I feel like I'm evil Recovered borderline patients had lower baseline scores And significantly different patterns of decline Than non-recovered patients When it comes to the fourth state I feel like I'm a bad person Recovered patients had lower scores over time But the groups declined at the same rate Even non-recovered borderlines Got rid of this perception of being a bad object A worthless object These results, say the authors Suggested borderline patients report experiencing inner states Related to having a negative identity Less often over time Additionally recovery status is significantly associated With decreased time Experiencing these states A very interesting article At least intellectually and philosophically If not clinically Was published by Maya Zandersen and Joseph Parnas It's titled Identity Disturbance Feelings of Emptiness The Boundaries of the Schizophrenia Spectrum It was published where else In the Schizophrenia Bulletin Volume 45, Issue 1, January 2019 And here's what they say Historical and current research on borderline personality disorder Reveal certain affinities with Schizophrenia Spectrum Psychopathology This is also the case for the borderline criteria Criteria of Identity Disturbance and Feelings of Emptiness Which reflect symptomatology Frequently found in Schizophrenia and Schizotypal personality disorder Unfortunately, the diagnostic manuals offer limited insight Into the nature of these criteria Including possible deviations and similarities With Schizophrenia spectrum symptomatology In this article, say the authors We attempt to clarify the concepts of identity disturbance And feelings of emptiness With an emphasis on the criteria's differential diagnostic significance Drawing on contemporary philosophy We distinguish between a narrative self And a core self Suggesting that this distinction May assist differential diagnostic efforts And contribute to mark the psychopathological boundaries Of these disorders Schizophrenia As opposed to borderline personality disorder Fascinating article Which would lead you to conclude and I think correctly That there are very very fuzzy and permeable boundaries Between borderline and non-sacistic disorders of the self Psychosis and Schizophrenia Including Schizophrenia light Like Schizotypal personality disorder And Schizoid personality disorder Onward Jewish soldiers To the Journal of Personality Disorders Volume 35 Supplement B The article is titled At the junction of clinical and developmental science Associations of borderline identity disturbance symptoms With identity formation processes in adolescence Very critical topic with borderline And the identity disturbance attendant upon borderline Associated with borderline And the resulting clinical features and symptoms of borderline All of them start in early adolescence Between the ages of 10 and 13 Most commonly 12 to 14 This article Timely article was authored by Shona Mastro-Kanbo Melanie Zimmery-Gembeck and Amanda Duffy Published in June 2021 And this is what they have to say Developmental scientists describe the raw confusion that can occur for adolescence As their forming personal identity Clinical psychologists describe low sense of self-worth Lack of self-clarity Feelings of emptiness and dissociation As the key elements of identity disturbance And they link this to borderline personality disorder Emptiness stood out as the strongest correlate of borderline symptoms Youth, young people reporting greater emptiness When nearly twice as likely to report a high borderline symptom profile So it seems that emptiness and identity disturbance Are the twin engines that lead later to full-fledged borderline pathology And to full-fledged narcissistic pathology Narcissistic pathology is a more egregious stage A more egregious form of the borderline pathology That's why Grossstein suggested That borderlines are failed narcissists Borderlines are children who didn't progress with their mental illness As far as narcissists, they stopped midway and they became borderlines Narcissism is extremely close to psychosis and schizophrenia It could easily be conceived as a post-traumatic state That leads inexorably and under prolonged stress and abuse From complex trauma to a disintegration of the personality Sense of emptiness that are indistinguishable literally From schizophrenia, schizotypant personality disorder Schizoid personality disorder, and of course psychosis This is all emerging in current literature and current debates And I encourage you to read, to download and read the articles that I've mentioned They are available on scholar.google.com Scholar, S-C-H-O-L-A-A-R .google.com Just type in the titles of the articles Which are available in the description of this video down And you will be rewarded with fascinating read Living with a person with borderline personality disorder And I have had my share of such experiences Is harrowing It's harrowing because you constantly have to mourn and grieve The person who is not there This absence This fluctuating, shimmering mirage And this process of grieving and mourning affects you And if you are also mentally ill And if you also suffer from identity disturbance There is a resonance, an amplifying resonance between these two identity disturbances There is a confluence and congruence Of the emptiness of your borderline partner and your own emptiness It becomes the equivalent of a massive black hole at the center of an illusory galaxy Some kind of a swirling vortex that threatens to digest and assimilate and swallow you And never spit you out This experience could be addictive Because both the borderline and her typically narcissistic partner try To appropriate the other person's identity As a sound and a medicine to their own identity disturbance And knowing emptiness, howling void They try to unnext each other, to digest each other, to merge with each other So as to form a complete person But the outcome is never a complete person The outcome is more of the same Exponentially so This is the sadness This is the sadness This is the frustration This is the maddening recurrence and repetition compulsion At the core of the narcissistic borderline couple And here I refer you to Jo-Anne Lechkar Jo-Anne Lechkar's pioneering work on the topic And she's about to publish a new book with the Rookledge About this But she had pioneered the film It is, by far, the most agonizing experience imaginable Because through the borderline you get annihilated You get disintegrated And you can't save her You can't help her You can't be her You can't provide her with surrogate or vicarious or Or by proxy existence She doesn't have her own And so she can't get it from the outside, of course And so if you have a fixer and savior type If you're the healer type There is no experience more horrible Even in therapy This inability to reach and touch something Because there's nothing there Is between terrifying and maddening in the sense that it can drive you mad Drive you crazy It's not for the faint-hearted You need to be very centered and very grounded To live with the borderline or with the narcissists Emptiness Identity and disturbance Personal discontinuity And so the show goes on You find yourself living With a kaleidoscope of people A circus A panoply A smog-as-board And every morning you get up And you're not sure who is in bed with you Who is sharing your life It's the closest one gets to a horror movie My name is Sam Baknin I'm a professor of psychology And the author of Malignant Self-Love Narcissism Revisited And many many other books that I have written And never read Now let's start with the basic fact The more empathy you have The more enhanced or increased your empathy is The older you are And therefore the more developed your empathy The less you are able to recognize Emotions in other people But wait a minute Baknin you say All of you at once You're wrong of course What you wanted to say Had you not been drinking so much Is the higher the empathy The more you are able to read other people's emotions Empathy is the condition For reading and understanding other people properly So if you have a high level of empathy You understand other people's emotions better And if you have a low level of empathy For example if you are a narcissist You are not able to recognize Decipher, decode and understand emotions in other people properly Right? Wrong Allow me to repeat Studies show That increased empathy An age-related increase in empathy Decrease Decrease as in down Your ability to recognize emotions in other people Yes, I know that all of this The self-styled, self-proclaimed experts online Are telling you otherwise But they are telling you otherwise For one simple reason They are not experts That is especially true for those whose names are bracketed with academic degrees real or fake The literature in the past 10 years at least Is pretty unanimous on this The higher your empathy The less, the less you are able to decipher, decode, understand And even recognize emotions in other people properly I refer you to studies The most recent ones By Israel Shvili Israel Shvili is a single word It's a family name Israel, like Israel Shvili By Agneta Fischer And by Nannis NAWNIS That would suffice These are one of the studies for example Involves 830 people So these are big studies And they show an inverse proportion An inverse relationship between empathy And the ability to recognize emotions And this fact is critical to the topic of today's video As today I'm going to discuss How borderlines and narcissists experience their emotions And before we go there Let me dispense with another idiotic myth online Everyone has emotions Psychopaths have emotions Narcissists have emotions Borderlines have emotions Histrionics have emotions Everyone has emotions Even Donald Trump has emotions Everyone The thing is that Narcissists and borderlines And histrionics and psychopaths Relate to their emotions Interact with their emotions Differently to what healthy normal people do In a different manner In a different way And another differentiating factor is that People with cluster B personality disorders Mislabel their emotions They mistake their emotions They feel one thing But they call it another They slap the wrong labels The wrong etiquettes on their emotions And this is today's topic A little primer on emotions Emotions start with cognitions Every single emotion you can conceive of Starts with a thought There's a thought A thought about yourself A thought about people around you A thought about your environment A thought about the circumstances A thought about the past A thought about the future A thought No emotion Just erupts as is It's preceded by a thought Like it is true That some of these cognitions are unconscious It's a bit of a contradiction in terms Unconscious cognitions But there are some cognitive processes Which are unconscious And they lead to the emergence of emotions Which appear to have Materialized out of nowhere But that's a mistake Every emotion is preceded by a cognition And then Cognition alone Thinking alone is not enough Because what people do They take these thoughts Then they monitor their own bodies They pay attention to the body So there's a thought And then there's information Gleaned from the body Coming from the body Ammonating and exuded by the body So for example you have a thought And then you pay attention to your heart rate Your heart is beating faster Or you are perspiring You're sweating Or you feel an enormous pressure Or headache Sematization symptoms Your body is talking to you Your body is communicating with you Through a variety of autonomous And non-autonomous functions And this coupled with the thought If it is conscious Leads to the next stage In the next stage You try to understand Why is your body reacting the way it does You invest additional thought This time it's analytical thought You're analyzing your body's messages You're analyzing your body's language And so you do this By paying attention to the environment By asking yourself Where am I Who am I with The people I'm with are they friends or foes Have I done something Have they done something So there's data coming from the environment Contextual intake And these are the three elements That comprise the emotion and bring it on Cognition thoughts Information gleaned from the body And then data from the environment This is the raw material Once this raw material is available You embark on hermeneutics You embark on interpreting the raw material You ask yourself Here's the raw material Here's what I've been thinking Here's what my body is telling me And here's the information from the environment And here's how I feel But I don't have a name for it I don't have a name for it yet What should I call it Am I angry Or am I afraid Am I sad Or am I tired I mean Am I jealous Am I envious Or am I contemptuous So you need to label The last stage in the emergence of emotion Into consciousness And the translation of emotion To behavior and to effect This last stage involves Very important dictionary function You're using a vocabulary of previously experienced emotions To explicate to yourself To label these emotions To tell you what they are Now what do you do when Your cognition is problematic Narcissists, borderlines, psychopaths, histrionics And a variety of people with other personality disorders And other mental health disorders They all have cognitive deficits Cognitive biases And cognitive fallacies And these cognitive deficits Are very, very crucial, very important They are ubiquitous They're all pervasive They affect every dimension And every aspect And every cell and every atom Of the narcissistic existence Or the borderline's existence They distort reality Take, for example, the narcissist's grandiosity The narcissist's grandiosity is a cognitive deficit It makes him misjudge himself He has an inflated view of himself A fantastic view A view that has nothing to do with reality Is divorce from reality Equally He has a devaluing Devaluing, contemptuous Disdainful attitude to others So he misjudges them For example, he misjudges the damage they can do to him So it's dangerous Cognitive deficits are dangerous And they are all pervasive in the sense that The narcissists can't say, okay, I will ignore that aspect of me I will ignore this dimension of my brain processes Of my cerebral processes I'll try to focus on something else There's not something else Everything is affected by the narcissist's deficit The same with the borderline They all have cognitive deficits So if emotion is critically dependent on cognition If it actually starts with cognition If there is no emotion without cognition If it is a sine qua non A condition that is both sufficient and necessary So if emotion is so crucially dependent And so derivative on cognition Then if your cognitive processes are malformed If they are defective If they are deformed If they are problematic Your emotions will be as well You can't You can't have a proper healthy emotion Based on a cognitive deficit You can't really experience emotions the way healthy people do If your thinking processes have nothing to do with reality Or are utterly illogical and distorted Cognitive deficits Cognitive problems Cognitive issues in narcissism, borderline and other personality disorders Have massive effects Not only on the narcissist and the borderline's ability to emote But on the content of their emotions On the structure of their emotions On what their emotions are On the quiddity, on the essence of their emotions Fundamental deficits and biases Create emotions which are so deformed So misaligned So misassembled That it's very easy to misidentify them If your emotions are bizarre Outlandish It's very easy to get your emotions wrong To misjudge them One could say that the narcissists and borderline Not only have an external impaired reality testing In other words They don't only misjudge the external environment Other people reality itself But they have an impaired internal reality testing They misjudge not only the outside landscape But their own inner landscape And we know that emotions are crucially dependent on cognition To the extent that many scholars suggest That we should not make this distinction That emotions are just a subtype A class of cognitions That emotions are actually thoughts Which provoke certain bodily and mental processes But that's all, they are thoughts Many scholars advocate eliminating This ostensibly artificial difference that we are making today Between emotions and cognitions But at any rate no one would argue That they are very closely aligned That they are twins And we know that this is true Because we have conducted multiple and numerous experiments There was an experiment where students Were shown photos of women Male students were shown photos of women And at the same time were given a mild drug Which created tachycardia Created faster heartbeat The students trying to interpret Why their hearts are beating faster They came up with the explanation That they were infatuated with the women With the photos So when your body signals to you When there are changes in your body You scramble, you try to understand To, you try to imbue your existence with meaning You're asking yourself Why is my heart beating faster? Why am I sweating? Why is my heart beating faster and sweating When I'm watching this photo of a woman Ah, probably I'm infatuated with her And this is one of numerous experiments And so we know that cognitions affect emotions We also have techniques Therapeutic techniques Which prove this beyond any doubt There's a technique called reappraisal Reappraisal is when we teach people To change the cognition That underlies a certain emotion So the client comes and says I'm feeling sad Then we unearth the cognition behind This feeling of sadness And then we teach the client to change the cognition And lo and behold The minute the client changes the cognition The emotion vanishes And is replaced by another emotion Which could be diametrically opposed From sadness to extreme elation and happiness So reappraisal is a very powerful technique For reframing cognitions So as to yield emotions on demand in a way Another class of therapies They're known as desensitization or exposure therapies And one of them is called Approaching the avoided emotion For example, approaching avoided fear So we teach people to think their way To their emotions To think their way through to their emotions If there are emotions that they're avoiding Like sadness or fear We teach them to think And as they think the way we teach them to Suddenly the emotions are not threatening anymore Because via the cognition They totally control the emotion Intensity of the emotion They modulate, they fine tune the emotion There is no doubt in clinical settings That emotions and cognitions are Two facets of the same coin And so if this is true And if borderlines and narcissists And psychopaths and histrionics and others Have cognitive deficits It's tend to reason that they will have emotional deficits As well Take for example borderlines Borderlines suffer from emotional dysregulation Their emotions are so strong That they overwhelm them The borderline feels that she is drowning in her emotions The borderline feels that he is about to be consumed By his emotions That his emotions are going to drive him I don't know to suicide 11% of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder Commit suicide The borderlines emotions are clear and present dangers And the borderline as opposed to the narcissists Had failed to develop Coping mechanisms The narcissist develops narcissism The false self It's a firewall It's a decoy And it's godlike Helps him to regulate his emotions Indeed many scholars suggest That borderline is simply failed narcissism That the person with borderline personality disorder Had tried as a child to develop narcissism Pathological narcissism And had failed And so borderline suffer from emotional dysregulation Because they don't have active narcissistic defenses They don't have a skin in a way And so they get indirect touch with reality Reality permeates them triggers them This is not empathy by the way Don't confuse this with empathy Reality triggers them and permeates them To the extent that they regard emotions As mortal enemies And so both borderlines and narcissists Exhibit inappropriate affect Inappropriate effect Is when they react in ways which don't sit well Do not conform Are inappropriate for a certain setting I don't know Laughing in a funeral Is an example of inappropriate effect But the etiology The reason for the inappropriate effect Is different in borderline and in a narcissist Let alone a psychopath The borderline reacts with inappropriate effect Because she is desperately trying to get a hold To get a handle To reassert control Over the tsunami The emotional tsunami That is inside her That is threatening to drown her from the inside The narcissist reacts with inappropriate effect Because he misunderstands his own emotions The psychopath reacts with inappropriate effect In order to manipulate and terrify his environment It's an intimidation tactic But all three and the histrionic All of them get emotions misconstrued They misjudge emotions They misunderstand what's happening inside them All of them experience inner stirrings All of them experience volcanic eruptions and movements And emotions It's like the furniture is being moved around by some whirlwind Or tornado or hurricane All of them have this inner turmoil Have this chaos Their personality has a low organization It's chaotic All of them have this But when they try to understand what's happening inside them When they compare themselves to other people Who are healthy and normal They get it wrong They get it wrong And this leads me back to empathy Narcissists borderlines Psychopaths histrionics They have empathy deficits The narcissists and the primary psychopath They have cold empathy Cold empathy is merely the reflexive component of empathy And the cognitive component of empathy The analytical component The narcissists and the primary psychopath Look at other people And they read them well They scan people They especially home in And focus and zero in vulnerabilities Chinks in the armor Weak points Hot button Hot buttons And so they have cold empathy But their empathy has no emotional correlate They don't experience emotions In response to their use of cold empathy So if they look at a crying person They would notice that the person is sad They would label the person's emotions correctly They would identify the emotion Very appropriately And the psychopath would ask himself How can I leverage this How can I make good use of this momentary vulnerability Maybe I could end up having sex with that person Or taking money from her Or him But this cold empathy This ability to say This person is crying Therefore this person is sad Does not evoke or provoke Or conjure up any emotional reaction In the narcissists and psychopaths So it's very difficult for them To create permanent correlations Between information from the environment And inner emotional responses If you look at the environment only analytically And nothing happens inside you You will never understand what it means to be sad Truly understand what it means to love Because all you do is you're an observer You watch You classify You create a normal database Emotional resonance database Correlating certain behaviors With certain proclaimed emotions For example If crying then sad If smiling then happy But the words sad and happy Would mean nothing to you Similarly the borderline Co-dependent and the histrionic They have functional empathy They have full-fledged empathy Their empathy includes the emotional component But it is very very goal oriented Borderlines want to ascertain That they will never be abandoned They have abandonment and separation anxiety Co-dependent is clinging And wants her intimate partner To perform important psychological functions And to cater to her needs And the histrionic is interested in hyper-emotionality And manipulates via seduction and fluidization And appearance So this is functional empathy It's functional empathy because it's not It's not other oriented It's not about the other It's about you You as a borderline You ask yourself I'm empathizing empathizing with this person Because it gives me the tools To make sure that this person will remain in my life If you're co-dependent you're saying I'm empathizing with this person fully Also emotionally Because this guarantees that this person will continue To love me and be in my life And perform important psychological functions for me Cater to my needs And if you're histrionic you're saying I'm empathizing with this person Because this way I can understand him And make him fall in love with me It's functional empathy Cold empathy with narcissists and psychopaths Functional empathy with borderlines Co-dependent histrionics These are empathy deficits These are deformed mutants These are mutations of empathy Not healthy empathy Full-fledged emotional empathy Is turned off in all these types Full-fledged other oriented empathy Is turned off in all these types And why is that? Because all of them experience overwhelming Negative emotionality If they allow them If they were to allow themselves to truly empathize with another person They would risk their own lives The trade-off in these characters With the exception of the psychopath Exception of the primary psychopath The trade-off in all these characters Is between empathizing and emoting And survival If they were to empathize and emote They would be exposed to such overwhelming negative emotions That they may well die So they prefer not to emote at all They prefer not to empathize at all And instead They use primitive defense mechanisms Such as splitting When they can no longer tolerate The risk of emotionality And the risk of overwhelming empathy They split They cast the other person They convert and transform the other person Into an all-bed object They devalue the other person And there's an object in constancy Out of sight, out of mind So these are all mechanisms That these seriously disturbed people Are using to avoid emotions and empathy The primary psychopath has called empathy Secondary psychopath has functional empathy That's why we think that Borderline personality disorder Is actually a form of secondary psychopathy And so this is the background You're beginning to see That if you're a narcissist You have cognitive deficits Your cognition is not working properly You have deformed dysfunctional empathy Called empathy You don't have the basic tools You don't have the basic tools To experience emotions And to label them, to recognize To say, ah, that's love Oh, that's sadness You don't have these ultra basic tools Same for the borderline Same with the histrionic Same with the psychopath Some extent, the code depends The basic tools that healthy people use To recognize emotions in others And by implication in themselves And to label what's happening inside them In accordance with empathizing While empathizing These are missing People with cluster B personality disorders, in other words Are missing the basic human experience Now I started the presentation With a fact The fact is the more empathy you have The older you are And therefore the more empathy you have The more increased your empathy Because there are gradations of empathy Some people, very tiny minority Are highly sensitive people HSPs, they have super developed empathy But even so Empathy is not equally distributed Some people are more empathic than others So the more empathy you have And the older you are Your ability to recognize emotions in other people Decreases Listen to this well It's a critical insight Which we have come across in the last 10 years In psychology Those of us who bothered to read the scholarly literature Most self-styled experts online Clearly never bothered to read Never bothered to read the scholarly literature The more empathy you have The less you are able to recognize emotions in other people But if this is true Doesn't contradict what I've just said Didn't I just spend 20 minutes telling you That the reason narcissists, psychopaths and borderlines Cannot label their emotions properly Is because they don't have working empathy No, that's not what I've been telling you So let's go over the same terrain again Armed with this new insight What I've been telling you is not That narcissists and psychopaths and borderlines Have less empathy than other people What I've been telling you is That they have deformed Mulfformed, sick, mutated forms of empathy It's an entirely different argument If you take 10 healthy people Five of them have high empathy Five of them have low empathy But it's healthy empathy Proper empathy Properly formed empathy The ones with less empathy Would recognize emotions in other people better The ones with more empathy Would recognize emotions in other people But will do a very bad job of it The more empathy they have The less they are able to read people properly The less they understand Other people's emotional landscape Reactions and sensations and feelings That's a fact Among healthy people The less empathy you have The better you are able to understand Other people's emotions But narcissists, borderlines, psychopaths, histrionics And to some extent codependent people Don't have less empathy or more empathy They are not in this group at all They are not healthy Their empathy is not healthy Their emotional regulation is not healthy Their cognitions are problematic Unreal, fantastic, sick So they don't have the basic tools Not only to understand and label and judge properly Emotions in other people They don't have the basic tools to understand What on earth is going on inside themselves What they do instead Is what I call cognitive emoting Healthy people When they experience emotions They experience it, so to speak, wholeheartedly Their entire body is participating By the way, literally the entire body Is participating in the experience of emotions There are changes in the intestines There are changes in the gut flora There are changes in numerous other body systems Not only in the brain Emotion, any emotion Is participatory sport The entire body is involved Including the brain, of course And the emotion is experienced in its totality And it includes a very pronounced cognitive component And a very pronounced, so to speak, component of feeling And it includes the assimilation, incorporation And interpretation of sensory input It's a systemic enterprise When borderlines, these are healthy people Borderlines, narcissists and psychopaths Do emoting When they experience emotions These are not emotions These are truncated versions Of emotions, because they stop at the cognitive level In other words, where in a healthy person There is a process, a path Indeed, the current thinking about emotions Is what we call a process thinking So there is a path, cognition Body, information from the body Information from the environment, emotion It's the path With narcissists, borderlines and so on, psychopaths There is cognition, end of story That's it, that's where it stops These people, the personality disordered people People with cluster B They don't emote They think they're emotions They analyze When they try to understand what's happening to them They analyze They compare themselves to others If they're very good with words, they verbalize So someone with a borderline might tell you Now that I think of it Yeah, yeah, what I'm feeling is love Or she may tell you I feel something, but I don't really know if it's love Because for example, when you're not near me The intensity is much lower Or it disappears Only when you're next to me, I feel it Or she may say Or he may say Someone with borderline Or when I feel When I have an emotion It's so huge, it's so intense It's so all devouring It's so all consuming That I don't have the time or the capacity Capacity to stop and have a look at it And analyze it I'm just swept by the wave So these people, borderlines, narcissists And especially psychopaths, industrialists And some extent co-dependents They think about their emotions They need to stop They need to sit down And they need to think I'm feeling something What is it that I'm feeling? Let me see I think it's love Coming to think of it Coming to think of it Or I think it's anger Because last time it was anger Yeah, I'm quite sure This last time it was anger Or I'm overwhelmed, I'm drowning But what does it feel? Probably I'm afraid of something I'm scared of something What am I afraid of? What is there to be afraid of? Let me look, let me see Now, the same processes happen with healthy people But then they segue They seamlessly transform into emoting And to react, emotional reactivity We all look for clues in the environment As to why we feel the way we do And we all listen to our bodies Consciously or unconsciously But then healthy people move on And they emote They feel Narcissist psychopaths and borderlines Don't move on They are in a permanent state Permanent state of a puzzle Putting the jigsaw puzzles together They are stuck at the initial phase Of analyzing cognitions Thinking about it Listening to their bodies Collecting or gathering cues And information from the environment And this for them is perpetual, mobile It's a perpetual enterprise Never ending enterprise Leads nowhere Results in nothing identifiable As emotion or effect They are like They are like, you know Do you remember the old records When you put the needle And the needle got stuck? They are that stuck needle The record goes on and on and on You keep listening to the same music You're never going to get to the end of the song You're never going to get to the point of the song You're never going to listen to 90% of the lyrics Because the needle is stuck In cluster B patients cope with these horrible deficits In emotional cognizance In several dysfunctional ways It's functional because their personality is sorted The personalities are very low Levels of organization They don't have the tools They don't have the instruments They don't have the capacity They don't have the presence of mind To reason To foresee consequences To control their impulses They don't have all this Critical machinery They are very infantile They are very too state They are very primitive They are very binary And so they cope with these deficits By either repressing or avoiding the emotions So the narcissists, the primary psychopath They would simply not experience emotions Sometimes they would experience something Something And it would bother them That they don't know what it is Because they are control freaks, of course Narcissists and primary psychopaths It's all about control They want to control the environment They want to control other people They want to because they perceive the world As hostile It's either control or be dead So they need to control The world is out to get them Everyone is an enemy Just per secretary, paranoid ideation And so they need to control And if they feel something And they don't know what it is They feel out of control So they need to label this something So very often you would hear the narcissist tell you I love you What he is doing, he is mislabelling His dependence on you For narcissistic supply Or you would hear the psychopath saying I'm very happy Actually, it's probably not happiness But it's goal attainment He finally got there He achieved his goal Primary psychopaths and narcissists Actually don't experience emotions They accept negative emotions They experience anger or rage They experience envy Envy is a criterion Diagnostic criterion In the DSM-4 For narcissistic personality disorder So some emotions get true And these are the emotions that allow them To lord over other people To control other people To subjugate other people And to convert them into slaves Or sources of supply Or to cajole other people Charm other people These emotions get through But even then these are not real emotions For example, the narcissist is never angry He rages The psychopath is never really emotionally invested In any project Or any endeavor Or any activity Anyone who had sex with the psychopath Can tell you this Psychopath is not really into the sex So they are not there These are people who are defined Not by their existence But by their absence These are disorders of absence Not of existence So they don't experience emotions And when negative emotions break through The protective veil Break through the false self In the case of the narcissist Or break through the feigned indifference And defiance of the psychopath When these emotions break through They are malignant They are cancerous They are unrecognizable to a healthy person How can you compare anger to narcissistic rage? It's like It's like the emotion is metastasized somehow The second mechanism That people will cost to be used When they are faced with their inability To grasp what's happening inside them To label it To judge it properly To recognize it To tell the world what's going on When they realize this deficit So the first thing they do They repress or avoid If they are narcissists Or primary psychopath Second thing they do They miss judge the intensity Or the semiotics of the emotion In other words They misjudge the signaling of the emotion The cue that the emotion gives them The information contained in the emotion So a histrionic for example Is likely to misjudge The nature of the relationship How deep it is How long lasting How involved the parties are This is so true That misjudging the intensity of romantic emotions Is one of the diagnostic criteria In the DSM form For histrionic personality disorder They are totally clueless Totally clueless They misread everything Social cues Sexual cues Virtue signaling Proper signaling Information of all kinds Environmental sexual interpersonal This is their way Their way of avoiding the painful realization That they are divorced from themselves That they have no access to themselves That their emotions are artifacts Way beyond their reach And so instead of admitting to this What they do They construct their own dictionary Their own vocabulary Their own private language No one else frankly understands And they impose it They impose it on other people They impose it on the environment After one day You are the If you date a histrionic After one day You are the love of her life And on the second that she wants to marry It's her way Of asking herself What am I feeling What are my emotions with this guy Oh probably I'm in love with it Probably I'm in love with it No Looks like it Stands to reason Stands to reason that I'm in love Makes sense That I'm in love with it Well if I'm in love with him Why wait Let's get married This is radicalization and escalation Which I could call it even Semantic escalation Escalation of meanings And the third mechanism Is dissociation Dissociating the emotions If you can't join them Beat them If you can't understand your emotions If you can't label them If you can't judge them If you can't recognize them If you cannot communicate them to others Why have them at all Dissociate them Cut them off Scissors them Scissors them away Like so many coupons In an ancient newspaper Just pretend they're not there Pretend they're not there And this happens With borderline personality disorder In the secondary psychopath In the borderline Which today we think is Female secondary psychopathic Borderline Essentially what she does She leverages She uses several Very important defense mechanisms Which survive from childhood Infantile defense mechanisms In order To dissociate her emotions Dissociation is a diagnostic criterion Of borderline personality disorder Because a borderline dissociates On multiple levels And in irreconcilable way She depersonalizes A borderline will tell you I felt that I was on autopilot I felt it wasn't me I felt I was observing myself From the outside She derealizes She can say I felt I was in a movie I felt the whole thing was unreal Or she has dissociated of amnesia She will insist that she can't remember What had happened What she had done She will attribute it to drink I drank too much So I had a blackout I mean she would dissociate And While dissociating the emotions She makes use of her object in constancy It's very difficult to forget your emotions If you have no object in constancy Out of sight, out of mind You are married You have a spouse You go out He no longer exists Because out of sight, out of mind And so then it's easy To do all kinds of things To misbehave Because he's He no longer is And because he no longer is There are no emotions Attendant on him And no emotions Attendant on the misconduct In other words There's no emotional reactivity When you can forget the trigger If you Cheat on your husband As a borderline woman And it's much easier to do If your husband Is out of sight, out of mind And you have no emotions connected to the act So dissociating emotions Is a major defense Against mislabelling Against this alienation This estrangement Between the cluster B Personality disordered patient And his own emotional processes Coping strategies In all these Literally all these personality disorders Disorders Coping strategies involve Self-soothing And self-soothing Is dysfunctional Vast majority of self-soothing techniques Or strategies are actually dysfunctional They're self-defeating They're self-destructive They're self-trashing They're reckless Over-eating is self-soothing Getting drunk is self-soothing Promiscuous sex is self-soothing Pathological gambling is self-soothing All kinds of bodily behaviors Which are harmful Most of them are connected to self-soothing You can self-soothe with men You can self-soothe with sex You can self-soothe with dream Anything and everything can be self-soothing And most self-soothing Has an addictive or at the very least Conditioned element You do it almost automatically Almost reflexively When you are under stress or traumatized Or in pain The reckless behaviors are also self-soothing And all the personality disorders Narcissists, older life psychopaths When they are faced with their emotional Invalidity With the fact that they are emotional cripples With their disability And it's not only a disability to emote It's not only a disability to experience the emotion It's even a disability to tell yourself and others What it is that you're feeling When they are faced with this With this enormous limitation With this loss Or renders loss of 80% of what's beautiful in existence In human existence They're not stupid Many narcissists and psychopaths are actually Super intelligent Clickly claims that most psychopaths Are more intelligent than usual So these are intelligent people And they know what they are missing They know intellectually They know rationally They don't know in the heart But they know in the mind, in the brain What they're missing They know they're missing out On everything that's beautiful Everything that makes people human Everything that's... They're missing out on the most profound experiences There's nothing more profound than emotions Falling in love Is there anything that comes close to it? They know they're missing on all this They know they've been deprived They feel a sense, a deep sense Of injustice and resentment And which is at the heart And the engine that drives, for example The psychopaths, anti-social, defined activities Acts Is angry Narcissists is angry The borderline is angry At themselves to start with But somehow At the world for having made them like this Try to blame their parents Try to blame society They try... They are looking for a scapegoat They don't know, they're thrashing about They don't know how to... But... And so they try to serve soon Very dysfunctionally and destructively And many of them, especially when they grow older And self-soothing no longer works Or the costs of self-soothing have become such that Even they understood, got it through the thick skulls That, you know, enough with this Enough with this promiscuity Enough with this drinking Enough with this drug abuse Substance abuse, etc So then they switch from self-soothing To repetition compulsions It's kind of a hope sprints a tunnel They try again And again And again And every time they fail They withdraw They isolate They avoid So there's this approach avoidance Repetition compulsions Older... Older narcissists Borderline, psychopaths and histrionics Let's say about the age of 30 or 35 Their approach avoidance They try to provoke in themselves Some emotions And to do it in a controlled Restricted, restrained, constrained way So that they can be sure What emotions they are provoking And evoking Since they cannot label emotions They cannot recognize emotions They need to experience emotions They need to provoke in themselves emotions In controlled environments So if they want to experience love They would select a partner Home in on the partner That explains behaviors such as love bombing And grooming These are controlled behaviors These behaviors emanate from the need to control Not only the partner It's a common mistake online The love bombing and grooming Has somewhat to do with the partner There's a lot to do With the narcissists and psychopaths Because love bombing and grooming Are controlled tactics And above all They need to control their internal environment So that when there is an emotional reaction When they do experience emotions They will know what this emotion is Why? Because they narrowed the protocol They limited the space They control, they micro-managed the interaction And gradually As approach Fails Is followed by avoidance And then another approach Followed by more avoidance And withdrawal It takes more and more courage More and more depleted energy More and more effort To approach again There is hurt aversion and pain aversion Even in psychopaths and narcissists and borderlines Especially borderlines But even in narcissists and psychopaths Histrionics Not to mention borderlines and co-dependence Borderlines are driven by Hurt aversion or pain aversion So it's very painful To approach and avoid Approach and withdraw Approach and lose Approach and be betrayed It's very painful And so gradually Narcissists and psychopaths and borderlines They develop Persecretary Introjected objects In other words They gradually form Paranoid delusions Persecretary delusions Centred around Introjects In other words Centred around internalized objects So their initial approach to other people Would be very very cautious Very suspicious And they would immediately transform these other people Take a snapshot Internalize a snapshot As an internal object In order to control the object Because as a snapshot You're in total control But then gradually As the real person Deviates And diverges from the snapshot They will begin to feel That the meaningful other The significant other The intimate partner Is frustrating them intentionally And malevolently and maliciously They would convert the intimate partner Into a persecutory Introjected object And this would be the topic Of our next video So I'll tell you what you're feeling now You're feeling tired And bored And you want to dislike this video But you can't Because you don't want any bad blood Between you and me Trust me on that Just kidding Okay Baby seal And multiple Svanpanim My name is Sanbak Nim I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love Narcissism Revisited And yes I am a professor of psychology In CIAPS Center for International Advanced and Professional Studies The Outreach Program Of the CIAS Consortium of Universities A few weeks ago I made a video About how the narcissist sees you Today I'm going to tell you how The borderline sees you Her intimate partner It's going to be a tough ride Very triggering Mind you Make frequent stops Drink water Think positive thoughts The borderline is a harrowing experience Living with the borderline Let alone loving a borderline Is a suicidal mission But it's intense It's colorful And it makes you feel alive Like nothing else You had been warned Baby seals Shoshanim Svanpanim And Shovavim Look it up Okay So there's a borderline in your life And you are her intimate partner Yes, yes, yes Before I get an avalanche Of sanctimonious self-righteous comments 50% of all borderline personality disorder diagnosis Are handed out to men I propose a new diagnosis Covert borderline Which better suits men Because while the emphasis with borderline women Is about emotionality And sexuality The emphasis in borderline men Is more about grandiose power And similar things Borderline men Resemble much more narcissists Than borderline women That's why I'm proposing to break the two apart And to have an emotional dysregulation disorder Assigned to women With secondary psychopathy as a self-state And covert borderline Which is a combination of borderline and narcissism Assigned to men Okay So every gender pronoun here is interchangeable I'm going to use she I'm going to use a female figure Female protagonist in this narrative Because he the two Which is a fancy word for until now Most BPD diagnosis Were handed down to women Women were diagnosed mostly with BPD Okay Enough with this gender nonsense Let's get to the point How does a borderline see you Her intimate partner And so as you well know by now There are two stages in borderline And these two stages in the borderline's behavior Correspond to her two anxieties Abundament anxiety The clinical term is separation in security And engulfment anxiety The borderline's point of view Is the outcome of her internal dynamics Especially the compulsive need to approach you And then avoid you I hate you, don't let me go I love you, I want you dead I detest you, don't ever leave me These conflicting messages These mixed signals Render the life of the intimate partner of the borderline And mayhem Totally chaotic Utterly unpredictable A roller coaster Of emotions Reactions and pain Pain permeates every interaction with the borderline Pain coupled with exhilaration Coupled with pain coupled with exhilaration The ups and downs of the borderline Infect the partner They are contagious In the approach phase This is how the borderline sees you You're my world You're my life And she means it She means outside of you Apart from you There's nothing There's no one She kind of minimizes herself And projects herself onto you and into you She renders herself the equivalent of an introject She wants you to subsume her She wants you to consume her This is not exactly merger and fusion Which are common in codependency This is much more than that This is identification and infrajection It's an infantile process The borderline is intensely Childlike Which provokes in you paternal or parental reactions The borderline parentifies you You're my world and you're my life Because I don't know any better Because I don't have any other access Because you are the vector through which I exist A raison d'être to use my antiquated fringe The borderline sees you as a savior She foists on you the role of a rescuer You will save me for myself, she says I'm horrible I'm intolerable I'm poison I ruin everything for myself and for others And you are going to change all this You're going to save me for myself You're going to save me from others And you're going to save others from me You're going to be the buffer The firewall between me and my pernicious Radioactive impact on the world around me Everything, the borderline tells you Everything is meaningless without you Your existence as my intimate partner Imbues the world Events, other people Interactions with sense You, my intimate partner You make sense of reality for me You are my reality testing The borderline is likely to often ask you Do you think the same? Is it true? Because you are the yardstick of her universe You are her reality You are a stable rock Guaranteed presence Permanence Constancy Determinacy When you are there in her life The borderline feels utterly oceanic Safe You are, in other words, a secure base Again, these are infantile childhood dynamics But you have other roles in the borderline's life During the approach phase Don't ever mix your drinks You stabilize the borderline's moods She has ups and downs, it's known as mood-lability She is depressive And she's a bit manic Which is a reason by many diagnosticians Confuse and conflate borderline personality disorder With bipolar disorder Wrong, of course The first is a personality disorder The second, the latter, is a mood disorder But people with borderline personality disorder Cycle all the time And this rapid cycling of moods, effects, cognitions, decisions, choices, values, behaviors, reactions This render the borderline identity less This is called identity disturbance It's as if she has no core No kernel No stable Atom inside her Which kind of oscillates and determines her time The borderline is a river in flux and a femoral cloud And it is the role of the intimate partner You, to stabilize, says the borderline To stabilize my moods You should regulate your emotions Because with you, I feel safe And with you, I feel whole I feel completed Without you, I'm partial Without you, I am almost dead Parts of me decay and decompose And fall apart and disintegrate without you You are the elan vital You are the animating force within me Says the borderline When you are with me, committed to me, monopolized by me A hundred percent mine, possessed by me, owned by me Inside me, in every way, sexual and otherwise You are me But you are a better me You're a stronger me You're more stable me And so I can merge with you thus Improving my functionality Allowing me to cope, to survive To somehow go through life Because I don't like life I hate life and I hate who I am in life I need you to live another life for me Bicariously, by proxy And I will give my life for you I will sacrifice myself Self-sacrificial It's the same with the narcissist, by the way He sacrifices his true self for a false self The borderline also has a false self But her false self merges with the intimate partner A process known as external regulation So gradually, you are sucked into the vortex of the borderline You begin to feel responsible for her moods, her emotions, even her cognitions She pretends to be dependent on you All the time, fostering dependency in you You are becoming co-dependent on the borderline Because she can't live without you She can survive without you You feel responsible She is very childlike She is very vulnerable She cries Her beautiful eyes Tear up any time you threaten to live or to go And you just can't take it She pushes all your buttons She leverages your softness and your empathy Or your need to be needed Or your grandiosity The borderline is adept at finding all the chinks in your armor Then invading you and penetrating you like no other The borderline says, I'm bad I'm evil I'm unworthy I'm poisonous I'm a bad object But with you, my intimate partner, I feel good I feel worthy because you accept me as I am Because you love me as I am And because you see me like no other And because you enable and empower every part of me Every hue and every frequency in my spectrum I become more through you I self-actualize through your agency Borderline borrows your agency in order to become more self-efficacious But in the process, she renders you less agentic And this is merely the approach side Now we are heading into the real tumult, the avoidance You can't win with a borderline You love her You're intimate with her You lose her You're cold and detached and neutral and therapeutic And aloof, you lose her You try to help her Too much, give her advice Director, you lose her You ignore her You let her live her own life You lose her It's a lose-lose proposition Or a lose-win proposition in some cases But usually a lose-lose proposition There's no winning strategy with a borderline And some people are addicted to the ride To the drama To the roller coaster They don't care about the borderline They want to experience the borderline's dysregulation vicariously They love the ups and downs They adore waking up in the morning Not knowing what the day will bring Borderline guarantees this serendipity This unpredictability This inconstancy impermanence and indeterminacy The borderline is a bag full of surprises A never-ending adventure A risk, a novelty, a danger lurking in your own bed How is this resistible? It's not It's not even for healthy people So approach is always followed by avoidance Regardless of your behavioural choices And regardless of your strategies With the borderline Approach and avoidance, repetition, compulsion In the borderline is, as the name implies, a compulsion It's out of the borderline's control And it is not mitigated or affected By any external factors or parameters Some stage the borderline says I'm overwhelmed by pain You are hurting me Owing to your rejection and abandonment And yet the borderline tends to interpret Almost everything is a rejection Almost any behaviour is a form of abandonment You are too long on the phone with a business associate You are abandoning and rejecting You go on a business trip You are abandoning and rejecting You have your own set of friends You are abandoning and rejecting You cast a glance at a beautiful woman in a restaurant You are abandoning and rejecting You refuse to countenance and accept The borderline's egregious misconduct And bad behaviour You are abandoning and rejecting You disagree with the borderline More than once You are abandoning and rejecting Everything is abandonment and rejection In the borderline's eyes And she often projects abandonment and rejection onto you It is she who wants to abandon and reject you And she projects it onto you She anticipates abandonment and rejection After all, she is a bad object She is unworthy She is corrupt She is unlovable She is inadequate Why would you not abandon and reject her? It's inevitable, ineluctable that you should So she prepares herself She preemptively cheats on you She prophylactically abandons you first before you abandon her You're not protective, she tells you You don't love me, really? Your love is not true? You don't care about me? You found someone else to take my place? You're disloyal You're looking for alternatives? And no amount of proofs to the contrary No amount of evidentiary representation would help you She's made up her mind Don't confuse her with the facts Most borderline women are also mis-entrised They hate men Because they've been exposed to the vagaries Vagaries of abuse and bed relationships They're post-traumatic So they're likely to punish you for being men They're likely, for example, to cheat on you In order to cause you pain Or to triangulate to accomplish the same To get a rise out of you By sexually self-trashing With other men The borderline accomplishes multiple goals simultaneously She affirms and confirms the bed-object in her Thus justifying her anticipation of rejection and abandonment She also proved to herself that all men are immoral beasts They all men take advantage of how broken damage women Such as herself And that upholds her mis-entrised, men-hating view Cheating is only one type of reckless behaviour from obscurity One type of reckless behaviour The borderline can become violent, aggressive in other ways Chopaholic, walkaholic, pathological gambler The numerous ways to self-destruct But whenever the borderline anticipates abandonment and rejection She decompensates All her defences collapse And at that point she is ready to move on to a stage called acting out But not before she switches into another self-state A secondary psychopathy self-state She becomes merciless, disempathic, hateful, revengeful She needs to prove to herself that she is still irresistible And she would do it with another man She needs to prove to herself that she is omnipotent Her grandiosity equals easily the narcissist So she would, I don't know, overspend, deplete the family savings In retail therapy, spray shopping Reckless behaviours are very common in borderline In the acting out phase Be it with men, be it with money, be it with violence Be it with behaviours such as drunk driving, etc. At some point the borderline decides upon the following sequence You're a man, she's a bad object Because you're a man and therefore impervious to the needs, emotions, and love of a woman Because you're a man, you're evil, you're a beast, you're immoral Because she's a bad object, you're going to abandon her You're going to reject her She needs to strike first So she would decompensate, she would switch to a psychopathic state And she would act out And while she does this, she experiences triple dissociation Three types of dissociation Amnesia, depersonalization, and derealization And the borderline experiences typically to all three During a period of acting out Amnesia, she deletes the memories Simply, she has no access to them She has very blurred memories Even when she's not drunk Autopilot, depersonalization She feels that she is not inside her body That she's just going through the motions That her body is some kind of independent entity Taking on a life of its own Depersonalization, it's not me I'm not there, this is not happening to me I'm not doing this Derealization, the whole thing feels like a movie It's not real, it's dreamlike or nightmarish These are three mechanisms of dissociation That operate in a borderline that had been hurt That had been rejected, that had been abandoned That had been humiliated This is her reaction She acts out dissociatively She says to herself I need to do something, I have to do something I need to do anything I need to hurt him, my intimate partner And then having hurt him The power matrix restored Because it's a power play of course Having hurt him and the power matrix Power balance restored I can regain his love I'm going to cheat on him And still regain his love I'm going to destroy his finances And he would still love me I need to test him to the limits I need to push beyond The most extreme nether regions of my world And then act in ways which are so egregious So ostentatious, so horrible So beyond the pale That if he still loves me after all this It means that he really loves me It's a test of loyalty Which many intimate partners or friends often fail It's a test of loyalty And a test of the veracity of the intimate partner's love Because in Borderline Never trusts the intimate partner to truly love her How can anyone love her? She's horrible So she acts horrible She becomes the bad object, orish or whatever And then she returns to the intimate partner Begging for forgiveness Riven with guilt and shame Discomfort and egodystony Begging on her knees to be forgiven And accepted back to the fold And if the intimate partner says yes For a while she rests assured that she is loved She feels accepted The avoidance phase In the avoidance phase the Borderline Openly says You want me dead You want to shackle me You want to chain me to your world or to your bed You want me to be only yours You want me to disappear into you She says to the partner You've changed You blame shift I'm the victim, not you You guilt trick me I've done nothing wrong You've rejected me You've abandoned me And so I was just retaliating And I didn't even know what I was doing Because I was dissociating I don't feel it I don't feel it was me There's some vacuum with his self state theory So I think it was a self state It wasn't me She says to the intimate partner You're not even self aware You're very self destructive You're going to destroy our relationship Never mind what I've done You can forgive me You know I can't help it You know it's stronger than me You know it's not me I wasn't there when I shagged this guy When I slept with him I wasn't there It was just my body And anyhow meaningless Because I love you and only you You're judgmental You're over critical And you want to drag me with you You just after my leg looks You just want to have sex You don't really love me And paranoid ideation sets in In the avoidance phase The borderline becomes paranoid She has She develops persecutory delusions A persecutory object which used to be you The idealized object of the intimate partner The idealized introject, the internal object Is replaced by a persecutory one The intimate partner becomes the enemy I love you Don't leave me I hate you Stay with me I want to kill you I hope you live forever A persecutory object And the borderline is likely to tell you You're lying to me You constantly deceive me You constantly cheat on me You're out to get me You entrap me You never mean what you say You gaslight me You hate me While I love you Unconditionally and self-sacrificially You don't know how to love You are humiliating me And shaming me all the time You're malicious You know how guilty I feel You know how Shameful I feel for what I've done And yet you harp on it And you keep bringing me back To these memories Which I want to erase Which I just want to forget And yes Of course it will happen again But that's just the way I am It's a take it or leave it proposition If you truly love me You will accept me And now That you have survived the ordeal The test that I've imposed on you Now I know That you truly love me And now I can approach you again Again You become my world You are my life You will save me from myself And from others Everything is meaningless without you You're a stable rock You stabilize my moods You regulate my emotions With you I feel safe and whole Completed I will give my life for you I'm bad and evil But with you I feel good and worthy Because you've just proven That you accept and love me As I am A borderline