Today we are going to use a poem and a novel in an attempt to understand why borderlines, especially borderline women, are attracted to sadistic men, abusers who enjoy inflicting pain on others.
It is a phenomenon not limited to borderlines, of course, but it is very pronounced in borderline personality disorder and borderline personality organization.
What is the secret ingredient, the secret source of pain and hurt and agony and torture that appeal to the sensitivities and predilections and proclivities of the borderline? What is this secret bond? What is this occult attachment between the borderline and her pain, both internal and external?
This is the topic of today's video.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm your COVID-recovering professor of clinical psychology and the author of the first book ever on narcissistic abuse, Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited.
And as is our habit, let us delve right in.
Throughout this text, I'm going to use the female gender pronouns when I refer to borderlines.
This used to be the case until more or less the 1980s. Today, half of all people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder are actually men, so genders are interchangeable in this text.
The borderline, the person diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, is attracted to the agonizing hurt and pain in relationships with abusers. Could be narcissists, could be psychopaths, could be sadists, could be schizoids, who inflict pain by being emotionally absent and indifferent, could be paranoids.
Borderlines are attracted not necessarily to a specific personality type or personality disorder, but to the pain, to the pain that is somehow guaranteed, somehow part and parcel of this package deal.
Pain becomes an instrument, an instrument of external regulation. The borderline uses pain in order to reawaken, become more self-aware.
And somehow, through this purgatory, through this process of purification via hellfire, the borderline is able to regulate and to control her labile moods and dysregulated emotions.
Pain is therefore a regulatory mechanism in borderline.
But there are additional functions to pain.
For example, the borderline perceives pain as a kind of self-sacrifice.
Self-sacrifice to whom? Self-sacrifice to the primitive deities of her devaluing, hateful introjects.
We'll come to it a bit later when we discussed the borderlines bad object.
But pain is her kind of attempt to appease and assuage these unforgiving primitive molochs inside her being.
External sadism is better tolerated by the borderline, better managed by the borderline. She copes better with external sadism than with the internal kind that keeps haunting her and pervading her throughout her life.
The borderline is a dark cloud on the verge of dissipation, and it is a cloud of agony and torture and pain and hurt. A lot of it is self-generated, but it's still there, no less true.
The borderline is self-punitive. She is self-trashing.
And this is because of a bad externalized object.
Now you remember that the narcissist, for example, has a bad internalized object. The narcissist has inside himself or herself a coalition of voices, coalition of introjects that keep informing narcissists how unworthy he is, how bad, how inadequate, what a failure, a loser, ugly, stupid, etc.
The whole mechanism of pathological narcissism is compensatory and its main aim is to falsify the voices of the introjects that comprise the internalized bed object, the primitive superego.
In the case of the borderline, there's an externalized bad object.
Let me explain.
The borderline believes herself to be a good person. She firmly adheres to a good internal object, unlike the narcissist.
But on the other hand, she cannot explain to herself her bad behavior, her misconduct, her recklessness, her acting out, her aggression, her violence. She cannot reconcile her image of herself as essentially a benign person, a loving person, a caring, empathic person, and the way she often hurts other people. She can't put the two pieces together.
Her bad object is external, is behavioral, not internal.
So what she does, she says to herself, I'm a good person who has misbehaved. So now I need to be punished. Punishing myself is a rite of purification. It's catharsis, having punished herself, for example, by sexually self-trashing, or abusing substances, or behaving recklessly, or gambling, or overspending, or whatever the case may be.
Having trashed herself, the borderline feels purified. She feels that she has been restored to the primordial stage of benignity, of goodness.
So, her self-trashing, her self-punitive behaviors and choices, they are intended to restore her to a pristine state of goodness.
And that's where sadistic, abusive men or partners come into the picture, because they fully cater to this need, this inexorable, irresistible need to be punished.
Sadistic partners punish the borderline. They are the instruments of God, if you wish. They are the reification of unforgiving, inflexible, rigid morality.
So the borderline self-punishes and self-trashes through the agency of her sadistic abusive partners.
Exactly like the narcissist, the borderline has a false self.
But the borderline's false self fulfills different roles to the narcissists.
And as distinct from the narcissists, the borderline has both a false self and a pretty active true self which roughly correspond to the externalized bad object and the internalized good object.
The false self is the false self which misbehaves and the internalized good object which is the true self.
The borderline perceives herself as childlike, innocent, pure, unadulterated, empathic, loving, compassionate, affectionate, accepting, warm. That's her view of herself. And this corresponds pretty accurately to her true self.
But she has a false self, which is essentially narcissistic. And this false self engages in acts that harm other people and hurt her and especially her partners.
So the false self of the borderline is different to the narcissists.
The narcissist's false self is impregnable. It is defensive. It is intended to keep out potentially hostile world.
The borderline's false self is wide open, agreeable on the surface. The borderline's false self is beseeching. It craves love, acceptance, and above all, a sense of safety, but it is dysfunctional.
The false self in both cases is imbued with aggression, but otherwise these childhood constructs could not be more different.
Whereas the false self of the narcissist is inward looking, the false self of the borderline is public facing.
But in its quest for love and acceptance and safety, a secure base, a substitute maybe for a maternal figure who loves unconditionally, in this quest, the borderline's false self uses aggression to manipulate, coerce, punish, threaten, aggress against other people.
There's also a difference in social behavior.
To sustain and buttress their sense of godlike superiority, narcissists surround themselves with manifestly inferior hangers on and minions. People around the narcissist are usually less endowed than the narcissist, less intelligent, less accomplished or less handsome than the narcissist is.
Narcissists idealize themselves, and they idealize their partners in the shared fantasy, and they idealize their role models, du jour.
But they hold all others in profound and virulent contempt.
That's not the case with the borderline.
The borderline actually surrounds herself with people she perceives as superior to her. The friendship of such people, the allegiance of such people, undergirds, buttresses, supports the borderline's sense of self-worth and self-esteem.
She idealizes herself continuously through these other people, through her human environment. A process known as co-idealization.
Don't get me wrong. Borderlines are not saints and no angels. They're capable of lying and gaslighting, exactly like psychopaths.
Because unlike narcissists, borderlines can tell the differences between fantasy and reality.
But what really goes on in the mind of the borderline, this alien galaxy far away, what traverses these infinite spaces of pain and hurt that comprise the non-existence of the borderline, her absence, this empty schizoid core that most borderline complain of. What are the dynamics within this vacuum and what particles spring forth from this primordial soup?
Psychology is not enough in this case. We need to resort to a superior discipline of human understanding, literature.
Allow me to read to you a poem. It's an amazing poem. I'm going to change one word in the poem. And it applies perfectly to the borderline's state of mind when she falls in love with an intimate partner.
Actually, it's not exactly love. It's a shared fantasy. And the borderline's shared fantasy involves a safety, stability, a secure base, and an external regulator.
I advise you and recommend that you watch the videos in the borderline playlist on this channel.
And here is the poem.
Last night, ah, yesterday, between her lips and mine, there fell thy shadow, the narcissist. Thy breath was shed upon my soul between the kisses and the wine. And I was desolate and sick of an old passion. Yeah, I was desolate and bowed my head. I have been faithful to thee, the narcissist, in my fashion.
All night upon mine heart, I felt her warm heartbeat. Night long within my arms in love and sleep she lay. Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet but I was desolate and sick of an old passion and I awoke and found the dawn was gray.
I have been faithful to thee, O Narcissist, in my fashion.
I have forgot much, O Narcissist, gone with the wind, flung roses riotously with the throng, dancing to put thy pale lost lilies out of mind but I was desolate and sick of an old passion yeah all the time because the dance was long.
I have been faithful to thee, O Narcissist, in my fashion. I cried for madder music and for stronger wine.
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, then falls thy shadow, Narcissist. The night is thine, and I am desolate and sick of an old passion, yeah, hungry for the lips of my desire. I have been faithful to thee, narcissists, in my fashion.
That's an amazing poem titled in Latin, I have been faithful to thee in my fashion. It was written in the 19th century by Ernest Christopher Dawson and that's where the phrase Gone With the Wind is taken from.
There is a novel that captures like nothing else, the danse macabre, this shadow dance between the borderline and the narcissist. It's the novel The Master and Margarita. It was written by a Soviet writer, Mikhail Bulgakov. It was written in the Soviet Union and it took something like 12, 13 years to complete. It's been published posthumously, many decades after the author has died.
The novel is roughly divided in two parts. The first part takes place in Moscow during the 1930s. Satan, the devil, makes an appearance in Patriarch's Pond. It's a location in Moscow. And he impersonates a professor, Professor Woland.
Just as an aside, a biographical aside, Patriarch's Pond was my residential address in Moscow in the late 1990s. Draw your own conclusions, inevitable as they may be.
Okay, this is part one and it's not relevant to our discourse in this video but part two as I said is the best encapsulation of the relationship between narcissists and borderlines or actually abusers and borderlines. It explains the borderline dynamic like nothing else in literature or in psychology.
Part two introduces Margarita. Margarita is a mistress. She is a mistress to a guy who calls himself, or is designated, the master. Very megalomaniacally, very grandiosely, the master is a failed author, a collapsed narcissist. But she refuses to give up on him. She refuses to let him to despair.
She thinks her lover is the world's leading genius and his work is the masterpiece to end all masterpieces.
It's a common shared fantasy among borderlines and their intimate partners or special friends or special persons. Borderlines tend to idealize these other people, their external regulators.
And Margarita is no exception. The master, in the eyes of Margarita, can do no wrong and his perfection reified and embodied, well in reality, as I said, it's a pitiful collapsed narcissist and we are not quite sure where there is a good offer let alone an exceptional one.
At some point, the devil, the guy who lives in Patriarch's Ponds, may I remind you, sent her an emissary, a messenger, Azazello. And Azazello gives her a magical skin ointment. When she ladders the ointment on her skin, she becomes invisible, which is a great metaphor when it comes to borderlines.
Borderlines can turn their visibility on and off. It's an unsettling feature, but also an enchanted one. Borderline's ability to externalize her absence and then to reabsorb it and become ostentatious, to take over an environment and then vanish into it, dissipate into it. This is an amazing feat and clinical feature of borderlines.
This is the metaphorical ointment in the story. She's invited by Azazello, the devil's messenger. She's invited to a midnight, good Friday ball, thrown by the devil, of course.
Woland, the professor, who is actually Satan, gives her the chance in this ball to become a witch. This is the borderline's secret dream.
Borderline personality disorder is a form of enchantment. The borderline has a personal fable and an imaginary audience. These are adolescent features.
And in this fable, she is a princess, sometimes in need of rescue, sometimes a rescuer.
And within this everlasting masking ball, like Eyes Wide Shut, if you have seen the movie, the borderline is the key attraction. She fulfills the role of a wizard, a witch. She enchants her environments. She bewitches everyone around her, and she creates magic and brings on miracles.
The entire, the interior life of the borderline, the internal life of the borderline, her internal space is imbued with what could be called magical realism or maybe Chagall type imagery.
And so Margarita enters the realm of the night. She finds the devil's offer irresistible. She's a borderline. She needs magic. She thrives on magic. She feeds off magic.
Take away the enchantment from her life. Disenchant the borderline. And you render her suicidal. She needs the fantasy. She needs the narrative, she needs the story.
In Master and Margarita, Margarita learns to fly and control her unleashed passions.
The connectivity between magic and passion in the mind of the borderline is irreducible. There's no way to break this bond, this bidirectionality. Magic is passionate and passion is magical.
The borderline therefore strives to continuously be in a state of passionate magic or magical passion. That's why the borderline is dramatic and erratic.
Margarita has a maid, Natasha. Natasha accompanies her, and Natasha rides on a neighbor of Margarita who has been transformed into a pig. It's a funny story, actually.
There's a lot of humor in the Master and Margarita. It's a dark story, penumbral kind of babes in the wood, Hansel and Gretel thing. Brothers Grimm writ large. But it's also full of humor, the Soviet humor. The only way to survive the Soviet Union.
And so they fly over the Soviet Union's forests and rivers and so on so forth. It's a bit reminiscent of Diels Holgersen, Selma Lagerloff's book.
And finally, Margarita takes a bath and returns to Moscow with Azazello as the hostess of Satan's spring ball. She welcomes all kinds of people, historical figures, into the ball, they arrive from hell.
And so she gets more and more immersed, one could even say immured, in the works of the devil.
When the borderline opens herself up to the enchantment of passion, to the magic of existence, especially the magic of relationship with a special person, a special person who can reach into her mind and regulate it, control her, she outs it, control her.
She outsources herself, her self. There's no self there, but she outsources her inside. Her mental innards, she outsources them to the intimate partner.
This creates between them kind of merger and fusion and enmeshment, which are very reminiscent of this biotic bond between a baby and a mother, a newborn and a mother.
She's newborn. It's a rebirth. It's a renaissance when she comes across the intimate partner as she sees him or her.
So it's a Faustian deal. The borderline gives up her soul for worldly love, stability, safety, and the bewitching enchantment of limerence and infatuation.
It's a secure base. It's a kind of unconditional love given to a mother, maternal figure.
And so the master and margarita captures this process of gradually descending into the bowels of the earth, making peace with hell, giving up your soul, just in order to be able to interact with the devil with Satan.
She does all this, of course, in order to promote the master. It's her self-sacrifice.
Satan or the devil represents the internal dynamics or psychodynamics in borderline, which are very painful, disintegrative and hurtful and dissociative, but it's a price she is willing to pay.
Margarita, I'm glad to inform you, survives her encounter with the devil.
Satan, like all other men, is so impressed with her that he offers to grant her her deepest wish.
She makes one wish, he says, okay, I'll grant you this wish, but here's another one.
Strangely, her first wish has nothing to do with the master.
It has to do with some other person who is tangentially related to her. Not related, but tangentially entered her awareness.
We have come across this phenomenon in borderline personality disorder, especially when it's coupled with substance abuse dual diagnosis, borderlines tend to become more empathic towards strangers than towards loved ones. That's a fact, especially when they are drunk, under the influence of alcohol.
And she's drunk, margarita is drunk here. It's not alcohol, but it's the whole surrealistic dream scape of satan and nightmare that is also irresistibly alluring, captivating and subsuming.
And so she is more empathic to a stranger.
Only her second wish has to do with the master.
She asks Satan to deliver the master to her.
And pronto, presto, the master is there. He's dazed, he's confused, is disoriented.
He interprets the whole situation as a lunatic asylum, where she met him, by the way. He was in a lunatic asylum where she met him, by the way, was in the lunatic asylum.
And so having reunited through the good services of Satan the devil, they return to the basement apartment where they have established their love nest.
It seems that the love between the borderline and her abuser, the borderline and the narcissist, the borderline of the sadist, requires the intercession, intermediation, and intervention of the devil himself.
As I said, it's a Faustian deal. It's impure.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, borderlines were cast as witches, as some presence of the dark forces in the relationship between the borderline and her intimate partners or special friends or special people, special persons.
This attribution of darkness to mental illness, especially borderline narcissism and psychopathy, is not new, nothing new.
There's a lot of it in Jung's work, even Freud compared it to demon possession, so the metaphors and the language of medieval religiosity and puritan texts have survived to this very day.
And the collaboration of the dance between the borderline and the narcissist and the sadist or any other type of abuser appears from the outside to be driven by forces that are best avoided. Forces that are incomprehensible, dynamics and energies which are so uncommon that they are suspect.
They represent the Netherlands of our inner-scape.
The fantasy of the borderline, which incorporates these other meaningful, significant others, this fantasy is adulterated, it's contaminated.
There's something wrong about it, substantially and fundamentally, because it is imbued with aggression. It is imbued with desperate dependency, clinging to the point of choking and suffocation.
There's a lot of death in the shared fantasy of the borderline.
In the shared fantasy of the narcissist, there's a lot of hope and optimism, which is delusional, of course, because it's founded on a grandiose self-assessment and the idealization of everyone involved.
In the borderline's fantasy, it's like clinging to a rock with your nails. And that's the only thing that stops you from falling. There's this sense of imminent fall.
And fall, of course, is a metaphor in the Bible. The fall, the expulsion from the garden of Eden, the conversion of Adam and Eve from pure innocent creatures into what we are today, which is nothing to write home about, nothing to brag about.
The borderline is poised on this precipice between virginal purity and extreme depravity. A state of primordial innocence compared to extreme self-dressing and self-degradation.
She is the line separating these spheres of existence. She often transitions from one to the other. She's like a pendulum. She's the bridge.
She wishes to induce, to induct others into this game, to introduce people who can regulate her, afford her a sense of stability and safety and predictability. She wishes to drag them into this morass or miasma of conflicting images and drives and dynamics.
Borderline is just another name for dissonance.
And so the Master and Margarita describes this in a way which no other work of literature or psychology ever came close to.
So now the Master and Margarita, the reunited, the love nest, bonded by the shared fantasy, the master is a narcissist, so he believes himself to be the number one author to have ever lived.
Margarita concurs. She agrees with him. She idealizes him.
The reunited couple says the devil will be sent to the afterlife. This is their gift.
Azazello actually brings them a physical gift, a bottle of Pontius Pilate's poisoned wine.
And then the master and Margarita die and Azazello brings their souls to Satan and to his retinue and they fly away into the unknown. They leave Earth behind. They travel into dark cosmic space.
And so this is possibly the most amazing part of the book, the novel, because it unites seamlessly Christian eschatology and theology with what we know today about Cluster B personality disorders, and especially the dynamic between borderlines and their partners.
The borderline and her partner believe in their essential goodness. They see nothing wrong in their union. They regard the fantasy as is in some ways real.
The borderline is much more grounded, much more realistic, by the way. It is the narcissist in the couple who kind of imbues the fantasy with a sense of reality.
But she conforms, she accepts, she caters to the narcissist's need to believe in fantasy.
And so this is the afterlife. The afterlife is of course a fantasy because even the book says that when they die their souls find themselves in dark cosmic space. That's not exactly how we imagine heaven, is it?
So it's a fantasy. The gift is very telling. It's the wine. The wine of the guy who sentenced Jesus Christ to die on the cross. The wine that belongs to the guy who has signed off the decree to crucify Jesus Christ.
And so Pontius Pilate's wine is of course poisoned. It's not clear if it's poisoned physically or it's poisoned metaphorically, but it ends up killing the couple.
How is this related or connected to the dynamic between borderline, for example, narcissists or sadists or whatever?
Ultimately, in the fantasy, in the shared fantasy of the borderline, her intimate partner, the special person, but let us talk about the intimate partner, is also her executioner.
Remember, death is an intimate strand in the shared fantasy of the borderline.
She ultimately must die as the ultimate form of self-fulfillment.
No wonder that 11% of people with borderline personality disorder end up committing suicide and a much higher number end up attempting suicide.
Suicide is perceived as the destination. Death is perceived as the destination. A desirable one in many ways, not necessarily only because it silences the pain, the internal tumult, the internal noise that drowns everything internally and externally, not only because it puts an end to the torture, self-inflicted and other inflicted, not only.
Death is idealized. Death is perceived by the borderline as an ally.
Self-mutilation is a form of courtship. The borderline courts, flirts with death by mutilating her body.
So death is a destination, not only a solution, but a destination.
The entire life of the borderline is a narrative that leads inevitably, ineluctably, inexorably to death. Death makes sense of the borderline's life. It imbues it with meaning, it's hermeneutic.
And so Pontius Pilate's poison wine is welcome. And the couple consume it.
And by doing so, they crucify themselves.
Pontius Pilate crucified Jesus. So by drinking his wine they become Jesus Christ, they crucify themselves and by crucifying themselves they absolve everyone else of their sins.
The act of crucifixion in the New Testament is also an act of absolution. Jesus died so that your sins may be forgiven.
The master of Margarita died, having imbibed Pontius Pilate's wine. They died, they got crucified, so that the sins of everyone around them should be forgiven. They grant an absolution to everyone.
And so they fly away into the unknown.
In the minds of the narcissist and the borderline, when they are together in the shared fantasy, it's a voyage. It's the kind of exploration that Europeans undertook in the dark continent, in Africa, in the 19th century.
Their relationship is a terra incognita inhabited by the savages of their internal psychological dynamics. And they explore each other, and they explore the relationship, and they can't let go. It's insatiable.
They delve deeper and deeper, and wherever they think they've reached the end, it's just starting, it's just the beginning.
So they fly away into the unknown, but they have been flying away into the unknown from the moment they've met. This is just the physical affirmation of a psychological process that has started when they have become a couple.
And they leave Earth behind. As a typical borderline narcissist couple does.
This kind of couple leaves Earth behind. They inhabit their own planet. This planet is often inaccessible even to therapists.
They're going to spend eternity together in a shady, pleasant region. But it's not heaven and it's not hell. It's Dante Alighieri's limbo. It's a house under flowery cherry trees for some reason, Japanese motif, but it's very reminiscent of Dante's limbo.
Having granted absolution by self-crucifyingeveryone around the master, Margarita, become pure spirits, including the devil himself.
The power of the love of Margarita and the master is such that it could transform even the devil himself.
Indeed, borderlines attribute this kind of potency and power to their attachment and bonding and relationships.
Borderlines believe that their relationships are primordial, atavistic force. They believe that their relationships are transformative. They believe that they arethe agents of change. They believe, all borderlines believe, that they are having impact, very often irreversible impacts on people around them.
Because they firmly think of themselves as good persons, as good objects, most border lines would tell you that they're having a good influence of people, that they've helped people, that they've changed the trajectories of people's lives for the better, that they help to introduce people to each other, etc.
And so the devil changes. He's transformed, possibly against his will, and becomes a pure spirit.
Down on earth in Moscow, people witness all these events. They try to make sense of them.
The same way people outside the borderlines dyad also try to make sense of what's happening.
People ask, why is she with him? Why is she suffering? Why on the other hand is she so addicted to him? What's the role of pain and abuse in their relationships? Why doesn't she just pack up and go? Why doesn't she leave him?
These questions torment, torture and bother people around the borderline couple with her abuser.
And so, people in Moscow also attribute all these strange events to hysteria and mass psychosis and mass hypnosis.
In the final chapter, Satan, the devil, again in the role of Professor Wallach, tells the master to finish his novel about Pontius Pilate.
And he says that Pilate is condemned by cowardice to Limbo for eternity.
It's interesting because the Master and Margarita are in Limbo actually. They're Pilate's neighbors. Pilot brought them there, his wine.
Pontius Pilate is in limbo. He's condemned. He was a coward. He didn't want to crucify Jesus Christ. He gave in to the mob.
The master shouts, you're free. He's waiting for you.
Remember, the master of Mangarita crucified themselves or agreed to be crucified, agreed to die, in order to absolve everyone.
And so the first one to be absorbed is the person who killed them, Pontius Pilate.
You forgive your killer, your assassin.
The motive of forgiveness in the borderline personality organization. This motive is very dominant.
The borderline is preoccupied with accountancy, with ledgers. Who did what to whom? Should they be forgiven? Should they be forgotten? Should she engage in revenge? Vengeful activities? Should she seek revenge?
She's very preoccupied with all this.
And the choice of Margarita and the master is to forgive.
And the master shouts, you're free, he's waiting for you, Satan. Pontius Pilate is indeed freed. He walks, he talks, not with the devil. He walks and talks with Jesus.
And now, through the self-sacrificial act of the borderline, Pontius Pilate is free to tell Jesus Christ how much he admires him and his teachings that he intends to follow him.
It's an act of conversion. The borderline converts people. It's missionary. It's like a religion.
This act of conversion is elemental in borderline.
When the borderline comes across her intimate partner, she converts him into her private religion, into her shared fantasy.
She renders him her master because he controls her internal processes.
But subtly, subtly, she makes him a copy of her own, an extension if you wish, and together they're saving the world.
There's this ethos or myth of we against the world, and it's not a conflict, it's more about converting other people, making life better in some ways.
And peace descends on Moscow. Peace descends on Moscow. Peace descends on Moscow.
Even when there's a full moon later, there's a bit of a bit of disquiet, but nothing bad happens.
And people make peace with who they are.
For example, there's a character, Ivan Ponyol, he always wanted to be a poet, and he's not a good poet, so he becomes a professor of philosophy and gives up on poetry. He makes peace with it.
External peace, the conditions of calmness that prevail with forgiveness, allow people to accept themselves, reconciled with themselves, and live in inner peace which reflects the outer peace.
In the borderline's utopian fantasy, this should be her ultimate role. She can bring infinite love to the table. Shouldn't this be enough?
And whenever she fails, whenever she hurts people, whenever she harms people, she feels guilty and ashamed, immediately becomes self-punitive, self-trashing, thereby aggravating the harm and the pain.
It's a trap. It's a catch-22.
The borderline's only way to chastise and castigate herself and punish herself for her misconduct only magnify the misconduct, amplify the misbehavior, and ends up hurting even more people.
This is the infinite loop of the borderline.
And that is, for her, ultimate self-rejection and self-loathing.
This negation, this vitiation of the felt, deeply felt, good object.
I'm a good person. Why do I end up doing bad things?
Well, the devil is one explanation, if you are so inclined, but remember the borderline's transformative power extend even to him.