Yesterday, someone started a thread on Reddit, and the thread is titled, Is Sam Vaknin an idiot? Now, is God great? Is Richard Grannon handsome? I mean, why ask these questions? You don't need to be a professor to answer them.
And yes, I am a professor of psychology in several universities, some of them pretty prestigious. And I know you hate this fact because it just proves to you, just goes to show that bad guys finish first.
And I propose to you guys today, we're going to deal with our favorites, borderlines, narcissists, psychopaths, and the wonderful things they do, like lying all the time about everything, except about being a professor.
Of course, my name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Even Revisited. And I spent the last week participating in two documentaries, one documentary dedicated to a new system of philosophy known as nothingness, and the other documentary about narcissistic abuse, short by Mark Vicente, Mark Vicente of The Vow, the famous HBO series.
So he was here with his producer, the inimitable Scott, and together they shot me for two days. They shot me for two days and I'm still alive.
Here's another fact for you to hate. Right.
Enough with the banter and the nonsense. And let's get to business.
First of all, I want to tell some of you who keep writing to me about falling in love with narcissists and falling in love with borderlines and falling in love with psychopaths, just falling for these characters.
Love is the opposite of self-sacrifice. Love is the antonym of dependency. Love and self-destructiveness are mutually exclusive.
And if your so-called loved one demands or expects any of the above, unlove them and do it in a hurry.
Loving another person is first and foremost an act of self-love. A proposed self-love. It's a wonderful segue into cluster B personality disorders.
I want to begin by describing a typical lie which occurs very often, according to testimonies by family members and so on, among borderline personality disorder patients.
Now, lying is not a diagnostic criterion in borderline personality disorder. Lying is not a diagnostic criterion in narcissistic personality disorder.
The only personality disorder where deceitfulness and lying is or a diagnostic criterion is antisocial personality disorder and its malignant extension psychopathy.
We'll come to it a bit later.
But let's start with a very common occurrence among borderlines.
Now, not all borderlines cheat. There are no statistics. There are no serious rigorous studies. There's only anecdotal evidence from mainly borderline personality disorder forums, support forums.
But it seems that there is a segment, a group within borderline personality disorder patients who tend to cheat habitually and serially.
And when someone with a borderline personality disorder acts out, she cheats on her partner, she goes into a secondary psychopathy self-state.
I encourage you to watch the video, my video, of course, the borderline as a secondary psychopath.
She cheats and then she feels guilty and she feels ashamed in the aftermath because borderlines are capable of emotions and are capable of remorse.
But at the same time, she also dreads her mates reaction. She has what we call separation insecurity. She's afraid, in other words, that if she comes clean, he will abandon her.
And so to ease her conscience, the borderline voluntarily confesses, but she also lies about what had actually happened.
So this bizarre hybrid, she confesses to having done something wrong, but then she doesn't come clean. She doesn't give accurate details as to what had happened.
Typically, she minimizes the transgression. She would say, we just danced. We just hugged or kiss or talked. We were just drinking or we had coffee together for all time's sake.
Or she may transpose the event, the unsavory event. She may transpose it to another place or another time, usually conflating the event with more innocuous, but similar occurrences. That makes her feel comfortable to lie. She's not really lying. She's just creating a collage, a kaleidoscope of different events in her life.
The borderline feels justified to lie because she casts the lie in terms of self-defense against abusive reactions to her misconduct. It's a very circuitous, very tautological kind of thinking, kind of reasoning. She says, well, I'm lying because if I were to tell the truth, I would be mistreated.
So that justifies my lie. This is called interpersonal hypersensitivity, for those of you who love high-faluting clinical labels.
Gradually, the borderline starts to believe some of her own pre-varications and she protests vehemently against any attempt to refute her lies. She feels exonerated. She feels vindicated. She feels empowered, morally upright, and she feels entitled to repeat her misbehavior and again to lie about you, cornered as she is in a dead relationship by her abusive and rejecting partner. In other words, she repaints or recasts her relationship as a dead relationship.
Every fight becomes a breakup. Every disagreement is proof of the demise of the liaison.
So these justify cheating and cheating, of course, requires lying because if she doesn't lie, she may get abandoned or worse.
So this is what we call alloplastic defenses. They are coupled with an external locus of control.
And since the borderlines read rejection and abandonment into every act of the maid or the spouse, they interpret everything as imminent, looming, cruel, cruel and sadistic abandonment and rejection.
And so this justifies recurrent misdeeds. So recurrent misdeeds, recurrent misconduct, and then lying about it, these are baked into any relationship with the borderline. In other words, take it or leave it there.
Now this is especially egregious when borderline personality disorder is comorbid with other personality disorders. There is no worse combination than comorbid antisocial narcissistic and borderline personality disorders. Such a wonderful trifecta is diagnosed in about 10% of cluster B patients.
Scholars are beginning to reconceive of both borderline personality disorder and overt narcissism as forms of secondary and primary psychopathy, respectively. Borderlines, especially women, female borderlines, are now increasingly considered to be secondary psychopaths. And overt narcissism, the kind that used to be identified with narcissism in the DSM-3 and DSM-4, is now beginning to be considered a form of primary factor one psychopathy.
And this trifecta of antisocial narcissistic and borderline persecutory, this gift that keeps giving, this trifecta renders the afflicted impulsive risk takers, hostile, aggressive, egocentric, possessed of compromised empathy, mistrustful and grandiose, and it also makes them consummate inveterate liars.
Lying is an integral part of this comorbidity. And the disorders are compensatory, they are mutually compensatory. The strong points in each disorder covers up for deficiencies in the other comorbid mental illnesses. The disorders in the form of self-states, subpersonalities, or pseudo-identities.
So each disorder takes over the patient's total functioning in reaction to stressors and environmental challenges.
So because the patient rotates, oscillates between various self-states, and because they are dissociative partitions, albeit partial, permeable dissociative partitions between them, this leads to confabulation, which is also misperceived as lying, will come to it a bit later.
And these transitions lead to an ever greater identity disturbance.
How can you stick to the truth? If you don't know who you are, if there's no continuity, if every few minutes you are someone else, a psychopath, a narcissist, a borderline, a codependent, it's difficult. It's difficult to not lie when you have no idea what is the truth about yourself, about others, and about things that may have happened to you when you spend a big part of your life on autopilot, and when you have memory gaps which far outweigh your memory.
And so your identity is disturbed, fractured, not constellations, dysfunctional, and you might well be described as selfless without a self.
Okay, this is the opening salvo in our discussion of lies. It would behoove us to classify lies and confabulations.
A statement constitutes a lie only if at least one of the interlocutors knows that this statement is untrue, and yet he insists or he assumes that it is true.
If all the parties involved in the exchange know that the statement is false, or if none of them know whether it is false or true, then it is fiction, an act of faith, but it's not a lie. Someone must know about the act of lying. Lies are about facts. They're about states of being. Lies that pertain to facts cannot be rendered true by widespread consensus or by an act of persuasion. You cannot argue your way out of a lie.
But with regards to lies about states of being, if the parties agree something to be truth, the truth, their agreement can make it true. It can alter the truth value of the statement.
And this is so because statements about states of being are dependent on social context. We'll come to it again a bit later.
Okay, lies either prompt action or the inhibit action. And sometimes actions taken can convert the lie into a truth. For example, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a self-fulfilling lie.
There are eight types of lies, and all of them are common in cluster B personality disorders.
Number one, a utilitarian lie. That's a lie that is intended to accomplish something. A lie that is goal oriented. A lie with structure and content. A plan to promote or inspire changes conducive to the furtherance of the liar's aims, goals, and aspirations.
Now that would be the psychopath.
Utilitarian lies are very common among psychopaths.
Number two, the smokescreen lie. The smokescreen lie is a lie whose purpose is to obscure, conceal, or remove true information, and in this way, mislead other people.
It is common in espionage in military operations where there are decoys.
But smokescreen lies in, for example, borderline personality disorder, or in narcissistic personality disorder. They are intended to avoid facing a humiliating or shameful truth. Remember the example we opened with? Cheating? That would be a smokescreen lie.
The third type of lie is the compassionate lie. It's a lie that is geared towards sparing other people's feelings, catering to their sensitivities and vulnerabilities, and allowing other people to save face and to avoid shame and embarrassment. Most white lies are compassionate and empathic. Border lines often use compassionate lying.
And then there is the ceremonial lie. Lies and dissimulations whose function is to establish a pecking, hierarchical order demonstrating reverence and glossing over facts and behaviors that inconveniently contravene the accepted hierarchy. Manners and etiquette are highly elaborate forms of ceremonial lying. And believe it or not, it's common among narcissists.
Compensatory lies are used to distinguish the often humiliating fact that we do not know the truth or cannot remember the truth. Lies of this type amount to fiction, but with most of the interlocutors being unaware that it's a lie.
Then we have confabulatory lie, which is the next stage up.
These are intricate lies that weave a fabric of alternate reality, alternative reality, which is frequently an exaggerated version of the liar's trace, conduct and personal history.
Of course, these lies can be completely unrelated to anything real in the confabulator's life, but that's very rare.
Then there is the inferential lie. Fallacious conclusions or extrapolations based on true assumptions or statements, most logical fallacies are inferential lies.
And finally, we have the hybrid lie. These are lies that contain markers of some hidden truth, an occult truth or pathways to true information, allowing its recipients to read between the lines.
Hybrid lies are common in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and in the cults that narcissists form around themselves.
Okay, so this is the taxonomy. This is the classification of lies.
We saw that some of them are used by some, each cluster B personality disorder makes use of some of them.
But it's important to kind of refute a myth online propagated by self-styled experts, including experts with PhDs and other very impressive academic degrees. I call them self-styled because they're not experts. They hadn't published anything. They had participated in any studies. They just came online and declared themselves like this.
And immediately you can see that they don't know what they're talking about.
For example, psychopaths lie. Narcissists rarely lie. Psychopaths lie. Narcissists mostly confabulate. Narcissists concoct self-aggrandizing narratives to bridge dissociative gaps, memory gaps.
So narcissists create plausible scenarios in order to bridge memory gaps.
Psychopaths lie in order to accomplish something, school-oriented.
Indeed, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, edition 5, 2013, page 764, for those of you who mistrust me to that extent, there is the anti-social personality disorder alternative model.
And one of the diagnostic criteria there is deceitfulness, dishonestyand fraudulent misrepresentation of self- embellishment of fabrication when relating events. There is no hint of lying, prevarication, fraudulence, dishonesty or misrepresentation, embellishment of fabrication. There's no hint of any of these among the diagnostic criteria of narcissistic personality disorder.
And for good reason, narcissists rarely lie. There's also no hint of these in the diagnostic criteria of borderline personality disorder, again for good reason, because borderlines convince themselves that these are not lies.
Narcissists and psychopaths dissociate, they erase memories a lot, they're amnesiac, because their contact with the world and with others is via fictitious construct, the false self.
Narcissists never experience reality directly, but through a distorting lens, a glass darkly. They get rid of any information that challenges their grandiose self-deception, and the narrative they had constructed to explicate, excuse, and legitimize their abrasive, antisocial, self-centered, and exploitative behaviors, choices, and idiosyncras.
In an attempt to compensate for the yawning gaps in memory, narcissists confabulate. They invent plausible plug-ins and scenarios of how things might have been, could have been, or should have plausibly occurred.
To outsiders, these fictional stop-gaps appear to be lies, but actually they are not.
The narcissist fervently believes in the reality of these confabulations. He may not actually remember what really had happened, but surely it could not have happened any other way, he says to himself.
He tells himself that his confabulations probably have happened, had happened, and so he protests fervently, and adamantly, and vehemently, if he tried to contradict them, if he tried to refute them, or to expose his confabulations as lies.
And these tenuous concocted fillers are subject to frequent revision as the narcissist inner world and external circumstances evolve.
And this is why narcissists often contradict themselves. Tomorrow's confabulation often negates yesterday's yarn.
The narcissists and psychopaths do not remember their previous tales, because they are not invested with the emotions and cognitions that are integral parts of real memories. They don't have real memories.
People with severe dissociation, memory lapses, and lost time, they are often misunderstood, they are often perceived as liars. The same goes for borderlines.
One of the diagnostic criteria of borderlines, borderline personality disorder, is dissociation, dissociative states.
And the borderline tries to make up for these dissociations. She is in a constant dream state.
Many things that happen to the borderline, especially stressful things, are relegated to her mind. And so they appear to be dreamlike, surrealistic, a bit like a nightmare.
Frequently these people appear to be lying, but they are actually not prevaricating. They are not lying. It is just because of their extreme dissociations these people have learned to not forget.
They hoard memories. They never discard even the tiniest details. They memorize dates and numerous trivial data as handles, something to hang out onto in their whole written minds.
And so paradoxically, borderlines and narcissists would confabulate on the big picture. They would tell you stories and narratives, construct narratives about the big events in their lives or the general environment, which are manifestly untrue.
But they would also be stickler for details, nitpickers, obsessive compulsive about exactitude and precision. And these two things go together.
And so the confabulation appear to be real, partly because they are populated with numerous details, which are real.
But the details are arranged in the wrong order and yield the wrong narrative outcome.
So dissociative people often have contradictory memories about the same object, the same event or person at the same time.
This is called dissonance. A dissociative person can regard the same woman, for example, dissociative men can regard the same woman as both irresistible and repulsive simultaneously.
The same man he would regard as prestigious and as decrepit, the same person as someone who makes him feel good and makes him feel bad.
This is a constant background, dissonant background and such gaping discrepancies render dissociative people make them appear inconsistent and deceitful, but it is not lying. It is not deception. It is simply their archaeological memory. They maintain access to all the conflicting layers and strata at once.
But why would these people have radically differing viewpoints about the same person, about the same event, about the same object?
Precisely because of the way their struggle to maintain their unruly memory and to cling to it goes.
They are struggling to maintain a coherent continuous identity based on a flow of memories which is both logical, makes sense, and accurate.
So they never delete a memory because they cherish their memories like so many treasures and they cherish their memories like treasures because they have not so few of these memories.
Where there is a troubling gap and their memory fails them, such patients confabulate.
They invent a plausible narrative or scenario that must have happened, not may have happened, but must have happened.
So they never get rid of a memory. They never replace one memory with another. They never modify memories. They simply add to the memory another memory, even if the two memories are diametrically opposed.
Dissociation is typically in borderline personalities or borderlines are labile. The changes in their internal states, cognitions, emotions, moods, these changes are so abrupt, dysregulated and violent that they disrupt any personal continuity and sense of coherent identity. This discontinuity also makes borderlines appear to be lying, but they are not. They are just struggling with their fragmented memories and excruciating lability.
Even when they do lie and they are aware that they are lying, they try to recast the lie, to reframe it in a way that would appear to them to be 80% truthful.
Lying is one of the myths associated with narcissism. And the reason there are so many nonsensical myths about narcissism is that people came online and without any qualifications and any relevant credentials declared themselves to be experts on narcissism. And so they propagated, unmitigated trash and rubbish.
And so let's inspect eight or so of the myths.
First of all, unambiguous physical or sexual abuse rarely results in adult secondary narcissism. To be afflicted with narcissistic personality disorder, one needs to be pedestalized, idolized, hampered, instrumentalized or parentified as a child and then abruptly and cruelly discarded by the parent.
The adult narcissist spends a lifetime trying to recapture those lost moments of parental idealization.
Myth number two, narcissists do have emotions, but they have access to and experience only negative affectivity, rage, envy, hatred and the like. So they do have emotions.
Number three, narcissists do have empathy. They have a truncated form of empathy, called empathy, which allows them to spot and leverage the vulnerabilities in their targets.
Next, narcissists dread abandonment. They have separation insecurity or separation anxiety.
They dread abandonment exactly like borderlines do.
Narcissists are often dysphoric, often depressed, especially when they fail to secure narcissistic supply.
Number five, grandiosity is about being unique. Grandiosity is not about being the best. It's not about being the greatest. It's not about being the most. It's about being unique, special, suicidally, enemies, one of a kind.
So the narcissist can brag, for example, about being the perfect loser, the uninterrupted failure, the quintessential victim. Being a loser, a failure and a victim, doesn't strike people as grandiosity, but it is.
If you are the ultimate victim, you are the peak of losership, etc.
Grandiosity is about being special.
Next, sub-narcissists are pro-social, communal. These narcissists are morally upright, altruistic and charitable. They are ostentatious and grandiose about it all, but they still are friendly and integrated in society, sometimes as pillars of a community.
Next, narcissists cheat, romantically cheat, I mean, extramarital affairs. Narcissists cheat less often than psychopaths, because they're prone to abandonment anxiety. They're terrified of losing their partners. Narcissists are less faithful during the bargaining and devaluation phases of the shared fantasy, but in all the other phases, they're actually unusually faithful.
We misattribute to narcissists traits and behaviors, because most of you are misled, especially by people online, and few of you bother to read scholarly literature, including these self-styled experts. But misattribution is a general problem.
There is something called misattribution error, or attribution error, or attribution bias. That is, when we attribute to other people, motivations that reflect on who they are, rather than analyzing the decision-making process of other people, we say, well, that's the way they are.
And this is called attribution error. We misattribute the most likely motivations to our actions and to other people's choices and behaviors.
Often, the picture is much more complex and involves layers upon layers of occult hidden reasons and causes.
I'll give you three examples.
Take, for example, toxic relationships.
When you ask people, why do you stay in a toxic relationship? Some of them will say, well, trauma bonding, or some such phrase, which they have little idea what it means.
But sometimes people remain trapped for decades in toxic relationships, not because they pity the partner, not because they love the partner, not because they're bonded with the partner, but because they seek to continue to punish their mates for past transgressions, real transgressions, perceived transgressions, or imagined transgression.
There's a dynamic of vengeance going on in many toxic relationships.
I recommend that you watch the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf.
Take another example, sunk costs.
People make new decisions or persevere with old ones because they had already invested resources, however, minimally in a certain course of action. They chose a course of action and they had made investments, minimal investments. Any investment, however small, yields commitment. And this is regardless of outcomes. The outcomes could be negative. The person can even foresee correctly that the outcomes may be negative, but the fact that he had invested in the course of action means he's going to continue to the bitter end.
And finally, let's second it, as example, celibacy.
Some narcissists opt for lifelong celibacy because they are incapable of either sustaining a sexually active long-term relationship, and they are also incapable of having casual sex because it undermines the sense of uniqueness and grandiosity.
So these narcissists are in a bind. They're a catch-22. They can't have sex in long-term relationships and they have abandonment anxiety. They're afraid to lose their partners or they don't cheat and they can't have casual sex. So they end up being celibate.
As you see, nothing is as it looks. Very often when you come across a lie or a deception or a confabulation, you should ask yourself, how does the other person perceive it? If it is someone with borderline narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder, they may well not realize that they're lying.
Their world is constructed on falsity. What is the false self? It's false. The world is founded on fantasy. The world of people with cluster B personality disorders is founded on a fantasy defense gun or ride malignant fantasy.
And so they have great difficulty to tell the difference between reality and alternative reality, reality and fantasy. It's all blurred. It's all fuzzy. It's all dream, dreamy, dreamlike.
And so don't be too harsh on these people. A psychopath is the only one who uses lying and confabulation and prevarication to obtain goals.
But even with the psychopath, often there is comorbidity, for example, with borderline, it's pretty common. So be more understanding. Try to go to the roots of the lie. Try to see what function the lie had fulfilled.
You remember the classification?
The eight roles of lies, the eight functions of lies. Try to understand why you are being lied to and then create the environment in the circumstances where the person with cluster B may feel safe enough to tell you the truth.