 Everyone and his dog has an attachment style nowadays. It could be a secure attachment, avoidant attachment, or any one of a set of four types of attachments. But the truth is that some people have what I call flat attachments. They are incapable of any kind of bonding, any kind of relatedness to other people at all. Flat attachments, people with flat attachment, regard other people as utterly interchangeable, replaceable, dispensable. Objects, functions, nothing more. They commodify people. They treat them as commodities. Like grains of rice, all people look the same to them. When a relationship is over, people go through a period that I call latency. It's a period where people mourn the defunct bond. People, members of the couple, members of the diet, process the grief, experience withdrawal symptoms associated with the breaker, but not so the flat attachment. Someone with a flat attachment transitions instantaneously, smoothly, abruptly, and seamlessly from one insignificant other to the next insignificant target. People with flat attachments fully substitute a newfound bore, lover, maid, or so-called intimate partner for the one they had discarded. The one who is usefulness has expired for whatever reason. As you have already surmised, many narcissists and almost all psychopaths are flat attachments. They have flat attachment. Long time ago, when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, 1995, I coined the phrase, idealize, devalue, and discard. It is rare for me to admit an error, but I did commit it. I should have rather said, idealize, devalue, discard, and replace. Replace, that's the key word. You see, attachment, of course, has to do with intimacy. And here's the time to say that my name is Saint Dachy, and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a host of other books about personality disorders. Attachment has to do with intimacy, past intimacy, and future intimacy. Attachment has forged in early childhood through relationships with primary caregivers and primary objects, also known as parents, attachment determines one's ability to engage in intimacy, to create and participate in intimate relationships. But to some people, intimacy is like kryptonite, both sought after and dreaded and feared. The result is an intricate and crazy-making dance, dubbed, approach, avoidance, repetition, compulsion. Another aspect of this ambivalence, this love towards intimacy and hatred of intimacy, another aspect is what I call the menu scraps, dichotomy. Those who truly seek intimacy want the entire menu of interpersonal togetherness. They want intensive talking, they want romanticized sex, they want it all. But the intimacy challenged, the people with flat attachment, make do and are fully satisfied with scraps. They feel threatened and overwhelmed by the totality of the intimacy menu. They want to taste, have a taste of things. They don't want the main dishes. They get by on occasional snippets of talk, on rare sex, and on swaths of personal space and time apart. The two types of people, the intimacy challenge and those who seek intimacy, intimacy start. They are utterly incompatible, they make each other profoundly unhappy, and yet only they are inexorably attracted and drawn to each other. The menu types are parental fixes by nature, and the scraps crave the unbridled and unconditional intimacy preferred by their antithesis by the menu people. They drive the intimacy, but they still seek it. Mixed couples, flat attaches and deep attaches. Mixed couples invariably end up in a mushroom cloud of agonizing mayhem, an unmitigated catastrophe. They may drive each other to insanity, or even to suicidal ideation, or actual suicide. At the very least, they subject each other one another to excruciating theme, as the menu tries to alter and modify the scraps, and the scraps withdraws further and further and resolves to desperate measures, such as cheating or reckless behaviors, in order to undo the bond and revert to pristine loneliness. When rejected or abused, women, for example, overread or abuse substances. And that's a perfect example where flat attachment leads to outlandish and extreme outcomes. Because as I said, most women would overread or abuse substances. But a minority of women self-medicate with men. They hook up with friends, former flames, or even total strangers for some good time, for some sex, casual sex. It helps them to restore their self-esteem, regulate or dull their negative emotions, buttress their femininity, stabilize their labile sense of self-worth. Intimacy, however, is a different issue. Never mind how transient, limited, or fake. Even if merely physical, it does wonders to the assertiveness and resilience of such women, the flat attaches. In some cases, such conduct involves defiant, in-your-face, rage-infused cheating on the intimate partner. So that's an example of how flat attaches react to the stresses of typical relationships. But such misconduct has three other goals. First of all, to hurt, to cause excruciating pain, to grievously and often publicly offend and humiliate the rejecting or abusive counterparty, or the counterparty that is perceived as rejecting and abusing. Because flat attaches, being narcissists and psychopaths of histrionic, are very often hyper-vigilant. They find insults and humiliation when there's none, or non-intended. The second reason for such behavior is to elicit a reaction. Any reaction from the indifferent and indismissive spouse or mate. And this is usually done via ostentatious triangulation. The third reason is to win points in a never-ending power play of one upmanship and brinkmanship between the misbehaving woman and the husband per date or boyfriend. The flat-attached women, the women with flat attachment, who default to this kind of choice, are able to engage in emotionless and casual sex. They are often histrionic. Today we think of histrionic personality disorder as the female variant of psychopathy. That's the latest thinking in the field. These women lack impulse control. They suffer from emotional dysregulation. Which is also common among borderlines, trauma victims with PTSD or extreme complex sympathies. And of course when I talk about women, it's an example of flat attachment that is somewhat sexist. Because this equally applies to histrionic men. Only the number of histrionic men is much smaller than the number of histrionic women. So this particular example applies much more to women than to men. But men undermine sabotage intimacy in other ways, for example by being passive-aggressive, or by being outright-aggressive, or by conspicuously cheating, or in many other ways. Flat attaches, regardless of gender, male or female, men and women. Being incapable of attachment feels threatened by it. Intimacy within a relationship is perceived as a trap. As imprisonment has been put in shackles. So to free themselves from this perception of being a hostage or a prisoner, these people would do anything. They would use nuclear weapons. They would soul-murder others. They would hurt, they would defend, they would do anything. The extremes to which flat attaches are willing to go in order to free themselves from intimacy, these extremes are absolutely mind-blowing. The things I've seen and the things I've experienced defy description. Flat attachment is fast becoming a global social problem. The technologies such as dating apps, social pressures, cultural pressures, disintegration of institutions such as family and community, people become atomized, alienated, isolated. The incentive to become a flat attache increases the rewards for being a flat attache or on the rise. And as Kinner taught us in behaviorism, rewards dictate performance, dictate behavior patterns. We are all becoming more and more incapable of true attachment. We are all in a way becoming flat attachments. And in this particular sense of least, we are all becoming more and more narcissistic and even more and more psychopathic. Shalom bavazonim hamudim sheli lo kitab. Society keeps telling you, if you're not having sex, especially casual sex, something is wrong with you. If you're not in a relationship, every single day of every single week, something is definitely wrong with you. And if you're incapable of intimacy, then you're lacking the basic constituents of what it means to be human. These are society's messages. Society wants you to conform. Society wants you to be a herd animal. And yet studies and surveys, like the Pew Center surveys, consistently show that anywhere between one third and one half of adults don't feel comfortable in relationships. They're not happy. They're not content. They're egodistonic. They want out and they undermine and sabotage relationships when they find themselves in them. So today we are going to discuss a new spin on a relatively new spin on attachment theory, not the classical thing, you know, secure in secure attachment styles. There's a video I've made about these issues and you can watch it separately. But today I'm going to discuss an attachment theory, which is actually the recent iteration of attachment theory, which deals with danger. And more specifically, danger in relationships and how do we survive such dangers. My name is Sam Vaknin and I propose danger. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. And I'm a danger to all future generations because I'm a professor of psychology. And I mold the next generations of psychologists and psychiatrists in several countries. How is that for danger? Okay Shoshanim, let's delve right in. And start with the fact that not everyone is built to be in a relationship. I'm going to repeat this sentence and I want you to listen to it well because many of you are going to feel a wave of relief wash over you. Not everyone is built to be in a relationship. It's okay if you are not in a relationship. It's okay if you don't want relationships. It's okay if you don't want intimacy. It's okay if you want to be celibate and it's okay if you want to have casual sex, as long as you don't cheat yourself, you don't deceive yourself about the nature of what it is that you're doing. There are different attachment styles and insecure attachment styles predict recurrent relationship failure. So why go there? And not attachment styles cannot be changed. They are ingrained patterns of relating to other people and they usually emerge in late childhood and early adolescence. It is possible in theory to modify some behaviors attendant upon attachment styles but you can't change the basic attachment styles. Your basic attachment style. I'm sorry. This is the fact. So if you are one of the several types of insecurely attached people, then relationships, intimacy, love, proximity, cohabitation, marriage, family, these are not for you. Don't go there. You're going to make yourself miserable and you're going to make everyone around you miserable. Why? Just because society tells you to. You don't have intimacy skills. You don't have relationship skills because you did not want to acquire them and why you did not want to acquire them is the topic of today's video. But the fact is you lack these skills. The ability to compromise, the ability to negotiate, setting boundaries, sharing, keeping separation, individuation even when you are in a couple, avoiding merger and fusion and numerous other skills without which intimacy and relationships become traps. The other person becomes your personal hell across multiple studies. At least 15%, that's one 5%, that's one of seven adults state that they are much more comfortable, much happier, much more content, much more satisfied, being alone. They like to be alone. There's a whole subgroup of schizoids and schizoid-like personalities. Lynn Sperry described the schizoid personality. There are of course people with mental health disorders, for example schizoid personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, and these personality disorders and other mental health issues such as bipolar disorder and so on preclude functional relationships. If we put all of these together, there's about 15% who would rather be alone. 31% of adults are lifelong singles. One third of adults spend their entire life being single. This has always been the case, by the way, in the Victorian era, these women were called spinsters and their male equivalents were called eternal matchellers. And then much later in the 70s, there was the Peter Pan syndrome. People were refused to grow up and assume adult chores and responsibility and adult roles in society. This was castigated as a form of infantilism. The majority of the rest of the people, the other two thirds, they are immured, literally entombed in abusive, dead or ephemeral pseudo relationships. Only a minority actually, only a minority survive within functional relationships which provide a modicum of happiness and allow for self-growth and self-development. These are the minority of relationships. The majority of relationships are what we call pseudo relationships. They look like relationships. Some of these relationships last for decades and yet they are not relationships. In any clear sense of the word. They are dysfunctional, they're dead, they are abusive, there's no recognition or respect for boundaries. They include merger and fusion or exactly the opposite, aversion and avoidance and withdrawal. That's where the majority of people are. And that's the reason the divorce rate is something like 40-50% of all marriages, of all first marriages and 60-70% of second and third marriages. Intimacy and love anyhow are lost arts. They are the outliers. They're no longer the norm. They add to that personal predilections and proclivities and it's a miracle that anyone ends up with anyone else. The problem is that some people feel threatened or they feel constrained, suffocated by love and intimacy in longer committed relationships. They don't feel good when there's commitment. These kind of people anticipate failure, hurt, misery and discord and so they develop anticipatory anxiety. They know it's going to end badly. And so they gear themselves and prepare themselves for the ineluctable Armageddon catastrophe. They catastrophize. They preemptively is an anxiolytic strategy, an anxiety-reducing strategy. They preemptively bring about the very outcomes of which they are terrified. They repeatedly adopt dysfunctional behaviors. It's like these people are saying, let the other shoe drop. I can't bear it anymore. If anything bad is going to happen, let it happen now. And I'm going to make sure that it does happen. I'm going to provoke my partner. I'm going to cheat on my partner. I'm going to misbehave. I'm going to avoid my partner. I'm going to develop an addiction. There are numerous strategies to destroy and sabotage and undermine a relationship. These are relationship misfits. These people can't have intimacy, relationships and love. They crave more than anything in the world. They crave an intimate partner. They want relationships. We always want that which we cannot get. We always want most what we are incapable of. We dream and fantasize because we can't face reality. We can't face our own limitations and constraints in reality. So of course people with insecure attachment styles. The thing they want most is to have a long-term, committed, loving, embracing, accepting, warm relationship. And that's the only thing they can never get. Richard Granon once told me that intimacy is kryptonite to many people. And so these relationship misfits, they subvert and they undermine their relationships. They gain fake intimacy and acceptance and fake warmth via sex with strangers. Some of them even have sex with groups of strangers just to be accepted. Just to feel a warm body next to them. Just to be the center of attention. Just for a fleeting moment to experience intimacy. They feel liked. Air quotes. They feel loved. They feel that they are in a connection when they are actually, what they're actually doing is casual drunk encounters with anonymous partners in seating settings. So these people want relationships, crave intimacy, can't get it. So they lie to themselves. They lie to themselves. They team up with strangers for sex. And they conflate and confuse sex with intimacy. And they conflate and confuse these strangers with intimate partners. Typically they experience dissonance with their choices. And they result in dissonance by dissociating from the situation, simply forgetting about it. They numb their emotions. They abuse substances. And they have reduced effect display. Some people, some of these people who are incapable of intimacy, love and relationships, convert their ego-distony into a narrative ideology of empowerment. I am not in a relationship because that's my choice. I have casual sex because I want it. And I get what I want. It empowers me. I'm empowered. It's nonsense, of course. It's a deception. Very primitive one in that. And it coalesces into a crusty ideology. And this ideology sometimes becomes public in victimhood movements, like feminism, late feminism. People who dread intimacy feel a lot more unencumbered with strangers. They feel that an interaction with a stranger is easier, lighter, less threatening, more pleasant, and has an end, has a horizon, doesn't have to go on forever. There are no demands, no commitments, minimal investment. And so it's all lighthearted fun. But that's all what they want. They want intimacy. They want depth. They want the profundity of a relationship. They want to be known and seen. And you can't have that in casual sex in a one-night stand. So what they do, these people, they use fantasy to compensate for the low level of intimacy in these unsatisfactory, exploitative, and often predatory encounters. Many, many people with insecure attachment styles, those who had repeatedly failed in attempted relationships, those who had gone through a dizzying array of pseudo-relationships, they give up on the chase. They give up on the chase. They settle into a career-centered life of celibacy and self-sufficiency. Okay, that's the introduction. Now, today I want to introduce you to a cutting-edge model of attachment known as dynamic maturational model of attachment and adaptation. It deals, of course, with relationships and the effect of relationships on human development and human functioning. It starts with relationships between children and parents and goes all the way to relationships between what they call, what the theory calls, reproductive couples. It's an extension of late work by John Boulby and Mary Ainsworth. Boulby and Ainsworth, especially Ainsworth, Mary and Ainsworth, John Boulby and Mary Ainsworth. Mary Ainsworth, in her late work, had transitioned from emphasis on attachment, safe base, love. She had transitioned from this to emphasis on danger. Mary Ainsworth was the first to introduce the concept of danger. Life's many dangers and how the dangers of life drive adaptation. All kinds of adaptations. One of them is attachment. But DMM, I remind you, the dynamic maturational model of attachment and adaptation. Yes, DMM from now on. DMM was initially put together, coalesced in the work of Patricia McKinsey-Critenden. C-R-I-T-T-E-N-D-E-N. Patricia McKinsey-Critenden. She had many colleagues, collaborated with many other scholars, like Dilala, Angelica Clausen, Andrea Landini, who had written a book much later, Steve Farnfield and Susan Speaker and many others. So, the DMM's main tenet is that exposure to danger drives neural development and adaptation in order to promote survival and that the greatest dangers are in relationships. Another problem is that people with insecure attachment styles perceive dangers in relationships even when there are none. They perceive the relationship itself as a danger and the intimacy in their relationship as a catastrophe. So they are threatened not by something that happens in their relationship, not by some developments, not by some events or not by the choices and decisions of their partners. They are threatened by the very existence, factual existence of the relationship. Being in a relationship in their minds constitute danger. Just to clarify something, DMM does not recognize the distinction between secure and insecure attachment styles. It actually dispenses with the whole idea of attachment styles. So I'm conflating, I'm confusing a bit several attachment theories when I'm talking to you right now, but I'm eclectic. I believe you should take the best from each theory. You don't need to adhere religiously to a single model. So when a person needs protection, when a person needs comfort from danger, they go to someone else. They go to another person. They develop protective relationships. So we all develop protective relationships. We perceive dangers in the environment, sometimes in ourselves, but definitely in the environment. We perceive dangers in our relationships. And then we adopt someone else as a protective person. Borderlines call it special friend. And so the protective relationship is very crucial because the nature of the relationship generates relation-specific self-protective strategies. In other words, relationships dictate the strategies for self-protection, not the other way. Until recently, until Crittenden's work, we thought that strategies dictate relationships. Crittenden ended this. She suggests that relationships actually dictate which strategies are available to us in terms of self-protection. The DMM describes protective strategies, aspects of parent-child relationships, romantic relationships, relationships between patients, clients, long-term professionals. I mean, it's very complex and very confounded and a very fascinating theory. And I recommend that you have a deeper look at it in your spare time. What I would like to focus on today is a lot more pragmatic, a lot more practical. How does the DMM translate into day-to-day attachment reactions? How can we look at everyone around us and classify them in terms of the various strategies of DMM attachment? So to do this, I would like to recap, perhaps more in layman's terms, I'd like to recap the DMM. The Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation, DMM. It emphasizes the dynamic interaction of the maturation of the human organism across the lifespan with the context in which maturational possibilities are used. And they are used for three goals, to satisfy, to meet three needs, requirements and goals. So the dynamic, the DMM says there is an interaction between people, an interaction between organisms. This drives neurological development, development of the brain, because the brain is neuroplastic. This development never stops. It's across the lifespan. Now the context, the relationships determine the strategies and the pathways of neural development. And there are three goals, three aims. One is to protect the self. The second one, second goal, is to reproduce. And the third goal is to protect one's offspring or progeny. So very simple, protect yourself so that you can reproduce, so that you can protect your children. Maturation in DMM is neurological, mental, physical, everything. It's an integrated theory of attachment. And it involves the increase in potential during childhood and adulthood, but also the ultimate decrease in old age. So it's a lifespan attachment theory. And it deals with a multiplicity of contexts, people in places that affect development, anything from family to school to workplace, etc. It's a very rich theory. The context is not limited to the environment. So it's not an environment, strictly environmental theory, because there are attachment theories that attribute attachment reactions to environmental cues exclusively, not the DMM. The context in the DMM includes intra, internal challenges, but also interpersonal challenges. In other words, internal processes, but also processes one has with other people in different periods of the lifespan, infancy, preschool, school age, adolescence, adulthood. And the outcome of all these complexes, webs, webs of interactions embedded in context and with other people, the outcome of all this is kind of emerging organization. Again, the DMM does not accept the distinction between disorganized attachment and organized attachment, because the DMM says there's no such thing as disorganized attachment. There's no way to survive without attachment, and there's no way to come up with an attachment strategy if it's not organized. So the DMM dispense with the idea of disorganized attachment. But the outcome of the DMM is the organization of mental and behavioral strategies of protection for the self and for one's children, the progeny. And these are the patterns, patterns of attachments. So the DMM actually, the main hypothesis of the DMM is that maturation creates complexity. Maturation creates novelty. Maturation drives us to develop ever newer, ever more novel and complex mental and behavioral processes. Changes in context provide the occasion and the catalyst for using these processes and giving, they give rise to these processes. So there's a need for maturing individuals to attribute meaning. It's an integral part of my work as well. I think there's nothing more important to people than meaning. Maturing individuals, according to the DMM, need to imbue complex, ambiguous, incomplete and deceptive information with meaning. So they're busy all the time making sense of what's happening around them and to them and to end with other people in ways that promote self-protective behavior. It's an interaction of maturation with experience. The particular organization of self-protective behavior reflects the strategies. And these strategies help the individual to identify, prevent and protect themselves from the dangers of particular contexts and particular relationships. At the same time, it promotes exploration of other people, of aspects of life, of the environment and via introspection of oneself. Exposure to danger differs by age, differs by person, family, cultural groups. But ultimately, the patterns of attachment will reflect individual developmental history, family organization of self-protective strategies and cultural experience with persistent local dangers. That's the DMM. And now, the DMM accounts fully for people with insecure attachment styles or people who are incapable of intimacy, love and functional relationships. We'll come to it in a minute. But to get there, we need to understand that as we grow up, as we move through the lifespan, as we grow older, we keep accumulating layers upon layers of attachment strategies. And all these attachment strategies are simultaneously functional. So it would be wrong to reduce any single individual to a single attachment strategy or a single attachment pattern or a single attachment theory or style. Because everyone displays very complex, multi-layered, archeological and historical behavior when it comes to relating to other people, to attachment. Of course, in infancy, the repertory is very limited. Now, Crittenden adopted Ainsworth ABC classification. Ainsworth came up with three types of attachment strategies or attachment situations, following the famous stranger experiments or stranger positions. So Ainsworth suggested that there's ABC and only B is Confident Secure Safe Base attachment. A and C are not. So Crittenden and her collaborators had adopted this ABC classification and they divided attachment strategies to ABC. So in childhood, we have the first type of attachment strategy we develop is inhibited, socially facile. So this is called A12 strategy. A12 strategy uses cognitive prediction in the context of very little real threat. It can be described as anticipatory anxiety. Attachment figures in this inhibited style, attachment figures are idealized by overlooking the negative qualities. And this is typically what babies do. Overlook mommy's negative qualities because if mommy is a negative figure, if she is bad, a bad object, it's very threatening. And this is where I part ways with Klein, Melanie Klein, and disagree with her. I think children tend to idealize the mother. I think the splitting theory in early object relations schools was totally, got you totally wrong. Crittenden agrees. So in the inhibited attachment style, attachment figures like mommy are idealized by overlooking the negative qualities. The self is put down a bit. So to create a comparative good bed dichotomy, it's a form of dichotomous thinking, splitting. Most children, most babies, most infants with this inhibited attachment style, A12, they're predictable and responsible. And when they become adult, they become predictable and responsible people. They're cool, they're businesslike. Type A strategies all rely on inhibition of feelings. They set danger at a psychological distance from the self. It's like if I don't show you why I am, if I'm inhibited, if I don't lose control, then I can keep the danger at arm's length. And this strategy is first used at infancy, amazingly. Mothers would describe cold babies with kind of RAD, mild RAD, reactive attachment disorder. The second strategy is B12. Again, we are right now in infancy. The first few formative years, let's say zero to four or zero to six. So the second attachment style that emerges in this infancy phase is B12. Remember, these attachment styles start at infancy but remain for life. Other attachment styles start in adolescence, in puberty and remain for life. There is an accrual of attachment styles. And we will come, when we wrap up all this, we will come back to the issue of people who cannot have intimacy and relationships. Why is that? Okay, so B12 is known as the reserved attachment strategy. These individuals are a bit more inhibited with regard to negative affect but are inherently balanced and well-functioning. So they are bit reserved. They will not show you, they will not show anger or visible envy or any negative affectivity. But they are essentially balanced. So B12 is constructive, productive, functional attachment strategy. B3, again in infancy. The type B strategy involves a balanced integration of temporal prediction with affect. Let me explain. Type B individuals show all kinds of behaviors but they are very similar in that they're able to adapt to a wide variety of situations in ways which are self-protective, protective of their children. And that as often as possible cause others no harm. So it's a kind of the B strategies are strategies that like live and let live. I'll protect myself, I'll protect my children but I will not do this at your expense. B people, B type people, they communicate directly, negotiate differences, find mutually satisfactory compromises. They distort cognitive and affective information very little, especially not to themselves, they are not self-deceptive. This is relationship material. These are the good ones, the ones that go away. Finally, people with B strategies display a wider range of individual variations than people using other strategies. Because people using other strategies, they go through a process called constriction. They constrain their functioning. They alter their behavior and their strategies and their choices and their decisions in order to employ their attachment strategy. B people, people with B strategies don't do this. This strategy functions in infancy by adulthood. Two sorts of B strategies can be differentiated. Naive Bs simply had the good fortune to grow up in safety and security with good enough parenting. Mature Bs have reached neurological maturity, usually by the mid-30s. They have reached neurological maturity. They function in life's major roles as a spouse, as a parent, someone's child. And they carry out an ongoing process of psychological integration across relationships, roles and contexts. Naive Bs tend to be simplistic. Mature Bs grapple with life's complexities and nuances. But both of them are very good for relationships. Both of them are very, very healthy attachment strategies. B45 is a reactive strategy. These are individuals who exaggerate negative effects, but only a bit. They are a bit sentimental. Sometimes they are irritated. But inherently, they are still balanced. Generally, B strategies are balanced. Now we come to dysfunctional strategies. Remember that A and C are not safe strategies, not functional, not balanced, not secure, insecure. That's A's worth contribution. So let's now review the C strategies that emerge in childhood and remain for life. C12, threatening disarming strategy. It involves relying on one's own feelings to guide behavior. These are the kind of people who say, I trust my intuition. I'm never wrong. So they would rather trust their gut instincts than any rational analysis and any countervailing information or data. They have confirmation bias, which is set centered on their own grandiose infallibility. So these people also use somewhat exaggerated and they change displayed negative effect. So they're a bit off the charts, they're a bit out there. And their main aim is to influence other people's behavior. So what they do is they exaggerate the displayed negative effect or they change it suddenly. That is intermittent reinforcement. Specifically, the strategy of C12 consists of splitting, exaggerating and alternating the display of mixed negative feelings in order to attract attention and manipulate the feelings and responses of other people. The alternation is between presentation of a strong, angry, invulnerable self who blames others for any problem, alloplastic defenses. And the appearance of a weak, fearful, invulnerable self who entices others to give succorence and protection. So we have these alternations. C12 is a very normal strategy. It's founding people with low risk for mental health problems and a great zest for life. So while C12 is a manipulative strategy and grounded in some form of grandiosity, it is still highly functional, highly functional for the individual and to some extent highly functional for the intimate partners of the individual. So this is the picture in infancy. One could say that in infancy the preponderance of dysfunctional attachment strategies is very low, because a child cannot afford to not get attached. A child whose attachment strategy fails is at risk for her life. It's a question of survival. You need to attach. Even if you are C type, even if you are A type, which are very bad types, as we will see later on, you still need to attach. So there's a lot of constraining of negative affectivity, of changeability, of mood, mood liability. There's a lot of constricting and constraining of mental health effects, theoretically, ostensibly. All these infantile attachment styles can still lead to mature adult functional relationships. But then what happens is most infants tend to grow up. And as they grow up, they begin to develop attachment strategies which are really, really problematic for relationships, intimacy and love. So let's continue. You remember all the previous attachment strategies, the infancy ones? They prevail, they continue into preschool. So in the preschool, in the infancy phase, the parents mediate the effect of the context upon the infant, including the risk to the infant. The infant perceives risk and develops strategies mediated via his parents. He has no direct access to reality or to the environment. But in preschool, the child begins to learn safe forms of self-reliance for short periods of time. He's beginning to wander off, he's beginning to, in other words, separate and become an individual. And so all the previous strategies continue well into preschool and well into the grave, throughout life. But new strategies are added. The first new strategy is A3. Individuals using this strategy known as compulsive caregiving. It's actually a strategy first described by Boulbig in 1973. So individuals using this strategy rely on predictable contingencies, inhibit negative effect and protect themselves by protecting their attachment figure. In childhood, these people try to cheer up or care for a sad, withdrawn, depressed, unavailable, vulnerable attachment figure. In other words, they parentify themselves. They become parent figures to their own attachment figures. Attachment figures is another name for parents in most cases. So these children learn that if they want the attachment figure to stick around, and if they want the attachment figure to function even minimally, they have to parentify, to parent the attachment figure. So they parentify themselves. And so they try to cheer up the parental figure. They try to care for the parental figure. In adulthood, these people usually find employment where they rescue or care for others. They are very strong, saviour, rescuer complexes. And so they gravitate towards other people who appear weak and needy. And this is also true in intimate relationships. They fix people, their fixers, their healers. And so they would tend to have this messiah fixer complex when they come across a potentially intimate partner. I'm going to fix her. I'm going to make her better. I'm going to make her with my love. The precursors of A3 and A4 can be seen even in infancy. It's in the strange situation experiment. It's very clear. But the strategy only functions fully in preschool years. And so individuals in this period begin to show signs of this. Now, A3 is where we first encounter promiscuity, casual sex, avoidance of intimacy. And here is what the literature says. Individuals with A3 and A4 use a compulsively promiscuous strategy. This is from I'm quoting Crittenden, 1995. They use a compulsively promiscuous strategy to avoid genuine intimacy while maintaining human contact. So in casual sex, when you're promiscuous, you have human contact. You have a warm body. You have the smell and the taste of a partner. But it's not real intimacy. It's not genuine intimacy. It's fake. It's like junk food. It's fake. It's passing. It's ephemeral. And so these people avoid genuine intimacy, says Crittenden while maintaining human contact and in some cases satisfying sexual desires. Crittenden says, these people with A3, A4 strategy show false positive affect, including sexual desire, to little known people, strangers. And they protect themselves from rejection by engaging with many people superficially and not getting deeply involved with anyone. This strategy develops in adolescence when past intimate relationships have been treacherous and strangers appear to offer the only hope of closeness and sexual satisfaction. It may be displayed in socially promiscuous manner that does not involve sexuality or in more serious cases is sexual promiscuity. Crittenden regards sexual promiscuity as an extreme sign of attachment dysfunction. And so do I. And I'm not talking about agentic promiscuity, which is basically an empowered choice. I'm talking about compulsive promiscuity that involves sexual self-trashing, masochistic, self-defeating, self-destructive, reckless behaviors. Now A4 compulsively compliant individuals were actually first described by Crittenden and Dilala in 1988. They try to prevent danger. They inhibit negative effect and they protect themselves by doing what attachment figures want them to do. They are people pleasers, a co-dependence. If the attachment figure is angry and threatening, the compliance level goes up. The attempts of people pleas escalate. These A4 characters tend to be excessively vigilant, hyper-vigilant, quick to anticipate and meet other people's wishes and generally agitated and anxious. The anxiety, however, is ignored and downplayed by the individual and often is somatized. It appears in bodily symptoms that are brushed aside as being unimportant. These A3 and A4 emerge in preschool and remain for life. And so during preschool period, we have the A3, A4, but we also have the C3 and C4. The C34, aggressive, feigned, helpless. It's a strategy that involves alternating aggression with apparent helplessness to cause other people to comply out of fear of being attacked or to cause people to assist out of fear that one cannot care for oneself. So it's dual messaging. It's like a mixed signal. I'm going to attack you so you better comply. You better do what I want you to do. Better cater to my needs. And if not, then I'm going to destroy myself. I'm going to victimize myself because I'm helpless and I can't do otherwise. So you need to help me. You need to help me because I cannot care for myself. So there's an alternation between these two, this aggression and learned or feigned helplessness. Individuals using C3, which is the aggressive variant. This strategy, they emphasize their anger in order to demand caregivers compliance. And those using the C4, feigned helplessness, which is a form of aggression, of course. Codependency involves emotional blackmail. It's aggression. So C4, feigned helplessness. These people give signals of incompetence, inadequacy, submission, need, extreme neediness. The angry presentation, C3 elicits compliance and guilt in other people. Whereas the vulnerable presentation, C4 elicits rescue, saving, fixing, healing. Now, again, you can see all these behaviors in infancy, but the strategy only functions, only blossoms, flourishes in preschool years and later. And then, of course, after preschool, what do we have? School age. In school age, people establish symmetrical attachments with best friends, for example, while concurrently maintaining affiliative peer relationships. So it's all about peers. The reference group is peers, and peers have a much bigger influence than, for example, parental figures or teachers or even role models or celebrities. During school years, again, we have all the previous attachment strategies. I repeat again, previous attachment strategies developed earlier in life persist and survive into death throughout the lifespan. So in school years, we have everything we had before, but a new strategy emerges, and it's known as C56. It's an extreme form of C34. It involves active deception to carry out the revenge or elicit rescue. It's about revenge and rescue. Individuals using these strategies substantially distort information, particularly blaming others for their own predicament and heightening their own negative effect. The outcome is more enduring and less resolvable struggle or conflict. People using C5, which is the punitive strategy, they're called the deceptive, the distant, the self-control. They're much more so than people who use C3. These people appear invulnerable. They dismiss other people's perspectives while forcing other people to attend to them, and they mislead other people regarding their own inner feelings of helplessness and desire for conflict. So it's a facade, it's a compensatory thing, and it's very reminiscent of grandiose narcissism or overt narcissism. Individuals using the C6, which is seductive, this strategy, they give the appearance of needing rescue from dangerous circumstances that are in fact self-induced. C6 individuals mislead other people regarding how angry they are. And this alternating pattern is often seen in bully-victim fears with gangs and in violent couples, where the hidden half of the pattern is usually forgotten or forgiven until the presentation reverses. And this strategy develops during the school years, but actually it doesn't function fully until adolescence, which is the next stage in the lifespan. In adolescence, we transform best friend attachments into romantic reciprocal attachments with the sexual component. Here, the failure starts. Here, people who are incapable of love, romantic attachments, intimacy and relationships, here they trip in adolescence. So in adolescence again, we have all the previous attachment strategies A12, A3, A4 and so on and so forth. We have all the previous strategies, but we have a few new ones. So we have A5. A5 individuals use a compulsively promiscuous strategy. And so I mentioned it before, and so A5 blossoms in adolescence. It is where it starts to manifest really powerfully and becomes the dominant attachment strategy for life. People say, well, people can change. You shouldn't inquire too deeply into the past history of your partner. What matters is how your partner is behaving with you now. It's nonsense. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and certain things never change. For example, attachment strategies and attachment styles. So you need to inquire really, really deeply into the background of your partner. Sexual history, relationship history, intimacy skills, relationship outcomes, infidelity if there was any, etc. You need to do all this because it's going to repeat itself. We know, for example, that people who had cheated once are three to five times more likely to cheat again. We even know that people who had been cheated on are far more likely to be cheated on again. It's all pretty predictable. We're pretty predictable people. So the strategies that are described here are very, very important. They're very important because they give you the tools to classify your potential intimate partner and, of course, to classify yourself. And so if you do that, you're able to predict with a large degree of accuracy what's going to happen. So A5 individuals are similar to previous attachment styles that I had mentioned, and it's a compulsively promiscuous strategy. As I said, it's intended to avoid genuine intimacy and so on. But A6 is a really new layer, a really new strategy which emerges in adolescence. It was first described by Babelby, who else, in 1980. Individuals who use A6, it's a compulsively self-reliant strategy. These people don't trust other people. They regard other people as unpredictable in their demands. They find themselves inadequate in meeting these demands. So they both, they avoid other people in their demands because they think the demands would be capricious and arbitrary, and also they don't believe that they are adequate to answer these demands. People with A6 inhibit negative effect. They protect themselves by relying on no one other than themselves. They're totally self-sufficient. They self-contained. They expect nothing from others. They never ask for help. They reject advice. It's an intrusion. It's an imposition. This protects itself from other people, but at the cost of lost help, lost advice, lost comfort, support and assistance. It's a big loss. It's not a very wise or clever trade-off, and it's very defensive. Usually the A6 strategy develops in adolescence after individuals have discovered that they cannot regulate the behaviour of important but dangerous or non-protective givers, caregivers. So these people withdraw from close relationships as soon as they are old enough to care for themselves. There is a social form of strategy in which individuals function adaptively in social and work contexts, but are distant when intimacy is expected in an isolated form. So some people function perfectly in their careers, in their workplaces, but when intimacy is involved, their coldness, detachment, avoidance withdraw, render it impossible for them to connect. There's another form in which individuals in A6 individuals cannot manage any interpersonal relationship and they withdraw as much as possible from other people, totally to the point of celibacy and schizoid kind of solitude. And so these emerges in adolescence. A6 emerges in adolescence, and many of these adolescence are sometimes misdiagnosed as schizotypal, or they are the weirdos of the class and they are mocked and outcast, they are excommunicated, they are ostracized, they are ridiculed and so on and so forth. And they remain like this for life. And finally we reach adulthood, most of us. We reach adulthood where we establish symmetrical and reciprocal spousal or romantic attachments that foster both partners' development. And there is the nurturance of children in non-reciprocal and non-symmetrical attachment relationships in which the adult is the attachment figure. So we play a dual role. We play a role of an equal with our intimate partner and a role of an attachment figure, which is again non-symmetrical with our children if we have any. All the previous attachment strategies are active very much and in play, including many of them who preclude intimacy, love and relationship, make them impossible. But there are few additional layers, few additional strategies that emerge only in adulthood. A7, delusionally idealizing individuals. It's a late addition, written and first described it in 2000. These people have had repeated experience with severe danger that they cannot predict or control. They display brittle, false positive effect and protect themselves by imagining that their powerless or hostile attachment figures will protect them. This is a very desperate strategy of believing falsely in safety when no efforts are likely to reduce the danger. It's a kind of hostage syndrome. Paradoxically, the appearance of these people, of A7 people, their appearance is generally pleasing and there's no hint of the fear and trauma that lie behind the nice exterior until circumstances produce a breaking function. They suddenly collapse mentally. This pattern only develops in adulthood, which has a lot about the kind of adulthood that modern people have. A8, externally assembled self, also described for the first time by Crittenden in 2000. So, people with A8 attachment strategy do, as other people require, their people pleases, they have few genuine feelings of their own and they try to protect themselves by absolute reliance on other people, usually professionals who replace their absent or endangering attachment figures. So, Mienhausen syndrome and Mienhausen by proxy syndrome may be an extension of this. Both A7 and A8 are associated with pervasive and sadistic early abuse and neglect, which finally leads us to psychopathy. Psychopathy emerges in adulthood and it's known as the A plus C plus strategy or AC strategies. They combine the sub-patterns of both A and C, like it's best of both worlds. In practice, most of these people have distorted patterns. For example, A34 is higher, C34 is higher, you know, this kind of thing. Individuals using these strategies display very sudden shifts in behavior. They're very impulsive, they're very defined and reckless. In the cases of blended strategies, they show very subtle mixing of distortion and deception. And the extreme form of this is of course psychopathy. So, if you have a look, if you review, if you listen back to this recording, you will reach the very sad conclusion that the majority of attachment strategies are focused around fending off danger, protecting oneself. And therefore, they are not very conducive to intimacy, love and relationships. Finally, there's C7, A7, A8, menacing paranoid. It's the most extreme of type C strategies. It involves a willingness to attack anyone, combined with the fear of everyone. Type C strategies all involve distrust of consequences and an excessive reliance on one's own gut feelings. At the extreme, this pattern becomes delusional, with delusions of infinite revenge over ubiquitous enemies, the menacing strategy C7. On the reverse side, there's paranoia regarding these enemies, C8. And these two strategies do not become organized before early adulthood. Reviewing these attachment strategies tells us that when we attempt true intimacy, true love and abiding functional relationships, we have to overcome many, many layers of disturbed attachment strategies that lead to fear, danger, avoidance, withdrawal, negative affectivity, or self-denial and self-deception. It is not therefore surprising that so many of us fail in our quest to find warmth, acceptance, and a friend, a friend for life, and even the most basic and primitive of all needs and desires, C6. This lesson is titled So, Can You Change Your Attachment Style? And here is the lecture. The answer is no. Thank you very much for listening and see you in my next video. Just yanking your chain, just pulling your leg. Cool it. Did you ever hear of a lecture of mine which is less than 7 hours? I compete very closely with Fidel Castro, the late Fidel Castro. Okay Shoshanim, today we are going to discuss the stability of attachment styles. When you finally develop and adopt an attachment style, which is usually right around the end of childhood, the beginning of adolescence, is this attachment style for life? Is it going to be with you for the entire lifespan? Is there nothing you can do about it? In one word, yes, there's nothing you can do about it. Attachment style also known as attachment orientation in some other models of attachment and adaptation, like the DMM. Attachment style and attachment orientation are for life. They are immutable. We call it stability. They're stable. But there's a lot you can do about it. You can, for example, neutralize your attachment style. If you find your attachment style unacceptable, dysfunctional, if it damages your relationships, if it harms you personally, if you're uncomfortable with it, if you're egotistonic, you can absolutely neutralize your attachment style. You can modify your attachment behaviors. You can become self-aware and then prevent or negate a misconduct emanating from your attachment style. So there's a lot you can do. You can even modify your internal relationship model, which is part of your internal working model. Now we're going to discuss all these issues today and we're going to do a literature review, very extensive literature review. But in a nutshell, while you cannot change, I repeat, you cannot change your attachment style or attachment orientation. You can change many components in your attachment style and the behaviors attendant upon your attachment style. So hope is not lost on the very contrary. People overcome insecure attachment and they succeed to function well within long-term committed relationships. Even though underlying all this is an attachment style which is self-defeating, self-destructive and other destructive attachment style, which pushes people away attachment style, which is essentially founded on a dread of intimacy. Never mind how bad your attachment style is and for example avoidant dismissive is a seriously dysfunctional attachment style. Never mind. You can always overcome it by being self-aware, modifying your behavior, modify your internal working model and working together with therapists and with your partners. Okay, let's get to business and let's start by saying that 70% of people can't change anything about their attachment style. And that's a sad statistic. But the flip side of it is that 30% of people, up to 46%, depending on the study, but usually 30% of people can and do change substantial components and ingredients of their attachment style and orientation to the point that effectively they are transforming their attachment or the way they attach to other people. They are transforming their bonding, attachment behaviors and internal relationship models do change in 30% of people. An internal relationship model is an interaction model between a child and his caregivers. When the child has experiences with the caregivers, usually parental figures and more specifically the mother, he internalizes these interactions and he creates a narrative that incorporates them and makes sense of these exchanges. And this is known as the model. The internal relationship model becomes a part of the self. The internal relationship model is subspecies, an example of an internal working model. And we will discuss internal working model at the end of this interminable lecture. The relationship between a person's inner parent and inner child is supposed to be harmonious. They are supposed to love each other. And so the more you have been loved and the better you have been treated, the more your model, internal working model, internal relationship model approximates functionality. The better this model is for you and with you. But if the relationship between your inner parent and inner child is pathological in some way, if you have had what Andre Green called a dead mother, an absent, selfish, depressed, parentifying mother, then you would have a lot of rage and a lot of hatred bottled up inside you. And then the more you are loved, the more this rage and hatred are going to manifest. You had learned as a child to associate love with pain and hurt. And so anyone who tries to love you is a secretary, object, a potential enemy. All important external relationships are extensions and projections of internal relationship models. The more important the external relationship, the more intimate it is, the more powerful the inner relationship model is projected and activated. And so the more you are terrified of intimacy and love, the more hateful, resentful and aggressive you are when someone tries to love you and when you become intimate. We're going to discuss all this when we talk about the internal working model. The internal working model of attachment is a mental representation formed through the child's early experiences with a primary caregiver. This mental representation influences how the child interacts and builds relationships with other people as the child grows up. We call this process object relations. It also explains the differences in human behaviors among people but will not go into it. Now, what can you do about your attachment style or attachment orientation? This is something you had received as a legacy in childhood and then you stuck with it for life. Yes, you can't control your attachment style and you can't change it. Never mind what people say. But what you can do, you can definitely modify your behaviors. You can become self-aware, you're an adult now. So you can realize that your behaviors are counterproductive, destructive, self-defeating and other defeating, hurtful and push people away. You can modify these behaviors to counter the effects of the attachment style, to neutralize the attachment style. Also, you can modulate the intensity of your attachment orientation or attachment style. You can tell yourself, literally tell yourself, I'm being avoidant now. I'm being dismissive. I'm being paranoid. And I'm going to control this. I'm going to take hold of myself. I'm going to regain control. I'm going to become self-aware and I'm going to tamp down these bad behaviors. Behaviors that make me and people around me sad and mad and sometimes bad. So I'm going to change the way I interact with people. Deep inside, for example, I'm uncomfortable with intimacy because I have an avoidant attachment style. So intimacy frightens me. Intimacy terrifies me deep inside. But I'm going to force myself to be intimate with someone I trust. And I'm not going to undermine the intimacy. And I'm not going to do crazy things like cheating or stealing or lying so that I maintain the intimacy. I'm going to go through with it. I'm going to be brave. I'm going to be a big boy or a big girl. So the intensity, the intensity can be modulated. And it's very important because once the intensity is brought down, the attachment style becomes a lot more secure even if internally it's exactly the opposite. The changes in intensity in behaviors and in the internal working models are brought on and mediated via qualitative relationships or the quality of relationships. If you have a series of good relationships, healthy, loving, caring relationships with empathic people, you will likely take more risks in future relationships. So if so fact or by definition, you will have become more secure even if your internal style is immutable, the same outwardly, behaviorally, you'll become more secure. But if you're exposed to abuse, to bullying, to intermittent reinforcement, if you had a succession of partners who broke your heart and dismissed you and humiliated you and rejected you, then of course you may develop avoidance even if your attachment style is basically secure. In other words, you can be conditioned to some extent and your behavior can be modified. So quality of relationships. Then there's an issue of trauma. If you experience trauma, it tends to change the way your attachment style is expressed. Now that's a very important distinction. Attachment styles can be expressed in myriad ways. And so you could have the same attachment style from cradle to grave, and you'd behave very differently in different periods of your life because you're expressing the attachment style, the underlying attachment style very differently. So trauma changes the expression of attachment style. Therapy, a good therapist. If it's a psychodynamic therapist using transference and counter transference, if it's CBT therapist using, you know, reframing and other CBT techniques, but a good therapist, a therapist who provides you with a holding environment, a containing environment, a therapist who provides you with, in essence, unconditional acceptance in a way. Such a therapist can induce massive changes in you. He can be a proxy for or a surrogate for an intimate relationship. Kind of a bridge. So therapy is very crucial. If you have a personality disorder, that's a very bad prognosticator. It means that your attachment style is extremely likely to be deficient, dysfunctional and insecure. Narcissists, for example, people with narcissistic personality disorder. People with borderline personality disorder, let alone psychopaths, they all have severe attachment dysfunctions because they're incapable of perceiving other people as separate entities with their own needs and wishes and preferences and priorities. So they are unable to relate to other people as external objects. The psychopath treats other people as instruments. The borderline treats other people as external regulators over ego functions. The boundary, ego boundary functions. The narcissist treats other people as sources of narcissistic supply. This is not the right ground for attachment. This is wrong soil. No attachment is going to grow there, so personality disorders. And finally, life crisis. Life crisis can induce an apparent change in personality orientation, which is actually a change in behavior, not in orientation. We're going to delve in the second half of the lecture. We're going to delve into the issue of internal relationship models, internal working models, and how they can be modified. But I promised you a literature review, a boring literature review, and I'm a man of my word. Plus, it's a pleasure to torture you. All right, Shoshanim. We start with a very recent article, Chopin, Edelstein, and Grimm, 2019. The article is titled Longitudinal Changes in Attachment Orientation, over a 59-year period. It was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 116, of course. And I'm going to read to you the abstract. Research on individual differences in attachment, and their links to emotion, cognition, and behavior in close relationships, has proliferated over the last few decades. However, the majority of this research has focused on children and young adults. Little is known about mean-level changes in attachment orientation beyond early life, in part due to a dearth of longitudinal data on attachment across a lifespan. We found, say, the authors, we found that attachment anxiety declined on average with age, particularly during middle age and older adulthood. So they're talking about intensity. Yes, intensity declines with age, which is, by the way, very true for a variety of other traits, personality traits, and a variety of other mental health disorders. Psychopathy ameliorates with age. Anxiety ameliorates with age. Narcissism changes with age. Borderline personality disorder disappears with age. Age has something to do with all this. And attachment style or attachment orientation is an extensive trait. In other words, it's a trait that is ubiquitous in all areas of life and colors the entire personality. So naturally, it should undergo some kind of change with age. The authors continue, attachment avoidance decreased in a linear fashion across the lifespan, being in a relationship predicted lower levels of anxiety and avoidance across adulthood. Men were higher in attachment avoidance at each point in the lifespan. You don't say. Okay, now back in time, 25 years. We go to an article titled Attachment Styles and Closed Relationships, a four-year prospective study. It was authored by Lee Kirkpatrick and Cindy Hazan. It was first published in June 1994 in the journal Personal Relationships, the Journal of the International Association for Relationship Research. Again, I'm going to quote from each article, I'm going to pick up segments from each article and I'm going to read them aloud to you, mainly because I'm lazy. Okay, here's what this article says. A longitudinal study of 177 adults examined the stability of adult attachment styles and of romantic relationships over a four-year period. Findings included the following. A, attachment styles were highly stable over time. I told you so. B, attachment style was a significant predictor of relationship status. C, this effect was mediated by concurrent attachment style. D, in other words, attachment style modulation or modification. D, secure respondents were less likely than insecure respondents to report one or more breakups during the four-year interval, but E, paradoxically, ambivalent respondents were just as likely as secure respondents to be in a relationship with the same partner they identified four years earlier. And F, attachment stability was moderated to some extent by the experience of breakup or initiation of a new relationship during the inter-ring. Respondent's ability to recall their previous attachment style was also examined. And so what this, at the time groundbreaking article discovered was that attachment style is stable across a lifespan but can be modulated, can be extensively modulated, actually, by having a relationship as simple as that. Now we go forward to 2011 to a very important article, a seminal article that's published in the Australian, believe it or not, Journal of Educational and Developmental Psychology, there is such a thing, Volume 11. It's a new academic journal, but of high standard. So the article is titled, attachment across a lifespan, factors that contribute to stability and change. It was authored by Megan McConnell of McGill University in Canada and Ellen Moss of the Université du Québec in Montreal. So again, I'm going to quote from the article, but this time I'm going to quote extensively because it's, in my view, the best review of attachment literature extant to this very day. So here's what the authors say. A number of studies have examined continuity of attachment from infancy to adolescence and adulthood in both low and high-risk samples. I'm referring you here to Hamilton 2000, Waters, Merrick, Treboo, Crowell and Albert Heim 2000, Lewis Fiering and Rosenthal 2000, Weinfeld, Schruff and Eagleland 2000. 2000 was a vintage year for attachment studies. So continuity from infancy to adolescence to adulthood was studied, was investigated in all these studies. Results from these studies say the authors have indicated that factors such as divorce, single parenthood, life-threatening illnesses within the family, parental drug abuse, death of a family member and other negative life events were all indicative of change to attachment insecurity. As I said before, life crisis have an effect, modulating effect on the intensity of the underlying attachment style. In addition to the longitudinal studies continue the authors, in addition to these studies looking at attachment stability, the research on this topic has expanded over the last two decades as investigators have examined continuity and discontinuity across particular developmental periods such as infancy. And here I refer you to Baye Kaim, Sutton Fox and Marvin 2000, Eagleland and Farber 1984, Hohmerding and Shaw 1999. Continuity of attachment style had been studied even in early childhood. I refer you to Moss, Sear, Breaux, Tarabulsky and Dubois Comptoir 2005 and to the NICHD study in 2001. Many studies dealt with continuity of attachment style in middle childhood and adolescence. Ellen, McKellar, Heiney, Coppermink and Jody 2004, Amaniti, Van Isidorn, Speranza and Tambelli in 2000, etc. And finally there were even studies which went into adulthood and investigated whether attachment styles are stable in adulthood. And so I refer you to Crowell, Trebu and Waters 2002, Schaaf, Bartholomew, 1994, Zhang, Labouavi, Vieff 2004. Okay, so this is a literature review. You see that there are dozens of studies which had dealt with the issue of stability of attachment style across the lifestyle. And the authors of the article that was published in the Australian Journal say these studies have also identified variables such as stressful life events, family risk and depression, as predictive of change from security to insecurity or disorganization. And they refer to studies by Ellen, McKellar, Heiney and Coppermink and Jody 2004, which I mentioned before, Balcaim, Sutton Fox and Marvin study, 2000, Mossier, Burot, Tawabulsky, Dubois Comptoir 2005, the studies that I mentioned. Okay, where are we going with all this? What are the authors trying to say? First, they qualify. They say there have been fewer findings regarding the factors that contribute to stable security or change from insecurity to security. Of the studies that have succeeded in discovering results related to the trajectory toward security, variables such as relationship satisfaction, greater emotional openness and fewer negative life events have been found to be related to change towards attachment security. And they refer to studies by Eagleland and Faber, 1984 and Wondra at Allies 1999. Currently, say the author, there's a porosity of literature integrating all the findings on attachment stability. There are no reviews that have examined the literature on attachment stability across a lifespan. The conclusion of the article is this. In summary, this review documents the variables that influence stability and change in attachment across the developmental periods of infancy, preschool, adolescence and adulthood between infancy and adolescence and adulthood. This paper provides a unique contribution to the literature and attachment stability by identifying the specific developmental factors that influence continuity and discontinuity across the lifespan. Additionally, variables that are influential in predicting stable security and change to security were examined. In infancy, variables such as maternal depression, antisocial behavior, maternal employment, child rearing methods, et cetera seem to have more of an influence in predicting stability and change in attachment across infancy since they directly impact caregiving behavior. And since the attachment relationship is in the process of formation during infancy, variables that directly alter caregiving behavior have a significant impact on the attachment relationship. Additionally to say the authors, external factors such as negative life events and factors that operate within the marital relationship such as relationship satisfaction also influence stability and change in attachment style during this developmental period. Therefore, factors that influence maternal behavior directly as well as factors that stem from the environment and within the family, all important predictors of stability and change during infancy. During early childhood, maternal factors appear to play less of a role in predicting stability and change in attachment. While there are still associations between some caregiving behaviors such as maternal sensitivity and change in attachment classification, factors such as negative life events, marital satisfaction and more than 10 hours a week in childcare are just as influential in predicting stability and change in attachment during this period of early childhood. This makes sense given that developmentally the preschool child is more capable of interacting with their environment and less restricted to proximity seeking behavior. Across the period of adolescence, factors related to identity and communication in family interactions as well as depression play a role in predicting stability and change during adolescence. There are important issues that adolescents often struggle with and it seems appropriate that they would be influential in affecting the course of the parent-child relationship during this period. Negative life events were also shown to predict stability and change during this time of adolescence indicating that external factors continue to operate in ways that alter or stabilize the parent-child relationship. In adulthood, variables such as coping, well-being and environmental stress all influence stability and change in attachment relationships with parents or partners during this period. It seems that factors which are more prevalent for adults such as coping and well-being have a greater impact on attachment relationships with either a parent or a partner. These variables along with those which are external such as environmental stress work together to either sustain or modify attachment relationships. In regard to stability from infancy to adolescence to adulthood, negative life events stand out as the strongest predictor in influencing change to insecurity in attachment relationships over time. Events such as the loss of a parent or family member, parental divorce, living in poverty, parental hospitalization or abuse all significantly alter caregiving behavior and dynamics within the family. Those factors that maintain stability or predict change to security in attachment relationships over time are less clear. What is clear, however, is that experiencing a negative life event has a dramatic effect on the quality of the parent-child relationship and this will likely set the stage for other maladaptive outcomes for the child later in life. I've read the whole very long article, I think it was about 30-something pages. And what the authors are actually saying is that sometimes after adverse childhood experiences, A.C.E., and negative life events or life crises, sometimes people develop insecurity or increased insecurity. But we don't know whether people transition from insecurity to security and if so, what causes it. It's as simple as that. To become less secure, we have no proper documentation of cases where people became more secure. And even in transition from secure to insecure, this is usually in the margins and usually temporary. And so it looks much more like a modification of behaviors, intensity and the internal working model than anything fundamental because people afterwards default to the original attachment style. So yes, attachment styles can be suspended, can be modified to some extent, they can be played with, they can be neutralized, but there is no proof at this stage in any study that attachment styles, one attachment style disappears and another one appears and is God-offered confusion between attachment styles, attachment behaviors and internal relationship models. Let's go to another article, 1997. Why does attachment style change? J. De Villa, D. Birch and C. Heyman. It was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, October 1997. Again, I'm going to read to you the abstract. Adult attachment research has proceeded on the assumption that attachment style is relatively stable and affects future functioning. However, researchers have become interested in attachment instability. Mind you, not change. Instability. I repeat, however, researchers have become interested in attachment instability and predictors of attachment style change. In this article, two conceptualizations of attachment style change were examined. Attachment style change is a reaction to current circumstances and attachment style change is an individual difference in susceptibility to change that is associated with stable vulnerability factors. A total of 155 women were assessed after high school graduation and six months and two years later. Results primarily supported the conceptualization of attachment style change as an individual difference. Specifically, some women may be prone to attachment fluctuations, not change fluctuations because of adverse earlier experiences. As I said, bad relationships, abuse, trauma. And women who show attachment fluctuations say the authors are similar to women with stably insecure attachments. In other words, some women who are vulnerable, susceptible, who had gone through bad life experiences, these women show fluctuations in their attachment style, but these fluctuations are indistinguishable from a stable, insecure attachment. Okay, we proceed. From the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review, a 2017 article, Revising Working Models Across Time, Relationship Situations that Enhance Attachment Security. The authors are Aviaga, Kumashiro, Simpson, and others. It was published in June 2017. Now, this is a very interesting article because it is among the first to link attachment fluctuations or attachment instability with internal, internal working models. The authors propose the attachment, I am reading the abstract to you. The authors, we propose, the authors propose the attachment Security Enhancement Model, ASEM, Attachment Security Enhancement Model to suggest how romantic relationships can promote chronic attachment security. One part of the ASEM examines partner responses that protect relationships from the erosive effects of immediate insecurity, but such responses may not necessarily address underlying insecurities in a person's mental models. This is a very important distinction. What the authors are saying is if you have a good partner, a loving, caring, empathic partner, supportive partner, the expression of your insecure attachment style can be mitigated and ameliorated. Outwardly, you will appear to be more secure, but it has nothing to do. I repeat, it does not necessarily address underlying insecurities in the person's mental models. So the insecurity is still there. Attachment style is stable. The working model is unchanged, but you trust your partner. Your partner loves you, cares for you, and you let go. And by letting go, you appear to be more secure. But it's not real security because it's actually relegating several ego boundary functions to the partner. This is what many borderlines do. In this kind of situation, it's like the person with the insecure attachment style says, okay, I'm going to let you secure my attachment style. You will be my attachment style. He's telling the intimate partner, I trust you, I believe in you, so I'm going to let you dictate how I am to behave in this attachment relationship. So intimate partner kind of regulates the fluctuations of the insecure attachment style. I continue with the article. The authors say, therefore a second part of the ASEM and to remind you ASEM is attachment security enhancement model. So a second part of the ASEM examines relationship situations that foster more secure mental models. Both parts may work in tandem. We proceed that attachment anxiety should decline most in situations that foster greater personal confidence and more secure mental models of the self. In contrast, attachment avoidance should decline most in situations that involve positive dependence and foster more secure models of close others, which is a fancy way of saying what I just said. The ASEM integrates research and theory, suggests novel directions, et cetera, et cetera. That's the propaganda bit. Let's go really back to the founding fathers of the whole thing, Bowelby, Bartholomew, Horowitz and others. I'm going to read to you the abstract of a very, very ancient article, 1991, Bartholomew and Horowitz. Attachment styles among young adults a test of four category model Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 61. Here's the abstract. A new four group model of attachment styles in adulthood is proposed. Four prototypic attachment patterns are defined using combinations of a person's self-image, positive or negative and image of others, positive or negative. In study one, an interview was developed to yield continuous and categorical ratings of the four attachment styles. Inter-correlations of the attachment ratings were consistent with the proposed model. Attachment ratings were validated by the self-report measures of self-concept and interpersonal function. Each style was associated with a distinct profile of interpersonal problems according to both self and friend reports. In study two, attachment styles within the family of origin and with peers were assessed independently. The results of study one were replicated. The proposed model was shown to be applicable to representations of family relations. Attachment styles with peers were correlated with family attachment ratings. So they're stable across environments. When you see someone who used to be needy and clinging and became avoidant, someone who used to be anxious, preoccupied and avoidant or dismissive and became secure, someone who used to be secure and he suddenly insecure. When you see these things, you say wow attachment styles are fluid, they're in flux, they change. But that's not true. We know it's not true because people default after some time to the original attachment style. So what does change? Because clearly there's a change. Any therapist will tell you. So what does change? Well first and foremost, self-awareness. Self-awareness creates a feedback loop that modifies attitude to attachment. In attachment, we have three elements. Attitude, desire and behavior. And self-awareness modifies attitude and to some extent desire. And this of course leads to behavior modification. And the more you behave, the more feedback you get. And the more positive the feedback, the more self-efficacious you feel. So this gives you an incentive, incentivizes you to behave in certain ways. We call this positive reinforcement. And so this is one one trajectory, one way that visible attachment changes. The other way is by changing the way you see the world. The way you see the world, the way you see yourself and the way you see yourself in the world, interacting with other people. And this is known as the internal working model. IWM, internal working model. Like many other things it was invented by John Boulby, a brilliant psychiatrist. He came up with the theory of attachment later modified by Mary Ainsworth and others. I recommend to you to watch my videos on attachment including the latest one about DMM. But John Boulby's theory of attachment asserted that infants are born programmed to seek connection and proximity to caretakers because they need to survive. They need to create an attachment bond because otherwise they die. They need food, they need shelter, they need to motivate their mothers and fathers to take care of them. Smiling, crying, these are all signals, bonding signals, attachment signals. Over time children learn to internalize the whole process of attachment and they use these base relationships with primary objects, primary caregivers. They use these base relationships and they form a kind of narrative or script or prototype and this becomes the template upon which they construct all future intimate relationships. Honestly, all future relationships, not only intimate and this prototype the prototypical relationship. It's a kind of an archetype, it's a set of archetypes and it's called the internal working model. It's very symbolic, it's highly symbolic. It consists of how the child interprets and responds to the caregiver's behaviors. The child forms an expectation and then he uses the expectation to plan and to decide on acting and then he acts and then he gets feedback that modulates and modifies his behavior and it's kind of a loop. And so internal working models are very, very significant, very important in developmental psychology, in child's development because they're kind of inner navigation system, inner guidance system. All future behaviors literally dictated by the internal working model. If you have a view of the world that is hostile and dangerous, it's one thing and if you have a view of the world that most people are good, you'll have a different life. Internal working models influence emotions, behaviors, cognitions, interactions with others, expectations about relationships, you name it. These are models of the whole world. It's a model of the world, it's a theory of the world. Like we have a theory of mind, theory of mind is we're trying to decipher what makes people tick, what people are thinking. So theory of the world is the internal working model. These models operate outside of conscious awareness. That's why they're so powerful. They unconsciously direct the attention and the behaviors in relationships. Internal working models are dynamic. Don't misunderstand me, they're not set in stone. They are dynamic. They can change under certain conditions. They tend to remain stable over time but as opposed to attachment style, they are amenable to change and very often they do change of course with experience, with information with. So they change and they're so powerful that they change, they affect behavior. They say, oh you see, the attachment style changed. No. The behavior changed within attachment relationships. The behaviors within attached relationships had to change because the model has been modified and is now dictating different expectations and different behaviors. It's the quality of the parent-child in early life has huge effect on future relationships. Bauerby says that babies start to form internal working models in early childhood around the age of three. In early infancy, these models are available only for the cognition of the attachment figures and short-term anticipation of course. They're very kind of animalistic or binary things. But then the child evolves. There's memory. Memory creates identity. All kinds of cognitions are linked together and then they're linked. They're connected to emotions and feelings and so the model becomes much more complex and more enriched and they become the model. These models become general mental representations of other people and of yourself, of oneself. You suddenly have a model of yourself and you have a model of other people. It's the same model and then you have you put the two parts together and suddenly there's an interaction like sparks in a plug, you know. Suddenly there's an interaction like two magnets if you wish, attracting each other. The two parts of the model are indistinguishable. If you modify one part, for example, how you see other people you modify the other part, how you see yourself and vice versa. That's why personal experience constantly alters, changes the internal working model and experiences you've had with other people more so. In adulthood this representation, this internal working model affects everything in your life. Your thoughts, your feelings, behavior, human relationship, but especially love relationships which tend to replicate the first love you ever had. Love of mommy. In internal working model of yourself arises exactly because you are interacting with other people. It's relational. That's why the very concept of individual the concept of individual the concept of personality are highly suspect because the internal model that represents you, the internal model that is you, is totally dependent on interactions with others, starting with very intimate and close others like mommy and daddy. A child derives beliefs about how acceptable the self is through the gaze of the primary caregiver. He judges himself by how responsive they are to him. A child whose caregiver responds reliably predictably lovingly embracingly, empathically. This kind of child develops a representation of the self. It's loveable, acceptable, worthwhile he has what you can call a positive self-image. They see, these children see mother and father and whatever attachment figure there is. They see them as a secure base, a safe base that they can turn to whenever in trouble, whenever in doubt they these attachment figures represent safety but imagine that you grow up with an inconsistent or unresponsive attachment figure and then you develop a view of yourself as unacceptable unworthy, unlovable so you have a negative self-image and low self-esteem and the lack of attachment security means that you don't believe that your caretaker is accessible to you. There is no safety and comfort so you have to either refer to yourself which creates narcissism or excessively rely on others which creates all the varieties of co-dependency. Researchers have identified four attachment styles in adults according to different combinations of these inner working models of self and others. This secure attachment, a securely attached person possesses a positive expectation that other people are generally accepting and responsive. There's a preoccupied attachment that kind of person has a sense of unworthiness but a positive evaluation of others the person strives to be accepted and valued by other people then there is the fearful avoidant attachment. It's a person who has a sense of unworthiness and expectation to be rejected by others who are untrustworthy this kind of person protects himself from anticipated rejection and abandonment by avoiding close involvement with others and yet they have a strong dependency on others to maintain a positive self image so they approach avoid all the time hot and cold. It's very typical of borderline personality disorder and finally there's the dismissive avoidant attachment and that's an individual who has a sense of love worthiness, he thinks he's worthy of love thinks he's lovable but he has a negative disposition towards other people and so he protects himself against disappointment. He says I'm worthy of love but I'm not going to get it so he doesn't want to be disappointed and what he does he avoids close relationships he maintains a sense of independence and invulnerability I'm self-sufficient, I don't need you go away these people are detached of dismissing of attachment and intimacy and in many ways they dread intimacy because it results in hurt and rejection attachment styles are not only stable across a life span they're a little like communicable diseases they can be intergenerationally transmitted so if a parent has a working model pattern if a parent has an attachment style especially if it's an insecure attachment style the parent tends to pass it on to his over offspring there have been studies that show that children have a history of secure attachment at one year old and they have more adaptive interactions subsequently not only with parents but also with peers and with teachers these children behave in predictable ways including with their own children when they become parents so they tend to pass it on and similarly maltreated abused children they form insecure attachment and they tend to become abusive parents and when they create insecure attachment in their own kids there are many many studies that show this and this maltreated maltreating hurt people hurt maltreated maltreating cycle it's very striking because you see how the internal working model is formed in early attachment relationships and then carried forward and reenacted in subsequent relationships it's what Freud called a repetition compulsion so attachment styles are actually stable across generations that's how stable they are however we are not automatons we are not robots we can become self aware we can work on our behaviors we can modify the way we see ourselves and others a good therapist will help you with this a good friend will help you with this and a good partner is better than both so work on yourself try to be less scared of the world and less terrified of yourself try to be more vulnerable more open to the inevitable hurt of loss as it is loss that is the engine of personal growth and personal development hello Shvanpanim Shovavim this is your favorite professor of psychology minus the hair yes I have sifted through all your complaints observations and goodwill suggestions as to what to do but I'm afraid this is a hairy situation and here's suit as I am the only solution is to wait time heals everything and my hair is a strange propensity to grow with time so there's still hope for you if not for me today we are going to discuss the God almighty confusion between intimacy emotions sex and attachment when we were teaching our young to decouple sex from emotions which in emotionless meaningless sex to think of sex as the antithesis the opposite of intimacy when we did this we did them a disservice this created an enormous confusion in the minds of the young as well as in the minds of the old the minds of laymen as well as in the minds of scholars as to what exactly is the linkage between intimacy, emotions what's the connection between sex and intimacy and how does attachment especially attachment styles how do they fit into this convoluted picture my name is Sam Vakny and I'm the author of Malignant self love narcissism revisited I'm a professor of psychology and your guide into the darkest corners and recesses of the netherworld the human mind stay with me on this tour so let's start with intimacy there is no situation more intimate than psychotherapy in psychotherapy you encounter a relative stranger and you tell him everything about yourself you tell him your deepest secrets you share with him sexual peccadiers and foibles you seek his advice as to how to conduct your life there is no equivalent level of intimacy with your spouse or even with your best friends your therapist is by far the most intimate person in your life similarly how many times have you gone to a bar or to a party and you poured your heart out confided in a total stranger exactly because he is a stranger and you're never going to see him again so it seems that intimacy is not necessarily connected to emotions as we were taught to believe early on and so intimacy is a state of affairs it is not a state of mind intimacy has nothing to do with emotions of course intimacy can be accompanied by emotions it can be coupled with emotions but there is intimacy without emotions emotionless intimacy someone suggested to call it called intimacy and there are emotions which do not lead to intimacy for example negative emotions such as love don't necessarily lead to intimacy they could lead to hurt and pain the connection between intimacy and emotions is spurious it's wrong it's not true people for example can have sex with total strangers without any emotions except maybe some mild affection and modicum of trust but trust is not an emotion it's a state where the affection is an emotion or a state of mind or a state of affairs but you can have sex with a stranger without any emotions whatsoever sometimes you don't even know the name of the stranger people have sex with strangers and sex is the ultimate in intimacy there is nothing absolutely you can find someone into your body if you're a woman and you enter someone else's body if you're a man is there any deeper more profound form of intimacy if there is, I'm not aware of it and yet and yet sex often comes unaccompanied by emotions unaccompanied by intimacy not linked to anything except the physical release and the act itself intimacy means doing things together sleeping together talking eating there could be a huge intimacy in a lunch or a dinner making love all these are forms of intimacy and they all involve actions sharing in action doing something together but none of these situations necessarily implies imply or demand the presence of an emotion or in effect they do not require any effective or emotional correlate there is intimacy in prison where people are crowded together there is intimacy there is intimacy with a prostitute there is intimacy in the hospital between a patient and her doctor and as I mentioned there is intimacy in psychotherapy all these are intimate but emotionless states intimacy in a clinical sense is a state of affairs involving proximity physical proximity vulnerability a display of vulnerability not being afraid to show vulnerability in other words trust and joint activities life so these are the three components of intimacy proximity vulnerability joint activity do you hear the word emotions do you find the word emotions in this list you don't and for good reasons they are not necessary they are not strong emotions attached with intimacy necessarily and so this is the first confusion I must say that the young people under age 25 or even 35 are the most confused about these issues because they have been taught by us, by my generation by the baby boomers they have been taught that sex, intimacy attachment, emotions these are totally disparate categories and that they shouldn't try to detach one from the other they should engage in sex without emotions they should have emotions without sex they should have intimacy without both and they should attach to people without demanding sex or emotions or intimacy and this is mayhem this is total chaos while intimacy does not require emotions emotions, positive emotions which is love do require intimacy so it's unidirectional emotions should lead to intimacy intimacy is not necessarily attached to emotions nor does it often lead to emotions same situation same confusion exists with attachment people confuse mate selection with attachment style but these are two separate things for relationships to work the attachment styles of both members of the couple ideally should match yes you heard me correctly opposites do not attract if you are if you end up being in a diet or a couple with your diametrical opposite with someone who doesn't share your values with someone with behavior grates on your nerves the relationship will not last for long if you can't reach an understanding regarding certain beliefs certain goals in life regarding what's appropriate and what is not your relationship will not survive opposites don't attract or if they do it's a seriously bad idea attachment styles like everything else should match your values should match your beliefs should match your life goals should match the stage in life that you are in your attachment styles should match so attachment style has nothing to do with mate selection it should inform mate selection in other words when you select a mate you'd better select someone whose attachment style matches yours but attachment style is not mate selection nor is it an integral part of mate selection actually impaired mate selection means that you keep choosing the wrong partners and then you keep going on to having horrible relationships Freud called it repetition compulsion Adler called it diathesis these are very old ideas and this is the core problem choosing the wrong partner repeatedly consistently and very often the same type and so it is typically the outcome of bad parental programming attachment styles form are fostered by engendered in childhood and adolescence you witness an attachment between your parents and then you emulate it somehow the attachment between you and your parents is a major influence if it is bad if it is dysfunctional you're likely to develop a dysfunctional attachment style an insecure attachment style in our most modern approach to attachment we divide all attachment styles to two groups secure and insecure most insecure attachment styles are avoidant even someone with anxious ambivalent and anxious ambivalent attachment style is still avoidant an anxious ambivalent attachment style leads to avoidance this kind of person avoids relationship and intimacy destroys relationships and intimacy because of anxieties and doubts including self-doubts so we have secure and insecure avoidant attachment styles these are the two families and the attachment style informs may inform mate selection in an ideal world but very often doesn't so mate selection is an autonomous process it has to do with archetypes in a way it has to do with the internalization and introspection of parental figures and other influential role models including peers so mate selection by evolutionary considerations for example women are more likely to choose mates who can provide for them that's a fact, that's not misogynism and it's not sexism, it's supported by every single study in the field similarly men are more likely to choose good-looking younger women that's also a fact, I'm sorry chauvinism is a fact regrettably a scientific one and so mate selection is focused around modeling around types around archetypes around economic exigencies around evolutionary considerations mate selection has very little to do with attachment style attachment style comes into play much later if you are very very self-aware if you are educated in psychology and of course if you listen to lectures by professor Dr. Sambakni you would know to choose your mate based on your attachment style but most people don't as my viewership numbers show my contribution to this field was to suggest the addition of what I called or what I call the flat attachment style everyone has an attachment style but some people have flat attachment they are incapable of any kind of bonding or any kind of relatedness to other people at all flat attachments regard other people as utterly interchangeable disposable replaceable and dispensable other people are objects other people are functions and flat attachments don't attach to objects and functions actually very few of us do when a relationship is over people go through a period of fantasy mourning or grieving the defunct bond what could have been and processing the grief and then there are withdrawal symptoms associated with a breakup but the flat attachment has no latency he or she transition instantaneously smoothly, abruptly and seamlessly from one insignificant other to the next target they don't mourn they don't withdraw, they don't avoid they don't reconsider, they don't analyze they don't seek closure they simply move on they fully substitute and fully substitute a newly found boy or lover or mate or intimate partner in quote unquote or spouse for the discarded one the discarded you and they move on to the replacement the discarded person is considered the equivalent of an expired product something that whose shelf life is over someone who is no longer useful and so it's easy for them to move on because they're focused on goals in many respects flat attachments are a bit psychopathic many narcissists on almost all psychopaths are flat attachments borderlines on the other hand tend to sexualize attachment as far as a borderline is concerned sex and attractiveness are proof of attachment sex as wages abandonment anxiety sex reduces and mitigates the borderline's separation in security she forces and prompts her partner to tell her how attractive she is how amazing, how unique how irresistibly sexy that's her way of kind of testing the waters do you still love me are you going to abandon me am I going to be rejected by you and of course attachment has nothing to do with intimacy intimacy has little to do with emotions emotions don't have much to do with sex doesn't have to do anything with mate selection has very little to do with mate selection etc etc etc this is a god awful confusion confusing this even in scholarly literature has led to the blurring of lines and to completely wrong consequences and conclusions most of the field of gender studies studies is founded on these misperceptions misapprehensions and utter conflations and confusions a lot of sexology is similarly found founded on these wrong simply wrong pseudo facts and wishful thinking we need to look we need to take a hard long cold look at the realities of life and how men and women make choices mate selection choices sexual choices attachment choices attachment style is considered to be the hand of god unauthorable and indeed it's very difficult to change one's attachment style it's life long throughout the lifespan but it involves choices while you can't control your attachment style you can control your behavior and you can modify it so to conflate attachment style with sexuality for example leads to disastrous consequences to conflate sexuality with intimacy similarly degrades intimacy reduces it into a physical release of physiological state to confuse or mix emotions and intimacy renders many intimate situations impossible beyond the pale and wrong while actually intimacy is always good there's no single situation of intimacy that involves intimacy and that is wrong for you and yet we avoid many intimate situations because we perceive them to be somehow unethical socially unacceptable etc and this is because we associate intimacy with sex and we associate intimacy with emotions and many emotions are forbidden for example you're not supposed to love anyone beside your spouse you're not supposed to have sex with anyone beside your spouse if you are in a monogamy or an exclusive relationship etc etc these are all confusions this is all a salad and it borders on a word salad to borrow a phrase from the study of schizophrenia okay I want to read to you something I want to read to you a comment by Lynn Shaw who's posted today and he captured my attention and my eye because I think it's brilliantly written and encapsulates many of the insights in modern psychology she wrote vulnerable women revisit to punish themselves to bask in the dangerous nonspecific place that is offered to them thinking that maybe they will be the one to tame the uncommitted it's not a heartfelt space it's possibly unresolved trauma there is no way in for change just a vast space that is decorated in maybes almost and couldbes each time you self batter reducing yourself into yet another unnamed game starting from scratch each time as if nothing has been previously shared between the union the need for being seen goes unnoticed because there will always be another another that will tantalize with their veil of perfection as they search and search they leave debris excusing cold behavior as uncertainty the other is too much to demanding not quite evolved throughout the new search previous ties are never broken freedom doesn't come because the desire to remain bonded in any capacity doesn't allow others to move on grow letting go is not permitted and the means to draw you back in with ambiguous stories and bold statements means the link continues but it's a jaded link an unnecessary reunion that renders you stuck repeating and rehashing the nothingness that unveils no change no direction or reimagine that there's something in the union that may flourish the freedom of letting go is rich in reality rich in realizing fully what is and what is not no longer do you hope or idealize you simply see feel and understand the subtleties that invisible thread that leaves you petually trapped breaking free says Lin starting forgiving is freedom and then you're released from tardy bonds and imagined connections reaching this point is when you experience self love and eventual freedom a space where your once disorientated heart finally acknowledges authentic honesty and you lovingly begin to trust your world again amazing extremely well written I would have said it myself and I'm pissed at myself that I haven't okay Shoshanim this was today's vignette look it up today we are going to discuss attachment styles attachment disorders and attachment dysfunctions in narcissists psychopaths borderlines and histrionics we are also going to study attachment styles and disorders in people diagnosed with CPTSD complex trauma complex post-traumatic stress disorder and the reason is that people with CPTSD often display psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors and traits reactively and temporarily so they also experience periods in which their attachment is disordered and dysfunctional and we're going to study this as well we are going to go through a very peculiar path we're going to start with a dead mother and then we're going to think about something we know but we can never think of et cetera et cetera so I promise you a fun ride in the Samvaknin theme park don't sign off after 10 minutes you'll be missing all the fun and at the end of this presentation I hope you will have a handle you'll get a grasp of how we interact with each other how we relate to each other because attachment is not only about romantic relationships we get attached to workplaces we get attached to assignments we get attached to objects attachment is a general attitude towards the world a general emotional investment in something some people are very afraid to make this emotional investment some people make this investment and remain invested for life so to understand how people interact with each other interpersonal relationships workplace relationships we need to understand what makes them tick in terms of the ability to attach my name is Samvaknin and I'm the author of Malignan self-love Narcissism Revisited I also wrote other books and e-books about personality disorder I'm a professor of psychology in several universities and without further ado let's dive in but before we do that if you look at the upper part of your screen you will see a navigation bar I mean on YouTube, you go to my channel my YouTube channel, you look up there's a navigation bar to the right hand side of the navigation bar about next to about there's a magnifying glass the magnifying glass is a search box all you have to do is type a few keywords in the search box and the ever obliging YouTube will give you a series of recommended videos which include this keyword or relate to this keyword or however obliquely and tangentially refer to this keyword so I encourage you to use the search box in order to avoid my very blatant and rude responses to your questions ok babies and bebex I'm going to use now my bedroom voice Q mass exodus of screaming and puking ladies and the reason I'm going to use my bedroom voice is the moment you've all been waiting for I'm going to keep my clothes on and now Q collective sigh of relief few reckless women tiptoe we're really back I'm going to discuss today attachment styles attachment dysfunctions as I had promised and there's an included bonus if you stay to listen long enough there's an attachment style which you've never heard of before and the reason you've never heard of before is because I invented it in my lectures in various universities when I teach attachment I teach it in a very peculiar way which I haven't seen elsewhere not online and not offline and so if you bear with me I will take you on a ride the likes of which you're unlikely to encounter anywhere else and of course it all starts with childhood children grow among adults this is a much neglected facts children grow among adults when they look around them they see people who are not like them they see people who are chronologically advanced hopefully mentally advanced very different to them they have to emulate and imitate these people in order to carry favor in order to get food and shelter in order to secure love and safety they have to adhere to the tenants beliefs rules of conduct and demands of these adults and gradually they realize that they have to become adults and there's a process of becoming and this process of becoming is dialectical the child interacts with the adult and the adult interacts with the child that's another much neglected aspect of growing up it's not only children who have an impact children have an impact on adults it's a loop it's a self-modifying self-assembling loop so children's thoughts about their caregivers together with their thoughts about themselves you know, when you put these two together this is what we call the working model every child embarks on constructing a working model of the world very early on we believe perhaps at age 6 months and the working model that children construct includes elements which relate to their physical environment elements which relate to adults in the environment and elements which relate to themselves for example, children often think about the question do I deserve to get good care do I deserve to be loved am I entitled and worthy of safety and succor and comfort and affection and the answers to these questions are very very critical throughout life because the child has to develop a sense that he is a good worthy object in order to function properly later in adult life so working models of attachment are very critical and the best types of working models working models that work they are founded on something called the safe base the safe base is a parental figure usually but could be any caregiver a grandmother in case the parents are absent for some reason a grandmother, a teacher an adult role model so but usually it's the mother so a safe base is simply a mother that allows her child to separate from her to individuate ironically a safe base is a mother who pushes her child away but pushes the child away compassionately lovingly, empathically and courageingly she doesn't push the child away out of spite out of insecurity out of narcissistic injury out of rage out of hatred she pushes the child away because she loves the child she wants the child to become an autonomous independent entity it's very painful to the mother it's very painful to the mother because mother and baby live in a symbiosis they merge, they fuse it's a co-dependent relationship which could last two years even but the mature mother pushes the child away and when she pushes the child away she constitutes a safe base exactly like a military base the child goes out explores the world with the knowledge that he can always return to mommy that mommy is there that mommy is safe that mommy is not going away anywhere that mommy is not going to abandon him not going to punish him for becoming his own person with boundaries with wishes, with a will and with a grandiosity to explore the universe because it takes a lot of grandiosity to explore the universe it's a healthy kind of narcissism it's what we call primary narcissism it's a healthy type of grandiosity it's the grandiosity that allows the child to take the immeasurable terrifying risk of abandoning mother even if only for a second even if only for a minute and going out there there's an issue of object constancy when I look back will mother still be there when I want to return to her will she accept me when I try to have her laid will she reject me it's a huge gamble to leave mommy to go away from mommy to in a way push mommy away to individuate to separate is a traumatic gamble and if the mother is the wrong kind this first attempt this first attempt at becoming you fails and so the international classification of disorders edition 10 and probably edition 11 is forthcoming and the diagnostic and statistical manual they discuss attachment in terms of situations where the child has attachment problems attachment dysfunctions either generally or to a specific attachment figure but this is very narrow it's also misleading as we will see when I continue it's also misleading but it's also very narrow and so there was a guy scholar by the name of Andrei Andrei Green in 1983 he published an essay and he used the evocative he used the evocative phrase dead mother complex he said that some mothers are dead they are not they are not dead in the sense that they are clinically dead like no pulse no brain activity although I know many mothers who are like that while alive but they are dead in the sense that they are very depressed they are depressed they are emotionally unavailable or they are narcissistic they are too grandiose to take care of a child they feel that the child had disrupted their lives prevented them from reaching the pinnacle of their profession ruined their lives in a way so there is narcissistic rejection there is depression there is emotional unavailability because the mother herself has attachment disorder or attachment dysfunction all these types of mothers they are dead mothers this is a contrast to Donald Winnicott's good enough mother these are not good mothers and they are not enough mothers they and the child the only model that the child has of attachment of emotions of love of relationship is a painful model inordinately painful existentially threatening harrowing terrorizing horrifying model it's a destructive process really emotionally at least this kind of mother is there and not there and this mixed signal this dual signal is intolerable we do not tolerate human beings don't tolerate well ambiguity and uncertainty we try to disambiguate in a variety of ways most of which are destructive and this kind of child the mother he is exposed to a mother who is the epitome and quintessence of ambiguity and she's depressed and she's unavailable she's rejecting she's hurtful and as André wrote it's a mother who was initially emotionally engaged with her child but then switched off from resonance to emotional detachment perhaps under the influence of loss and mourning in her own family of origin and when the child goes through this roller coaster idealization devaluation when the child is unable to restore this warm empathic embracing accepting the loving contact with the mother he then the child then internalizes a hard unresponsive emotional core and this of course is a prerequisite to narcissism because narcissism is a reaction to this internalization mother is hurtful mother used to love me now she doesn't love I will never let anyone do this to me again I will never put myself at the mercy of anyone who could cause me such pain really threatened my existence because when you are 6 months old or 1 year old or 2 year old and your mother is emotionally unavailable distant doesn't care about you neglects you you can die it's life threatening and in this kind of people they become narcissistic later on in life and they are unable to form attachment and we see this for example even in settings where attachment is minimal therapy where they can't go through the phase known as transference they can't bond in some in some way with the therapist they can't even project their own emotions onto the therapist they can't regard the therapist as a parental figure so there's no transference in treating such people dead mother syndrome is the acute form of this and there are many dead mothers out there because we live in a narcissistic and psychopathic age more and more people are technically narcissists and psychopaths and these people for some reason procreate they irresponsibly have children and they raise these children as dead mothers and dead fathers the mistake in attachment theories is to say that when a child doesn't have a safe base when he has a dead mother he runs away he avoids he develops avoidance strategies he withdraws internally he becomes narcissistic and then he has like an imaginary friend the false self or a godlike entity which is the false self or he withdraws and becomes a co-dependent thereby suspending his own existence and merging with the mother figure or he withdraws and becomes psychopathic, antisocial, contact disorder it's known in children it's called contact disorder so the general thrust of current attachment theories starting with Mary Ainsworth to these very days in 9 and others the thought is that by the wrong kind of parents by not good enough mothers by dead mothers they simply detach and because they detach they learn a coping strategy for life which is a coping strategy of detachment and this is the part where I think attachment theories get it very wrong they get it very wrong if you ever saw a baby crying inconsolably he's dead mother, really dead mother and if you ever watch the movie Psycho Hitchcock's movie Psycho where the son who is running the motel bathes keeps his mother's body mummified and continues to interact with her as though she were alive if you've ever been exposed to these experiences however vicariously you would realize that the child does not run away from a dead mother but learns to love her children love their mothers whether they're alive whether they're dead whether they're good enough whether they're vicious and atrocious whether they're psychopathic whether they're narcissistic whether they're there whether they're not there emotionally available or not rejecting or accepting he learns to love a dead mother and when you fall in love with him and he claims to have fallen in love with you he tries to convert you into a dead mother too he wants you to play the role of his dead mother he wants you to die and to be a mother and this is as good a description as good and concise as summation of relationships with narcissists that I've ever come across the narcissist tries to do two things with his romantic intimate partner he tries to kill her and he tries to convert her into a mother he tries to recreate reconstruct and re-experience and re-enact the unresolved conflict with a dead mother the role is all yours but of course being in love with a dead object loving something dead is unthinkable so people with cluster B personality disorders although they are capable of loving only dead people dead mothers dead mother substitutes still they don't dare to contemplate this they're not aware of this on the contrary they lie to themselves they're telling themselves I'm trying to make her come alive I'm reviving my intimate partner I'm infusing her with life I'm giving her thrills and adventures and color I am the engine of excitement in her life when she's with me she's much more alive when she's not with me so there is this self delusional confabulation this self fallacious narrative that the narcissist and the psychopath and the borderline tell themselves I'm not doing anything wrong to my partner I'm not doing anything bad to my intimate partner on the contrary I'm Lazarus-like raising him from the dead and it's of course projection it's the intimate partner who raises the narcissist and the psychopath and the borderline from the dead because they are dead narcissists, psychopaths and borderlines are dead at the core because they have internalized a dead mother a dead object but they don't dare to think about it and instead what they do is call emotional thinking they're not thinking with their heads they're not thinking cognitively but whenever they need to think about relationships they think emotionally they let their emotions control their cognitions not the other way and what they do narcissists, psychopaths borderlines and victims of trauma by the way they caffect death and they caffect aggression now what the hell is caffect if you're asking caffect is emotionally invest cafaxis is emotional investment so they invest emotionally in death because their first emotional investment as children was in a dead mother a dead object so they know only how to invest in death and in dead people and in dead others and in dead intimacy so they invest in death of course death is aggression aggression leads to death and death is aggressive by definition and this is called destudo the opposite of libido libido is the force of life it comes from eros the force of destruction the force of aggression and it emanates from Thanatos the force of death and when we in our current culture and civilization we are emotionally invested in our smartphones in our beautiful luxury cars in our jobs we are invested in inanimate inanimate inert material goods materialism is the ultimate consumerism is the ultimate expression of destudo of the force of death because objects are dead breaking news news alert all objects are dead I don't know if you realize that real objects, physical objects the ones you can look on they are dead and they are substitutes for the dead mother and she encourages us to emotionally invest in dead things and these people, narcissists borderlines, psychopaths histrionics trauma victims how do they react to this emotional investment in a dead object? the dead object refuses to reciprocate adamantly insists on rejection insists on humiliation insist on modification injures you, all the time wounds you the archaic wound in the words of Freud so it's a wounding process it's death by a thousand cuts so you withdraw you love and you withdraw and you identify love with withdrawal if love then away, if love then push, if love then withdraw if love then not be to love is to not be love is an absence in the minds of these very very sick individuals it's an absence, not a presence in the minute it becomes a presence it's very threatening existentially threatening because this presence is bound to be withdrawn and they are bound to feel pain the pain of ultimate rejection they anticipate rejection borderlines for example, anticipate abandonment rejection, humiliation and react to this anticipation not to any real development so they reframe reality in these terms so these cluster B personalities they can't afford because their first experience with love has been an experience of annihilation annulment they were not seen it's critical to be seen when you're a child it is through the gaze of the meaningful other through the gaze of the primary object, primary caregiver through the gaze of mother that you are defined it is mother's gaze that constitutes and constructs your boundaries and through her that you realize that you are separate from her she is the one she is the agent the agent of society she is a socialization agent but she is also the agent of the physical universe and above all she is your agent she is the one who helps you become she is the primary agent of becoming and if you have a dead mother you become a corpse narcissists, psychopaths borderlines other walking dead and so they in an attempt to avoid a repeat to avoid the repetition of the same type of painful relationship they never allow themselves to truly love to truly get emotionally invested and they are very self-sufficient they even self-parentify they act as their own parents and they are very autoerotic sexually speaking they gratify themselves sexually masturbation, pornography and so to be able to love you these people have to kill you first it's like the famous joke if I tell you the truth I'll have to kill you if I fall in love with you I'll have to kill you they have to kill they have to kill the mother figure in order to love her they snapshot you they convert you into an inert photograph they merge with you they fuse with you, you disappear you're digested you're assimilated you become an extension these are various ways of killing you negating your existence annihilating you and then when you're dead when you're no more and when you have become an absence then they can love you of course because they're experts at loving dead mothers and they identify love with absence their introjects the introjects of their mother their father, other figures the inner voices the representations the avatars of these crucial adults they are all non-interacting dead inert mute mute objects the narcissists and the psychopath and the borderline of the histrionic cluster B they're the only people on earth whose introjects are essentially mute they can't talk, they don't talk they don't interact, they don't communicate they're there, snapshot so they need to take away from you speech they need to deny you the speech act they need to prevent you from communicating because communication is pain they need to fend you off and to fence you in and to stultify you to ossify you and to mummify and to fossilize and this way you own you and to control you because if you own and control someone he cannot hurt you she cannot hurt you it's all about pain aversion and hurt aversion and of course this makes it impossible to distinguish internal objects from external objects if your loved ones are inside you because you need to control them micromanage them they're inside you and they're internal but they're also external external is internal the narcissist the borderline to a lesser extent the psychopath make very little distinction between internal and external objects and in this particular sense Otto Kernberg was right these are people on the cusp on the verge of psychosis of a psychotic disorder there was a guy called Christopher Bollos B-O-L-L-A-S and in the middle years of the 1980s which to my mind was the renaissance of psychology or at least the psychodynamic and psychoanalytic schools of psychology so in those miracle years he came up with a concept called the unthought the unthought known unthought known his work was based probably we don't know for sure because he doesn't mention it but probably on some comment that Freud reported in one of his series of monographs and books and articles Freud was a machine so Freud reported that he had a patient and this patient told him I've always known something but I never thought of it and Freud was kind of thunderstruck he said wait a minute can you know something and not think of it ever is it possible to know but not cognitively is it possible to be fully aware of some fact some environment some other person and never to think of them and so Christopher Wallace coined the phrase unthought known in the 1980s and he said that these are experiences which in some way are known to the individual but about which the individual is unable to think I would add the individual is afraid to think it's inhibitor it's inhibition it's inhibitory an early schemata for interpreting the object world that pre-consciously determine our subsequent life expectations are an example of the unthought known we're all born with schemata with a kind of arrangement of cognitions, emotions, beliefs and facts so this schemata allows us to interpret the world to interpret the object world pre-conscious and they determine what we expect of life and they're an example of the unthought known so the unthought known is pre-verbal unschematized early experience and of course it can also be early trauma early trauma creates facts early trauma creates facts but these facts are so painful so frightening so devastating that we know them but we never think of them they're fenced off they're isolated they're removed from consciousness these unthought these unthought knowns they affect behavior they do it unconsciously and pre-consciously but they affect behavior but even though they affect behavior they never access consciousness conscious thought has no access to these knowns and yet they're known and in therapy very often when we introduce the patient to the unthought known the patient says I've known this all along but I never thought about it and there's of course beyond idea of better elements beyond said that there are psychic experiences which people cannot process in any way by the mind they are psychic, they are experiences there's no denying them there is knowledge that they had happened but this knowledge is kept via a variety of defense mechanisms probably like repression maybe or denial this knowledge is kept under the radar the person cannot afford to think about these schemata or these experiences these traumas because if he does he will disintegrate and Bolas suggested that there are quite a few elements in the substance of the unthought known he said that for example when you have persistent moods probably these moods preserve elementary but pre-schematized states of mind he said that the moods are kind of reflections or reservoirs of these unthought knowns and he said that very early in childhood when the self interacts with the primary object with the mother for example this interaction if it's very emotionally loaded for example if you have a very painful interaction with your mother if she's a dead mother you will relegate it to the unthought known similarly if you see something of great beauty when you're a child mainly pre-verbal you can't verbalize it you can't capture it with language so you kind of store it the storage area it's a warehouse the unthought known is a warehouse of experiences and things and judgments and beliefs and values and facts that you have no conscious access to because they were all pre-verbal languages the barrier prevents you from going there and these are all parts of the unthought known now narcissists and psychopaths and borderlines and histrionics they have a huge amount huge number of unthought knowns if you healthy normal people empathic people if you have I don't know 10 unthought knowns psychopath or a narcissist would have 100 now this means this is massive implications it means that the narcissist interpersonal relationships they are recreations of his original relationship with the dead mother but because it's so devastating so painful so frightening so hurtful this whole thing the whole relationship will be processed through the unthought known let me try to explain it a bit the narcissists psychopaths borderline they are born into a dysfunctional family the primary caregiver mother in this case for example is one way or another abusing one way or another emotionally unavailable one way or another exploitative she parentifies the child she idolizes the child she abuses the child sexually or physically or verbally or psychologically or whatever there's something wrong going on there she is dead to the child the child still loves his mother even when she's dead so he learns that love is painful and that you can love only dead things and so this thought this this realization is so mind boggling that he knows it but never thinks about it it becomes an unthought known and then when he meets the love of his life when he meets an intimate partner when he tries to develop a relationship have a family whatever he interacts with his intimate partner via the unthought known in other words he interacts with his partner recreating the original pattern of interaction with his dead mother dysfunctional mother sick mother and he interacts with his intimate partner not thinking about it when you confront him and say don't you see what you're doing he says what am I doing he's utterly unaware it's not a pretension he's not faking it he really is not aware and it's also not a result of delusions or reframing but a result of his inability he cannot afford he cannot allow himself to think of the known he knows but he doesn't dare go there he doesn't dare to think about it so in order not to create a dissonance not to create a conflict not to force him to think he kills you he simply kills you he renders you a dead mother the minute you're dead mother you conform to the earlier pattern and there's no conflict there's no dissonance and no risk that he will be forced to think about what he knows no risk of bringing the unthought the unthinkable from the unconscious to the conscious where it will create a massive conflict and may endanger the cluster B person so this is the sequence bed dysfunctional early relationship suppression of disinformation knowing it but not thinking about it then finding an intimate part forcing her to recreate the early pattern by becoming a dead mother so that what is known will not become thought will not generate overt life threatening conflict Bolas in his work also linked the concept of the unthought known to Donald Winnicott's notion of the true self so there is direct connection between Bolas's work Winnicott's work and narcissism true self, false self and so on these are not just wild speculations on my part but actually Bolas almost almost touched upon it almost went there in terms of system centered therapy in system centered therapy they make a distinction between what they call apprehensive knowing and comprehensive knowing apprehensive knowing is knowing but not being able to verbalize what you know not being able to use language to communicate what you know to yourself and to others and then there is comprehensive knowing there is knowledge that you can communicate to yourself and to others via language so we allow ourselves to formulate in words comprehensive knowledge or comprehensive knowing but we don't allow ourselves access to apprehensive knowing perhaps because it's apprehensive it's frightening, it's threatening and in therapy the unthought known can become the subtext of the therapeutic interchange the therapist becomes kind of a parent figure and he picks up the patient he contains the patient and the patient allows himself or herself to think about the unknown via the therapist maybe we'll talk about it some other time it's a process called projective identification back to attachment disorders three prominent three prominent scholars of attachment disorders are Zina, Lieberman and Boris and they suggested that attachment disorders start in childhood which I agree and they said that children who don't have who did not have the opportunity to form an attachment or where children who had a distorted relationship with a parental figure or when an existing attachment was for some reason abruptly disrupted in these three cases there's an attachment disorder and they used the term disorder of attachment it's when a young child doesn't seem to bond with or attach to any particular adult caregiver and so these kind of children are indiscriminately sociable they approach all the adults and they sometimes approach total strangers and they're very cute and very sociable and they ask for love and they ask for compassion and affection and they ask to be comforted but they do this not with mother specifically not with father grandmother or grandfather but they approach any adult wherever so there is a promiscuity it's a promiscuous sociability promiscuous behavior and it's a disorder of attachment and these as I said are children who didn't have the opportunity to form an attachment with a specific figure as the DSM says or whether the distorted relationship or existing attachment has been disrupted so some children react by becoming promiscuous they attach to any adult and others react exactly the opposite they withdraw emotionally they fail to seek comfort from anyone, any adult and so very often we mistake these children for shy children and say oh he's shy, this is not shyness this is extreme pain aversion, extreme aversion to hurt the child totally identifies any attempt at an interaction with an adult with life-threatening pain and hurt and abandonment and neglect and rejection and humiliation total threat of disintegration so these children withdraw emotionally and fail to interact and this is this is reminiscent of reactive attachment disorder because in reactive attachment disorder we have inhibited and disinhibited forms disinhibited forms are children who approach any adult for attachment and inhibited forms are children who approach no adult for attachment no more isn't enough describe a condition that they call secure-based distortion secure-based distortion is when the child does have someone, a mother a father, a grandmother, grandfather some caregiver, teacher and he prefers this familiar figure but the relationship with this figure is such that actually the adult does not provide the child safety when the child starts to explore the environment grandiosely this kind of an adult does not encourage the exploration and does not provide a safe base does not broadcast to the child go ahead find yourself, find the world I will be here when you return, I'll be here when you need me on the contrary the broadcast transmission is opposite is who do you think you are? what are you doing? you're hurting me you don't love mommy anymore you are impudent insolent you are impertinent you are misbehaving you are impolite etc these are all inhibitory messages messages that inhibit, prevent the child from exploring the world and such children they don't know what to do and many of them are disinhibitory they are linked to any adult they endanger themselves they are excessively compliant, submissive or they try to become apparent because they don't have a parent they try to become apparent and they try to parent themselves and even to parent the adult or even to punish the adult as a parent so this children are in total mess total confusion as to roles who they can trust and how they should function once there is an interaction which implies directly or indirectly some type of attachment and Boris and Zina discuss a lot what they call disrupted attachment disrupted attachment is any abrupt separation or loss of a familiar figure a mother or father to whom the child is attached so the child gets attached and then suddenly this figure is gone because it died, it's gone because of a divorce it's gone because it's lost interest in the child it's gone because there's a new sibling a newborn and the attention of the parent is totally diverted to the newborn and the parent abandons and neglects the first born or the previous child and so whenever there's a process of devaluation after idealization as I mentioned sibling rivalry yes the child perceives such abrupt absence as rejection so even if the parent has to travel it's perceived by the child as abandonment abandonment and rejection essential rejection rejection of his essence of who he is the child decides that he is not worthy of love or of object constancy not worthy of the parent being there for him not worthy of safety in other words a bad object as the child becomes an adult he will try to sustain this self-image because it's his comfort zone and a promiscuous child will become a promiscuous adult an inhibited child will become an inhibited adult and a child who had lost an attachment figure for whatever reason a child who has been devalued a child who has been dumped a child who has been neglected and abandoned humiliated and rejected or just let go this kind of child will try to recreate this in his intimate relationships he will try to force his intimate partner via projective identification to play this role of the dysfunctional not good enough dead mother the child's reaction to such a loss is is grief it's exactly grief exactly the same these five stages of grief is described by this Swiss American psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross the child protests he cries, he searches for the attachment figure then the child is depressed he is desperate he's sad he withdraws from communication and playing he withdraws from the original relationship and gradually very very gradually he accepts he accepts the attachment figure mother for example his gun and he resumes gradually slowly and usually dysfunctionally social and play activities scholars such as Daniel Schechter and Erika Wilhelm they have shown a relationship between maternal PTSD and secure based distortion in other words when the mother is violent physically abusive or even worse sexually abusive it creates a safe based distortion the child becomes reckless he develops separation anxiety hyper vigilance and role reversal and if this sounds familiar is because these are elements of borderline personality disorder fraily children and shaver these are two scholars they describe the central propositions of attachment in adults they said that all attachment in adults recreates the behavioural dynamics of infant and caregiver in other words adult relationships are nothing but a repeat, a replay a reenactment of childhood relationships when we observe individual differences in during childhood these differences will be preserved to other actually we have learned that attachment styles are pretty stable throughout the lifespan and only in 20% of cases attachment styles are mildly modified in 80% of cases attachment styles which are usually determined by age 2 to 6 the formative years attachment styles survive life long individual differences in adult attachment behaviour there are reflections of expectations and beliefs people have formed about themselves and about close relationships and these expectations have to do with attachment history the working models that we started with if you remember we all build working models about ourselves, about other people and these working models are stable and they reflect early caregiving experiences and so romantic love involves the interplay of attachment, caregiving, intimacy and the attachment part is actually unalterable, immutable and Rhodes and Simpson they suggested that biologies involve somehow it's biology that propels children to form attachment with caregivers and it's shaped by interpersonal experiences and they said that experiences in early relationships they create the internal working model and they create the attachment style and these systematically affect attachment relationships and the attachment orientations of adult caregivers influence the attachment bone of their children this is how crucial it is to be good parents working models and attachment orientations are relatively stable over time they are impervious to changes, very dangerous some forms of psychological maladjustment some clinical disorders including cluster B personality disorders they are attributable in big part to the effects of insecure working models insecure attachment styles so biology drives attachments but attachment is largely shaped by learning experiences and it depends crucially on expectations and beliefs that people have about their relationships and these expectations and beliefs come from internal working models these internal working models they guide relationship behaviors they are relatively stable as we said and they hark back to childhood individual differences in attachment contribute positively or negatively to mental health so we have four main types of attachment in adults now it's very crucial because people make the most god awful mess confusing childhood attachment styles with adult attachment styles they are not the same in adults we have secure anxious preoccupied dismissive avoidant and fearful avoidant attachment styles and to this I've added a fifth one my contribution my attempted contribution a flat attachment style so Cindy Hazem and Philip Shaver they observed that interactions between adults share similarities to interactions between children and caregivers as the issue of closeness comfort versus anxiety or loneliness and even in adult relationship there's an issue of secure base secure base you want to know that you can trust your intimate partner that she will be there for you that you have somewhere to come back to and it helps you face the surprises the opportunities challenges it helps you face life everyone has an attachment style now I would like to talk a bit about my contribution attempted contribution to attachment theory I suggest to introduce a fifth a fifth style I'm going to discuss each of the other four later but I'm trying to introduce a fifth one called flat attachment these are people who are incapable of any kind of bonding and any kind of relatedness at all flat attaches regard other people as utterly interchangeable, replaceable and dispensable objects or functions when a relationship is over people go through a period of latency they mourn the defunct bond they process the grief and there are withdrawal symptoms associated with the breakup they go called 30 if you wish flat attaches are different they react to the disintegration of even the most meaningful or primary relationships by becoming defined and becoming mad rather than heartbroken and sad they are mad, not sad the flat attach transitions instantaneously smoothly, abruptly and seamlessly one in significant other to the next target she fully substitutes and newly found both lover, mate or intimate partner for the discarded one whose usefulness has expired for whatever reason many narcissists and almost all psychopaths are actually flat attaches in 1995 I coined the phrase idealized devalued discard and I should have added idealized devalued discard and replace flat attachment is often confused and conflated with commitment phobia the fear of committing to a joint future but it's different flat attaches are constitutionally incapable of bonding with other people commitment phobes anticipate with anxiety the expectations that there are attachments to others and gender so commitment phobes are terrified of the expectations of their intimate partners and the emotional and pragmatic outcomes of liaisons of intimate relationships they are simply in a state of anxiety flat attaches have no anxiety they simply don't bond they don't attach and they don't give a hoot about your expectation commitment phobes are avoidant they are not emotionally vacuous on the contrary they are very strong emotions flat attaches are emotionally not there they are emotionally absent intimacy increases with time together but the more time you spend with the narcissist or with a flat attachment the less intimate you get I call this effect reversed intimacy it's the outcome of the fact that one is interacting with the narcissist false self it's a piece of grandiose fiction a placeholder where an entire person should have been traumatized victims of narcissistic abuse have learned to emulate the narcissist himself in a post-traumatic state as you know they try to slap a label on their tormentor and then to ignoring and relate only to the label total labeling where no intimacy is involved of course where no intimacy is possible stereotype stakeholder so this is my attempted contribution I suggest that there is a fifth style because all the other four styles that we have for adult attachment they assume some kind of interplay they assume some kind of need for attachment that is either frustrated or avoided but flat attaches don't have a need to bond or to attach nor do they have the capacity to do it the secure attachment style in adults corresponds to the secure attachment style in children the anxious preoccupied attachment style in children the dismissive avoidant attachment style in the fearful avoidant attachment style in adults are separate and distinct but in children they are one and it's called avoidant attachment children have a single avoidant attachment style while adults have dismissive avoidant or fearful avoidant So there are two scholars, Bartholomew and Horowitz. Bartholomew and Horowitz, together with Pietro Monaco and Barrett, they created all kinds of tables and models of attachments. And Bartholomew and Horowitz proposed that working models consist of two parts. The first part of the working model deals with thoughts about oneself. The other part of the model deals with thoughts about other people. And they propose that the person's thoughts about the self are generally positive or generally negative. And the same applies to someone's thoughts about others. So you can be positive about yourself or negative about yourself. You can be positive about other people or negative about other people. And so what you do, you can construct a table which is exactly what Bartholomew and Horowitz have done. They created a table of relationship between attachment styles, self-esteem and sociability. And they said that if your sociability is positive and your self-esteem is positive, you have a secure attachment style. If your sociability is positive and your self-esteem is negative, you have an anxious preoccupied attachment style. If your sociability is negative and your self-esteem is positive, you would have a dismissive avoidant attachment style. And if both are negative, you will have a fearful avoidant attachment style. So the secure and dismissive attachment styles are associated with higher self-esteem compared with anxious and fearful attachment styles. This corresponds to the distinction between positive and negative thoughts about the self in working models. The secure and anxious attachment styles are associated with higher sociability. Dismissive and fearful attachment styles are less sociable people. And this corresponds of course to the distinction between positive and negative thoughts about other people in working models. But narcissists, psychopaths, borderlines, victims of trauma, complex trauma and histrionics, they have only insecure attachment styles. Let's start with the first one, anxious preoccupied. The anxious preoccupied attachment style characterizes the compensatory narcissists, the inverted narcissists, other covert narcissists, borderline personality disorder and dependent personality disorder, colloquially known as codependent. The anxious preoccupied attachment style is people who have a negative view of the self, but they have a positive view of others. If you think of the compensatory, if you think of the borderline, for example, she has a negative view of herself usually, but she has a positive view of her intimate partner. She wants her intimate partner to help her to regulate her internal environment. She believes in the intimate partner's omnipotence. That's why the borderline is a perfect match for the narcissist because she encourages his grandiosity. She agrees with it. She wants him to be grandiose. She wants him to be godlike because she expects him to do miracles. She expects him to give her inner peace. She expects him to reduce the liability of her moods and to regulate her emotions. So the borderline has a positive view of others. Similarly, the covert narcissists. He has a very negative view of himself. He is shy. He is fragile. He is vulnerable. But he has a positive view of others. In the case of an inverted narcissist, he has a positive view of the overt narcissists she is with. Again, there's a lot of magical thinking here because they expect their intimate partners to do miracles, to do the impossible. To accomplish the impossible. They expect their intimate partners to make life tolerable for them. To regulate both their internal environment and their external environment. The inverted narcissist busks in the glory and accomplishments of her overt partner. The covert narcissist undermines and manipulates his intimate partner in order to self-regulate and to obtain his or her own goals. And these kind of people say, I want to be completely emotionally intimate with others, but I often find that others are reluctant to get as close to me as I would like. Or they say, I'm uncomfortable being without close relationships, but I sometimes worry that others don't value me as much as I value them. This kind of attachment, the anxious preoccupied attachment. These people want intimacy, they crave intimacy. They seek high level of intimacy, approval and responsiveness from their attachment figure. They value intimacy to an extent that they become overly dependent on the attachment figure because they consider the attachment figure the only source of intimacy, mini-break. And these people feel a sense of anxiousness. And this anxiety recedes only when they are in contact with the attachment figure. In a way, codependency can be easily reconceived as an anxiety disorder. These people doubt their worth as people. They blame themselves for the attachment figure's lack of responsiveness. They have auto-plastic defenses. They feel guilt, they feel shame, they feel ego-dystonic, they feel unease, they feel discomfort, they feel apprehension, they feel anxiety. These are neurotic defenses. These people are essentially what used to be called neurotics. And these dependence and idealization of the intimate partner, they render the attachment figure the sole source of solace and comfort and sacor. The dependence is total upon the source of intimacy. And the intimate partner serves as an anxiolytic, an anxiety-reducing medication. They self-medicate. These people borderline, covert, inverted narcissists. They self-codependence. They self-medicate with an intimate partner. And they exhibit high levels of emotional expressiveness, emotional dysregulation, worry, impulsivity. And it easily and seamlessly can glide into psychopathic or histrionic territory. So there is a lot of back and forth and a lot of switching, which is very reminiscent of multiple personality, by the way. They are like self-states that they switch between. So a borderline can easily become secondary psychopath. And the change is so pronounced and so amazing and so startling that you feel that this person is possessed, taken over by another entity, unrelated to the original. And so there's a lot of this switching going on. And this switching is triggered by perceived rejection, humiliation, neglect, abandonment being ignored by the intimate partner. The second type of insecure attachment style is dismissive avoidant. It characterizes the overt narcissists and the primary psychopath. A dismissive avoidant attachment style is when you possess a positive view of yourself and a negative view of others, when you, for example, hold other people in contempt, when you devalue others, when you consider them inferior to you. And these kind of people say, I'm comfortable without close emotional relationships. It is important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient. I prefer to not depend on others or to have others depend on me. And these people desire a high level of independence. They are fiercely independent. Independence is their autonomy, self-autonomy, self-agency, self-efficacy is their religion, their ideology. And the desire to attain these goals of independence, it's like it translates into avoidance of attachment. They avoid all types of attachment whatsoever. We are not talking only in romantic relationships. But for example, they can't hold a job. They are itinerant. They don't live in one place for long. They move around. They are ruthless, ruthless, like R-O-O-T less. They have no roots and they are ruthless in pursuit of ruthlessness. They view themselves as self-sufficient, invulnerable. And this blends into sustains and buttresses their grandiosity. Their grandiosity is founded on self-containment, self-sufficiency, independence, autonomy, self-efficacy. The ability to extract by force if needed beneficial outcomes from the environment, including the human environment. And they are invulnerable. And because they want to remain invulnerable, they perceive attachment as a weakness, as a vulnerability, as a chink in the armor. And they don't want to be closely associated with others. They deny that they need close relationship. And they view close relationship as unimportant in the best case, if not outright weak and stupid. And they seek less intimacy with attachments, with attachment figures. They often view their intimate partners less positively than they view themselves. They tend much more to devalue others, including their intimate partners. And they have a defensive character. It's actually a defense. The irony is that these people are actually highly insecure. That's why we call it an insecure attachment style. The dismissive avoidant attachment style, they're not really heroic or victorious or impermeable or invulnerable. They are suppressing and hiding their feelings. Remember the unthought known? They can't afford to get in touch with their emotions. They can't afford to know what had really happened to them. They tend to deal with rejection by distancing themselves from the sources of rejection. And they tend to do this not only when actual rejection is happening, but also when they predict or anticipate rejection. When they misinterpret some behaviors as rejection. And they tend to misinterpret most behaviors as rejection. Their attachments are very fragile and they are very fragile because they are fragile. They are fearful. They are unresolved. And so this leads to the next attachment style, which is fearful. Fearful avoidant attachment style. This characterizes some borderlines, compensatory narcissists, and secondary psychopaths. The fearful avoidant unresolved cannot classify attachment patterns. They are people who have unstable, fluctuating view of themselves and unstable fluctuating view of others. So they tend to idealize and devalue themselves as they idealize and devalue others. By the way, everything in the psychology of cluster B personality disorder has a self dimension and an other dimension. Narcissistic supply, there is self provision of narcissistic supply. Narcissist sometimes can provide himself with supply. There is self devaluation. There is self idealization. I call this process core idealization. As a narcissist idealizes his partner, he's actually idealizing himself. If he's deserving of such an ideal, perfect, brilliant, most beautiful partner, then he himself is perfect. So everything in these people with the fearful avoidant attachment style, they fluctuate. They're labored. They're not stable. They're not regulated. Their view of themselves and view of others is fluctuating. And these are people usually with losses or massive traumas, including, for example, sexual abuse in childhood and adolescence. And these people say, I'm somewhat uncomfortable getting close to others. I want emotionally close relationships, but I find it difficult to completely trust others or to depend on others. I sometimes worry that I would be hurt if I allow myself to become too close to other people. So they tend to feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness. They feel ill it is when they're loved. When someone tries to get intimate with them, they become aggressive, rejecting and pushing away. And these are mixed feelings, mixed signals, mixed messages. It's crazy making. Drive their intimate partners insane. Because they have unconscious negative views about themselves and about their attachments. They view themselves as unworthy of responsiveness from their attachments. They say, I'm a bad object. Can't you see? I'm unworthy. Why do you give me love? If you give me love, either you're blind and stupid or you are cunning and manipulative. These are the only two reasons to give me love. You can see that I'm damaged goods. You can see I'm broken and defective and dysfunctional. And yet you give me love. Something is wrong with you or you're doing this for a purpose. There's some hidden agenda. There's some ulterior motive they don't trust. The intentions of their attachments. And similar to the dismissive avoidant attachment style. People with a fearful avoidant attachment style, they seek less intimacy from attachments. They suppress, deny their feelings, and they are much less comfortable expressing affection and love. And finally Baldwin and others, they have applied the theory of relational schemas to working models of attachment. This relational schema is a scheme which contains information about the way the attachment figure regularly interacts with each other. So a relational schema is a schema which pertains to a relationship. And for each pattern of interaction, the schema contains information about the self, information about the attachment, and information about the way the interaction usually unfolds. So the relational schema has a predictive value, a prognosticating value. In other words, if you have a schema in your head as to how you're interacting with your intimate partner, this schema tells you something about yourself, tells you something about the relationship, tells you something about your partner, and tells you a lot about how your partner is likely to react to your signals, to your advances, and to your attempts to be close. Relational schemas help us to guide behaviors and relationships because they allow people to anticipate, to predict, to plan for the responses of the intimate partner. A relational schema is simply a lot of experience from which we derive heuristically a law, a rule. This is a rule-based system, a rule of thumb, if you wish, heuristically based on experiences. Relational schemas are therefore in the shape of if, then. If I try to kiss her, she will kiss me back. If I try to hug her, she will reject me. If I try to have sex with her, she will have sex with another man. So, you see, I have a morbid mind. So, the relational schema kind of augments and improves the working model because the working model is static. The working model says, this is who you are, this is who you think you are, this is who you think other people are. And the relational schema adds to this by saying, this is who you think you are, this is who you think other people are, and this is what you think will happen if you do this and this. People with attachment styles were less likely to, people with various attachment styles, were less likely to operate outside the relational schema. Another relational schema existing each and every one of us. Differences in attachment styles actually reflect differences in relational schema. When you have a relational schema, it dictates your behaviors. You're trying to avoid rejection, you're trying to avoid pain, you're trying to avoid hurt. There are some things you will not do. You know that you will be reciprocated. You know that you will receive pleasant experiences and pleasant feedback. So, you're drawn to do this. So, it's positive and negative reinforcements to use behaviorist theories. Relational schema incorporates information about positive and negative reinforcements. You will try to avoid negative responses, you will try to seek positive responses and gradually it will shape the way, shape the way you attach to your intimate partner. Relational schemas involved in working models are organized into hierarchy. I will quote Baldwin. Baldwin said, a person may have a general working model of relationships. For instance, to the effect that other people tend to be only partially and unpredictably responsive to his needs. At a more specific level, this expectation will take different forms when considering different role relationships. For example, we will not have the same relationship with a customer as we will with a romantic partner. Within romantic relationships, expectations might then vary significantly depending on the specific attachment. On the specific situation or the specific needs being expressed. Baldwin, 1992. And so, this hierarchy is three partites. There are three levels to this hierarchy. The highest level contains very general relational schemas that apply to all relationships. These are general expectations about relationships, you know, all relationships. Romantic, business, workplace, with parents, with children, with neighbors, with others, with strangers and so on. The next level of the hierarchy contains relational schemas that apply to particular kinds of relationships. So you would have relational schemas that pertain to customers, relational schemas that pertain to bosses, relational schemas that pertain to your underlings and subordinates, relational schemas pertain to your parents, to your intimate partners, to your children, to your neighbors, to strangers you meet in a bar, etc. These are the second level in the hierarchy of relational schemas and it's a differentiated level depending on the specific type of relationship. And the lowest level of the hierarchy contains relationship schemas that apply to specific relationships. Relationships with my this specific wife, with this specific intimate partner, with this specific boss in this specific workplace right now. These are time dependent relational schemas that are of course replaced. If you divorce your wife and marry another wife, you will have a totally different relational schema, hopefully for you. Pietro Monaco and Barrett wrote the following. From this perspective, people do not hold a single set of working models of the self and of others. Rather, people hold a family of models that include at higher levels abstract rules or assumptions about attachment relationships and at lower levels information about specific relationships and events within relationships. These ideas also imply that working models are not a single entity, but are multifaceted representations in which information at one level need not be consistent with information at another level. In other words, for example, that's Pietro Monaco and Barrett 2000. For example, you can have on the second level, you can have a general relational scheme, a schema which regards intimate relationship. So you have a general relational schema regarding intimate relationships. But on the third level, you have a relationship schema that pertains to your marriage. And the relational schema that pertains to your marriage could contradict completely the relational schema that pertains to intimate relationships. Why? Because your marriage is not intimate. It is not functioning well. So evidence that general working models and relationship specific working models are organized into hierarchy, is abundant. And for example, I refer you to overall fletcher and frizzy. Okay, let's try to wrap it up. When you're securely attached, you look for support. And looking for support is your most effective coping strategy. You're not afraid of people. You believe people can help you. You believe they're good, essentially good. You believe they can provide you with what you need emotionally. So you go looking out for them. That is secure attachment. When you have avoidant attachment, you tend to devalue the relationship and you tend to withdraw. When you have anxious attachment, you use emotionally focused coping strategies. You think emotionally and you pay more attention to experience distress. A pistol in 1996 studied anxious attachment in death, in 96, 95. So securely attached individuals have less negative overall emotional experience than insecurely attached. We said it before. They're early childhoods, much happier. They had a safe base. And there are many studies, including recent studies, for example, Fox and Tukolaga, that showed that anxious and avoidant attachments predict behaviors such as stalking. When you're anxious, when you avoidant, you tend to act antisocial. You become psychopathic. And this is where we tie it in with victims of complex trauma, victims of CPTSD. Being exposed to multiple repetitive trauma can induce temporary anxious and avoidant attachment styles. For example, every trauma victim, every victim of narcissistic abuse would tell you how difficult it is for her to trust again, to date people again, to go on dates. She becomes avoidant. She becomes anxious. And these attachment styles encourage psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors and traits. And for example, there's a huge correlation between anxious and avoidant attachment style and behaviors such as stalking. Ironically, stalking is about being committed. Stalking means commitment. The stalker is committed to you. The stalker is attached to you. And the anxious person is committed to you. He's anxious because he's committed. He's afraid to be rejected. And the avoidant person is negatively attached to you in a way. He's attached via his avoidance. He's attached to his avoidance. So ironically, these behaviors actually reflect commitment and variations of attachment. And so attachment, commitment, trauma, pain, hurt, they're all one complex. You can organize them in a relational schema. You can organize them in an internal working mode. It doesn't really matter what you call it. It doesn't matter. Psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors are induced by distress and by pain and by hurt and by trauma. These are reactions. These are defense mechanisms. These are attempts to reassert control. Attempts to be seen, to become visible. Attempts to diffuse or reduce and ameliorate anxiety. Self-medication sometimes with recklessness or with impulsivity or with antisocial conduct. These are coping mechanisms. And what people don't realize is that these coping mechanisms actually increase anxiety, increase distress. That's why we consider them dysfunctional. In psychology, there's no value judgment, no morality. We don't say to be psychopathic bad. It's not okay. It's evil. Our YouTubers do that, but academics don't. What we are concerned with is it working? Is it functional? Does it fulfill the role? Does it do things? Does it accomplish things? And to become a psychopath in a narcissist because you've been traumatized, you've been hurt, or you're anxious or you're avoidant. This is dysfunctional because we have proven conclusively in many studies that psychopathic and narcissistic and borderline strategies, coping strategies, defiance, impulsivity, contumatiousness, secondary psychopathy. All these things, they increase distress. They enhance anxiety. They don't work. There's a lot more to narcissists and psychopaths and borderlines than the disorders. I started my work 25 years ago as a pioneer. And my work, to some extent, has been misunderstood because people tend to reduce the narcissist to a figment to his pathology. They ignore the person behind the persona. They ignore the core of the narcissistic nuclear meltdown of attachment, lack of self-base, lack of object consistency, fear of being loved and fear of loving. The need to love a dead mother because dead objects are fully controlled, inanimate dead objects, never betray you, never abandon you, never hurt you. And this renders any type of meaningful communication with the narcissist all but impossible and inefficacious. Because the narcissist's main strategy is absence. He absents himself and he wants to absent you. And he wants to have an intimate relationship between two absences. A relationship between one non-existence and another between two voids, between an emptiness and a void. The borderline, to a large extent, is the same. The borderline is a failed narcissist. But still, highly grandiose and has many, many narcissistic features. The same with the psychopath, both primary and secondary. The variation has to do with the existence of empathy and with the regulation of emotions or access to emotions. But these are variations on the theme. And the theme is that these people, as children, they were instructed, told and encouraged to not exist. They were not seen. They were not allowed to become. They were given permission to exist only as elements of the parent, attributes of the parent, dimensions of the parent and instruments of the parent. Or not at all. Love was conditioned on not being. It's a lesson that is impossible to eradicate because attachment styles are stable.