Dramatic-Erratic People in Your Life (Compilation)

And drama is indeed the topic of today's lecture.

Drama. Drama in narcissistic personality disorder. Drama in borderline personality disorder. Drama in antisocial personality disorder, especially among secondary psychopaths, and to some extent, among primary psychopaths. Drama, drama.

I would suggest to the next DSM committee to replace the antiquated term Cluster B with off-off-B-B personality disorders.

Indeed, Cluster B personality disorders is also known clinically and officially as the dramatic or erratic cluster because everyone in Cluster B is very very dramatic.

But of course the question is what is the aim of being a drama queen or a drama king?

Why expend so much energy, effort, creativity, imaginationongenerating, fostering and gendering drama? Where does all this lead? Is it goal-oriented? Is it controllable?

I mean, drama queens, do they control the drama? Can they turn it off and on? Can they switch off and on? Or is it stronger than any individual? Is it like a reflex or an instinct? Something like hunger, like thirst, like watching Sam Vaknin, something you cannot control?

Well, stay with me and listen to some of the answers.

And as usual, as distinct from others, I bring you the latest cutting edge research, studies and so on.

Now, the thing about cutting edge, it hurts. Cutting edge hurts, by definition. Cutting hurts.

Cutting, by the way, is very typical of borderline personality disorder and has an element of drama in it.

People with borderline personality disorders self-mutilate, attempt suicide, and so on so forth, partly in order to feel that they're alive, partly to quell and sort of mitigate and ameliorate the pain inside them, but partly in order to generate drama and get everyone around them, become the focus of attention, become the life of the morbid party.

So we'll talk about this as well.

Lidia Gengelovska had observed recently that the pandemic had rendered all of us, drama queens and drama kings, even if we don't wish to be.

Drama is a tool, is an instrument, is a mode of communication. Drama is manipulative.

When people are helpless, when they're confined, when they are denied access to comfort zones, familiar settings, familiar faces, they resort to drama in order to manage their lives and in order to act upon and in the world.

Drama is a kind of last resort, the outcome of learned helplessness.

What are the motivations? Why do people become dramatic, erratic, unpredictable, terrifying sometimes, hurtful always?

I start by referring you to a previous video I've made about the victim and the triangle, the victim caught in a triangle.

That's the famous Karpman Drama Triangle.

It seems that one of the major roles of drama is actually acting.

People in dramatic triangles, the victim, the abuser, the hero (the rescuer, the savior) saves the victim because she is abused by the abuser. Everyone has his role, it's like a theater play. There's a script.

And the amazing thing that Karpman and others have discovered is that people rotate. They are victims and then they assume the behaviors of the abuser. They emulate the abuser. They internalize the abuser. And they become abusive. The rescuer can suddenly become the abuser.

Actually, in the majority of cases, the victim comes to regard the rescuer or the savior as an abuser, etc.

So it seems that drama, the dramatic triangle at least, triangulation, has a lot to do with acting. It's a role. It's a role play.

What is the aim of acting? Why do we engage in roles?

Well, there are two reasons.

One, functionality.

We settle into roles, we adopt emergent roles, we accept roles assigned to us by others in order to perform, in order to carry out certain functions.

Why do we carry out functions? Because it's good for us. We are self-interested. We get something out of it.

So acting, role play, allows us to function.

Actually, scholars like Goffman and even Carl Jung had suggested that all social interactions are a form of acting.

And of course there's a famous book by Eric Berne, Games People Play, where he claims that all interpersonal relationships and relationships in general are actually games, and that people are ludic, they like to play games. There's the ludic person, likes to play games.

And I have dedicated a portion of a video that I've made regarding the narcissist as a ludic person, as someone who likes to play games.

So acting accomplishes this function of functionality, secures functioning.

But acting has another very important role.

Distancing.

When we act, we are not ourselves. We are no longer ourselves. We are distanced from who we are.

And much more importantly, we are distanced from our experiences.

So for example, if I had undergone a trauma, if I were traumatized, one of the tools at my disposal is to distance myself from the trauma.

And I can distance myself from the trauma by pretending to be someone else, by acting a role.

And of course, acting by definition is dramatic.

Indeed, we observe a substantial increase in dramatic behavior among victims of complex trauma, CPTSD.

And if you go to communities and forums populated by the covert narcissists known as empaths or self-styled as empaths, there's drama no end. These are highly dramatic people. I mean, they revel in their drama. They put on shows endlessly.

So acting is an integral part of coping with trauma and coping with trauma via distancing.

Here are the first two functions. The first two functions of drama, to enhance functionality via playing a role and to distance yourself from egodystonic experiences such as trauma.

And by the way, to distance yourself from things about yourself you don't like.

So if you don't like a behavior of yours, if you don't like a trait of yours, you can distance yourself from such behavior or trait either by projecting them onto someone else, attributing them to someone else, or by acting, by becoming dramatic, by shedding your identity and assuming someone else's identity.

The second reason to be a drama queen or drama king is that it tends to enhance, regulate self-esteem.

Technically, clinically, it tends to regulate a sense of self-worth.

How come? Why would acting, not to mention acting out, regulate your self-esteem? How is this accomplished?

Well, by reverting the locus of control.

Someone who resorts to acting, someone who resorts to drama, as Rangelovska has mentioned, as I cited her earlier, as Lydia Rangelovska has observed, someone who does this is at the end of their tether. They are helpless. They ran out of solutions. Their coping strategies are not working anymore.

The situation is dire because they don't have the recipes or the procedures to secure favorable outcomes from their human environment, so they result to drama. They dramatize the situation.

When they dramatize the situation, they assume a dual role.

One role is a director of the drama. They're like a movie director.

And the second role is the star of the drama, the main actor or main actress, the center of attention, the life of the party, the one who has access to privileged asymmetrical information because only the person who initiates the drama knows where the drama is going and how the drama is going to end.

Drama is power. It's a power play.

When you engage in drama, you throw everyone into a maelstrom of uncertainty, unpredictability, threat. Everyone around you is very frightened or very worried or very concerned or a bit ill it is or a lot ill it is.

You control the moods and the emotions and the thoughts of everyone around you when you involve them in a drama.

In other words, it's about power.

Engaging in drama reverts the locus of control.

When for example you're a victim, when you're a victim, your locus of control is external. The abuser has the control. You are objectified. You are the passive recipient of the control. You are the subject, not the object.

So, suddenly, you reverse the tables. Suddenly, you are on top. You're not the bottom, you're the top. Suddenly, you are the dom, not the sub. Suddenly, you're in charge charge you call the shots you determine what's happening and what's going to happen and your abuser is thrown off your abuser is for a minute the perplexed baffled, unsure, doesn't know how to proceed and what to do.

Thereby, you regain the locus of control. It becomes internal instead of external. Your abuser is not longer in control. You are.

Of course, when you have an internal locus of control, and especially when the locus of control reverts from external to internal, you gain a lot in terms of self-confidence and self-esteem. It uplifts you. It buttresses you, it strengthens and empowers you to regain the control and the locus of control.

And that's the second reason to engage in drama.

The classic reason given is actually not as important as people think, and that is attention-seeking.

If you go online, everyone and his dog will tell you that drama is about attention-seeking.

Well, most of the time, actually, it's not.

But in some highly restricted cases, in some highly specific personality disorders, for example, histrionic personality disorder, attention is important.

Narcissus, by the way, rarely engages in dramatics. There's a huge confusion online between borderline and narcissists. Borderlines are much more dramatic than narcissists.

Narcissists prefer to obtain narcissistic supply via control. They are control freaks.

Borderlines are drama queens and drama kings. And histrionics, for example, engage in drama in order to secure attention.

You can secure attention in three ways.

One, you are the hero, you're the rescuer, you're the savior, you're the savior, using the Karpman model. So these guarantees and grants you attention.

So, in other words, when people are grateful to you, gratitude is the engine of the attention. And the attention is a result of a drama.

Now very often these so-called heroes, these saints, they engineer situations where they will become heroes, where they will save the day or the damsel in distress.

They are covert narcissists actually. And this is their passive aggressive, manipulative way of creating circumstances and channeling and directing everyone to a stage set where they can attain and take home the role of a hero.

So their heroism is self-induced, self-imputed, and self-created, self-generated.

But still, it's a form of drama and its main, its pivot, emotional pivot is gratitude.

So hero, gratitude.

The second possibility to obtain attention via drama is when you claim to be a victim.

Then you get, for example, compassion, empathy, pity, and in any case, attention.

So attention seekers pose as heroes and make sure to engineer situations where they end up being heroes or they pose as victims and when they pose as victims they garner the attention and the positive emotionality that they seek.

That is not to say of course that all victims do that and it's also not to say that everyone who engages in attention seeking as a victim is not a victim.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying many victims engage in dramatic behavior in order to garner and secure attention.

Among other reasons. So I'm mentioning among other reasons. So I'm mentioning all the reasons.

One of them is attention.

The third role is the seducer, and it's very typical of the histrionic.

It's the chase. It's the ostentatious flirtation. It's the overt seductive behavior.

So histrionics do this and it's another form of attention.

The next reason for dramatic behavior is when one has a victim or a rescuer mentality.

A victim mentality, recently I made a video about victim mentality, which I recommend that you watch. It's one of two. The other one deals with the Karpman drama triangle.

Victim mentality is simply the tendency to interpret life events and behaviors of other people in terms of victimhood.

There are recent studies, I mentioned them in the aforementioned video. In the videos that I've made, I mentioned specific studies, dozens of them. And I want to repeat myself in this video as well.

So victim mentality is simply an organizing principle. It's an explanatory principle.

Why did he do this to me? Because I'm a victim. Why am I not getting what is owed me? Why am I not being promoted? Because I'm a victim. Why did my mother misbehaved the way she did? Because she victimizes me. My neighbor victimizes me. Everyone victimizes me. History, society, etc.

You see the thin line between victim mentality and actually paranoid or persecutory ideation, and indeed victims of this sort, professional, lifelong, committed victims, victims who wouldn't hear any information to the contrary that maybe they're not victims, or maybe they are contributing to their victimization time and again by behaving unwisely.

They don't want to hear any of this because their victimhood imbues their life, gives their life sense, direction, purpose. Life has structure and order and meaning if you're a victim.

Exactly the same goes when it comes to the rescuer mentality, or the savior mentality.

Just reverse the role. It's someone who believes that he has to save people.

It's especially common among men. They want to save women, fallen women, damaged women, broken women. They have this savior, rescuer instinct or reflex, I'm going to save you, I'm going to fix you.

It's common among certain professions like therapists, for example. Bed therapies have rescue mentality.

And both people with victim mentality and people with rescue mentality are very dramaticand they use drama to aggrandize themselves and to impose their interpretation of reality on others.

And this would lead us to projective identification in a minute.

But they ferociously, and sometimes viciously, force other people to accept the dramatic elements in their narrative of victimhood or rescue.

You see, these kind of victims, it's not enough to be a victim. You need to be a victim in exceptional circumstances.

You need to be victimized by the most amazing, vicious, wicked, demonic abuser to have ever roamed the earth.

I mean, your victimhood is aggrandized, grandiose.

It's factitious and fictitious. It's out of this world. It's fantastic. It's HBO stuff. It's a movie.

I mean, these victims and these rescuers, they are emotionally invested in converting this victimhood, their victimhood or their rescue exploits, their rescue shenanigans, into movie-like, Hollywood-like level story.

And very often these victims and rescuers would say, I need to write a book about this. Or had you just witnessed my life, you would have made a movie. You know, it's the stuff of movies. Or I'm going to write a book.

Why write a book? Because my experience is unique. No one has ever had anything remotely close to this.

So this is the drama element.

Now the next reason for dramatic behavior is novelty seeking.

Novelty seeking, risk taking, thrills, adrenaline junkie, and impulsivity.

Now all these together, if you put them together, they are major elements, major elements in psychopathy, especially primary psychopathy.

The psychopath has a low tolerance for boredom and a low tolerance for frustration.

Consequently, the psychopath is impulsive, reckless, novelty seeking, risk-taking, adrenaline junkie.

These people are highly dramatic and this is the dramatic psychopath.

That's a psychopath who is ostentatiously spontaneous, amazingly daring, dare, daredevil, daring do, you know, happy go lucky in your face does the most reckless manner possible defies God defies fate defies nature defies you defies society defies authority.

Many creatures in the Capitol Hill riots, and I'm using the word creatures judiciously, there were this kind of dramatic psychopaths.

Next, provocation.

Drama is an instrument intended to provoke.

Why provoke? Projective identification.

I refer you to videos that I've made about the comfort zones.

Some people, I mean most people, try to force people around them to conform to a narrative that is comforting.

So we all have comfort zones. We all have expectations as to how other people should behave or will behave. That's known as a theory of mind. We have a theory of what makes other people tick, how they are likely to respond, what choices they are likely to make, what decisions are likely to adopt, and how they're going to treat us.

So there's a theory of world and a theory of mind, and it's known as the internal working model.

So every one of us, each one of us, has an internal working model which dictates the way we communicate people and dictates our attachment styles.

So people with cluster B personality disorders, many of them have grown up in abusive behaviors. Abuse, classic abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, psychological abuse, and non-classic abuse.

For example, being parentified, or being objectified, or being instrumentalized, or being idolized. These are also forms of abuse because they prevent the child from developing boundaries, separating and individuating, becoming an individual when the parent is selfish, narcissistic, absent, dead, dead mother, etc.

So we discussed all this in numerous previous videos.

So these kind of people, having grown up in abusive, traumatizing environments, their comfort zone is abuse. They feel good only when they feel bad. They feel relieved when they are tortured, humiliated, degraded, insulted, beaten up. Then they feel relief. They feel relief because it's familiar. They know the ropes. They know what to expect. They know the rules. And they know how to manipulate the other party, the abuser.

But what happens when such people team up with non-abusers, Mr. Nice Guy, the girl next door? What happens then?

Well, they try to force their intimate partners, their colleagues, their friends, their neighbors, anyone, their boss, their employees, they try to force people around them to abuse them. They want to be abused because they feel good and relieved and comfortableonly when they're abused. This is their comfort zone.

So they push people to abuse them. And this is known as projective identification.

The provocation is dramatic. They engage in theatrics, dramatic behavior, immature, infantile, puerile behavior, and all this is intended to push people's buttons, to get themto misbehave, to maltreat, to mistreat, to abuse, to react with aggression. They want people to do this, because then they feel good.

That's another group.

You can see that attention-seeking is actually in the minority.

Drama, dramatic behavior has many, very, very important psychological functions and caters to very critical needs. Regulation, locus of control, and so on.

The next thing is emotional blackmail.

Drama is often used to emotionally blackmail someone. To force the other partyto cater to your needs, to serve you, to save you, to give you something, to be present, to not abandon you, etc., etc., via emotional blackmail.

We all know the stereotype of the mother who wouldn't let her grown-up son leave her side. She is always mysteriously ill, sick. She always needs help with electricity, with groceries, with something. She wouldn't let her grown-up son go, have his own life.

And when he dares, when he dares to try, to attempt to be independent, autonomous, his own man, she would tell him, I sacrifice my life for you. And you are not willing to change my bulb? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?

That's emotional blackmail.

But of course, as you just saw, it's drama, it's family drama. It's a morality play. The son is all evil. The mother is all good. Self-sacrificial, saintly, she's an empath probably, and the son, the poor son, is then motivated to act in ways which he would otherwise have chosen to not act, in words, his agency is taken away from him.

Drama, any drama, any stage play, any production, whose main target, whose main aim, whose main goal is to emotionally blackmail someone, it has to do with removal or decrease of the other person's agency, ability to act independently and have personal autonomy.

And this is another motivation for drama.

And then we have pure, bare naked manipulation.

Drama creates stress. Drama creates the impression of brinkmanship. Something really bad is going to happen. Drama creates heightened anxiety. Drama generates fears. Drama fosters uncertainty, extreme uncertainty.

And so drama is highly manipulative because people would do anything to reduce the anxiety, to get rid of the uncertainty, to introduce some predictability, some element of predictability, to somehow regain control of the situation, to calm the other person down, to avoid escalation.

People would do anything. People are conflict averse, majority are conflict averse. They're peaceful.

So drama is an aggressive act of manipulation intended to go to the edge, to the border.

You know this, I forgot how it's called when two cars travel at each other, high speed, and like the last minute the chicken turns. So it's a game of chicken. This kind of manipulative drama.

And the dramatist, the person who initiates the drama queen or the drama king, they're willing to escalate no end.

Anyone who has lived with a borderline would tell you this. They're willing to escalate no end. They're willing to break things. They're willing to go out and get drunk and sleep with a stranger. They're willing to crush the car. They're willing to harm the children. I mean, they're willing to do anything for the sake of the drama until their wishes and needs are met.

And this could be a trifle. It could be like don't go to work today I want you to be with me. Or again you're traveling, you're neglecting and abandoning me. I mean it could be something you know both reasonable and trivial.

And the escalation is disproportionate to the alleged offense.

And this is the source of the power of the drama. This is a drama is disproportional.

Ultimately, you say to yourself, well, to avoid this kind of drama, I better make a small sacrifice.

Manipulation accomplished, mission accomplished.

And finally, drama is a destruction, a decoy.

Something bad is going on. Something horrible has happened. Some trauma, some betrayal, some external circumstance, which is adverse, some pandemic, some war, some hunger, some explosion, terrorist attack, I don't know what, some fight which leads to a divorce or to break up or separation, something bad with the children. I mean, something which essentially threatens the precariously balanced, disorganized personalities of cluster B people.

So what they do, rather than cope head on with the impending looming problem, even if they do identify the problem, what they do is distract. They create a diversion. They divert attention. They create a distraction.

Suddenly, they become extremely dramatic and everyone forgets about the real problem and gets focused on the drama.

The drama becomes the vortex, the core, the center of attention, and everyone's resources goes towards ameliorating the drama, controlling the drama, converting, reframing the drama, getting the person to come down and stop the drama, preventing escalation of the drama, etc., etc. Everyone is around the drama.

And the problem that gave rise to the drama is completely forgotten, for a while at least.

So it's a diversionary tactic and an attempt to redirect unwanted attention from some problem.

So for example, if someone with Cluster B had misbehaved, she did something really, really bad, like sleeping with a stranger. She would create enormous drama in order to deflect attention and deflect chastising and opprobrium and criticism from what she had done.

If someone with borderline personality disorder is, or dependent personality disorder, suddenly faces abandonment, she would create drama. And she would create drama because she can't cope with impending rejection and abandonment.

If a narcissist wants to accomplish something at work and keeps being stonewalled, or believes himself, believes that he's discriminated against or because of envy, he's not getting his due. So he's going to create a passive aggressive drama.

But it's still drama.

And the idea is to attract attention to the damage that he can inflict.

So narcissists and psychopaths, they create destructive dramas.

And it's a demonstration of their potential and power to hurt people, destroy things and institutions and so on.

So while the borderline codependent and so on and so forth, these kind of people create drama in order essentially to engage in distorted and thwarted object relations with external objects, in other words with intimate partners.

The psychopath and narcissist is goal-oriented and they're likely to engage in drama either to motivate someone, to accomplish some outcome, or to demonstrate how ruinous, how dangerous, how threatening, how destructive they can be, if they're not giving, if they're not given what they have demanded, what they've asked for.

So it's a kind of blackmail. It's not emotional blackmail. It's technically criminal blackmail.

You know, you don't give me the promotion, I'm going to destroy this company. You don't give me what I want. I'm going to cheat on you.

This is narcissistic and psychopathic reactions.

And they are actually, the lines are blurred.

Because as I keep saying in my videos, these patients transition between the various personality disorders and within each personality disorder, they transition between three states, overt, collapse and covert.

So all these drama or dramatic behaviors come into play, and the nicest, most loving and caring and empathic borderline can engage in drama in order to convey and communicate to her intimate partner, how much she needs him, how much she wants him, how afraid she is of abandonment and rejection.

But then if he doesn't pick up the thread, if he doesn't respond in kind, if he refuses to participate in the drama that she had initiated, she flips on a dime and becomes a secondary psychopath.

And then her drama is malevolent. Her drama is intended to convey the message, I'm going to hurt you badly. I'm going to hurt you badly, and I can do it again, and I'm going to do it again. So better, you know, be careful.

So you see, drama runs through all these personality disorders and it's not a fixed feature and it mostly doesn't have to do with attention.

Although all these people are infantile, all these patients are essentially infantile, they're regressive, they regress to early childhood, and we know that children do use temper tantrums and so on in order to secure attention.

We are forgetting that children also use rage attacks and displays of misbehavior to secure outcomes, to manipulate the adults.

And these two features survive into adulthood in people with personality disorders.

There are children in adult bodies, and this is how we should interpret the dramatic behaviors, but add to this life experience, knowledge, thoughts, tools that children don't have.

And you're beginning to understand how seriously dangerous drama is. Dramatic behavior is.

Drama queens and drama kings are not an oddity. They're not an eccentricity. They're not a sitcom.

They are probably the most dangerous among the personality disorder group.

Dramatic behavior in Cluster B leads to all the outcomes that we are terrified of, including aggression, including blackmail.

And so when we see a drama queen or a drama king, we should be doubly careful, doubly cautious, triply worried and concerned with heightened defenses.

This is a major sign, drama, including on a first date.

Drama, you see drama, walk away, walk away, it's an exceedingly bad sign.

So I opened with my own personal drama and I have depleted my dramatic reserves.

Like Rail Broadway, I'm close for the season.

My name is Sam Vaknin and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

The narcissist is nothing but a shell encasing a void.

Uncertain of his own reality, the narcissist engages in what I call conspicuous existence, a kind of theater of narcissistic absurd.

Conspicuous existence is a form of conspicuous consumption, in which the consumed commodity is narcissistic supply.

The narcissist elaborately stage-manages his very being.

His every movement, his tone of voice, his posture, his inflection, his poise, his text, and subtext, and context, they are all carefully orchestrated, choreographed to yield the maximum effect and to garner the most attention.

Consequently, narcissists appear to be unpleasantly deliberate. They're somehow wrong, like automata, gone awry, or a robot off kilter.

Narcissists are either too human or too inhuman, too modest, too haughty, too loving, too cold, too empathic, too stony, too industrious, too casual, too enthusiastic, too indifferent, to courteous, too abrasive.

But it's always too much of something.

Narcissists are exes and bollid. They act their part, and their acting shows the Thespian skills notwithstanding, the effort emanates and exudes through the scenes of their existence.

Their show invariably unravels at the seams under the slightest trace.

Their enthusiasm is always manic. Their emotional expression unnatural. Their body language defies their own statements, statements be like their intentions, their intentions are focused on one and only one thing, a drug, securing narcissistic supply from other people.

The narcissist authors, composes his life, he scripts his life. To him, time is the medium upon which he, the narcissist, records the narrative of his recherché biography.

The narcissist is therefore always calculated, calculated as though listening to an inner voice, to a kind of movie director or a choreographer of his unfolding significant, cosmically significant history.

The narcissist's speech tooit, his motion stunted, his emotional palate, a mockery of true countenances.

But the narcissist's constant invention of his self is not limited to outward appearances.

The narcissist does nothing and says nothing. He doesn't even think anything. He thinks nothing without first having computed the quantity of narcissistic supply that his actions, utterances or thoughts may yield.

The visible narcissist is the tip of a gigantic submerged iceberg of seething reckoning. Endless number of calculations.

Narcissus is like these famous supercomputers. He is incessantly engaged in energy draining gorging of other people and their possible reactions to him.

The analysis constantly estimates, evaluates, counts, weighs, measures, determines, enumerates, compares, despairs, reawakens, restarts, reboots, and extracts.

Extracts what? narcissistic supply.

His fatigued brain is bathed with a drowning noise of stratagems and fears, rage and envy, anxiety and relief, addiction and rebellion, mediation, meditation, and premeditation.

The narcissist is a machine which never rests, not even in his dreams, and it has one purpose only, securing and maximizing narcissistic supply.

Small wonder that the narcissist is tired, exhausted. His exhaustion is all pervasive and all consuming.

His mental energy depleted, the narcissist can hardly empathize with others. He cannot love, he cannot experience emotions. He is too zombified, too tired.

Conspicuous existence malignantly replaces real existence. The myriadambivalent forms of life are supplanted by this single obsession compulsion of I must be seen, I must be observed, I must be reflected of being by proxy through the gaze of others.

The narcissist ceases to exist when he is not in company. His being fates when he is not discerned, when he is not noticed. When he is ignored, he is dead.

Yet he is unable to return the favor. He is a captive, oblivious to everything but his preoccupation.

In a previous video I've made, I suggested a distinction between two types of gaslighting, verbal and behavioral.

You could gaslight someone by talking to them, by prevailing upon them and training them, brainwashing them. Verbally, language is a powerful weapon. You can weaponize language.

But another possibility is to behave in ways which convey the wrong information about reality. This could also alter the mind of your interlocutors or people around you. You could gaslight by behavior. You could signal gaslighting.

And so today I'm going to discuss a few variants of behavioral gaslighting and I would put them under the rubric, under the headline gaslighting by proxy, when you use other people, third parties, to gaslight someone.

I'll focus on three examples. Flying monkeys, triangulation, and the Karpman Drama Triangle.

So let's put things in order.

You could gaslight someone verbally. You could gaslight someone verbally. You could gaslight someone by behaving in ways which mislead people into believing the wrong things about reality. And you could gaslight someone by working with other people, with third parties, to distort reality and to make the victim doubt her judgment and perception of the world.

This is gaslighting by proxy.

Start with flying monkeys.

Flying monkeys usually collaborate with an abuser in order to convey wrong informationflying monkeys.

Flying monkeys usually collaborate with an abuser in order to convey wrong information, misinformation, fake news if you wish.

The main role of flying monkeys is to impose upon the victim an alternative view of what has happened. A reinterpretation or a revisionism of the history of the relationship.

To somehow make her doubt her memory and any kind of interpretation of the memory.

So that at the end, by the time the flying monkeys are done, the victim becomes highly dependent on other people for her reality testing.

So she is likely to ask, is this real? Am I just imagining this? Am I making this up? Am I crazy?

Flying monkeys are very powerful tools because sometimes the connection between the flying monkeys and the abuser is not known.

They are the long arms of the abuser. They are secret agents.

And because they pose, flying monkeys pose as objective, as neutral, their power of persuasion is much higher, much stronger than the abusers.

The flying monkeys are a very important weapon in the arsenal of the abuser.

And what they do is essentially gaslighting by proxy.

Triangulation is also a case of gaslighting by proxy.

The triangulator is not really interested in the target of triangulation.

In other words, let's put it this way. Triangulation involves introducing a third party into a relationship in order to elicit an emotional reaction from your partner.

So in order to get a rise out of your partner, to provoke some feelings and some reactivity or reactors, and you do this by introducing a third party, flirting with someone, sleeping with someone, collaborating with someone, and so on so forth in order to provoke a reaction.

This is of course a form of gaslighting because usually the third party that is introduced into the dyad, into the couple, is pretty meaningless.

The person engaged in triangulation doesn't really care about the third party.

A woman who flirts with another man ostentatiously so as to provoke her partner doesn't really care about that other man she's flirting with. She cares about her partner she cares about the emotional reaction of the partner she wants to get a rise out of the partner.

A man who visibly and conspicuously teams up with another person in order to provoke his business partner doesn't really care about that new other person.

The idea is to mold and shape the behavior of his partner, channel it in a way that is helpful and conducive and beneficial to the triangulator.

The triangulation falsifies the perception of reality as it provides false information.

The person who is triangulating is conveying misinformation and disinformation.

The person who is triangulating is saying, this new guy or this new girl or this new partner mean a lot to me. I am even considering or contemplating abandoning you.

But this is not true because that new partner, that new girl, that new boy, that new person, they mean nothing. They're just tools, they're just instruments in the triangulation process.

So the information conveyed about them, the information communicated about them, is wrong.

And that is of course the essence of gaslighting: wrong information that reshapes the perception of reality and renders it misperception, attribution that is erroneous, attributing motives, attributing beliefs, attributing actions, attributing traits in an erroneous way.

In this sense, projection is a form of gaslighting, albeit unconscious.

And finally, the Karpman Drama Triangle is also a form of gaslighting.

In the Karpman drama triangle, there's an abuser, a victim, and a rescuer, or a savior.

The victim switches or shifts from the abuser to the rescuer or savior.

But as Karpman has noted in his work on the drama triangle, I have a video dedicated to it.

These roles are not fixed.

The victim often becomes an abuser. The abuser often becomes a victim and the rescuer and savior could become either or exit the triangle, the equation.

So it's clear that the drama triangle is manipulative. Its main aim is to communicate, but it communicates not information, it communicates disinformation.

The role of the Savior and the rescuer is essentially a form of triangulation. The rescuer and savior is introduced into the triangle as a form of triangulation.

The idea is to triangulate with the Savior and the rescuer in order to modify the behavior of the abuser.

But to do so, the abuser needs to be fed the wrong information about the relationship between the victim and the savior or the rescuer.

And because there's a lot of wrong information communicated, channeled and conveyed within the drama triangle, the drama triangle is an encapsulation of a private case of gaslighting. It's gaslighting, simply.

These are three examples of gaslighting by proxy.

To summarize, gaslighting by proxy is in a situation where third parties are used in order to gaslight someone.

They could be flying monkeys, they could be triangulators or people to triangulate with and they could be rescuers and saviors and fixers and healers especially self-proclaimed ones. All these cases are gaslighting by proxy.

Have fun.

Drama, crazy making, chaos. Why? What for? What are the psychodynamic reasons behind such behavior or misbehavior? And what are the goals, if any?

Why do people with borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, even anti-social personality disorder, aka psychopaths on the extreme end of the spectrum, why do people with other personality disorders, histrionic, paranoid, with mood disorders such as bipolar disorder, with a variety of other mental illnesses, why do they engage in dramatic, erratic behavior?

This is such a defining feature that the cluster B personality disorders are also called erratic dramatic personality disorder, erratic dramatic cluster.

So drama is not a minor thing, it's not a fringe event or occurrence, it's not atypical.

Drama is at the very core of these mental health disturbances.

And in this video, we're going to explore the whys, the hows, the wheres, the whens, the whews, of dramatic crazy making.

My name is Sam Vaknin and I am a former visiting professor of psychology and the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. And onward to this dramatic crazy making video. You have my word.

First of all, as you've already understood, well, some of you at least, crazy making, drama or dramatic behavior, chaos, dysregulation, acting out, even defiance or reactance, recklessness, all these are indications of mental illness.

Mental illness can be severe. Personality disorders are considered severe mental illnesses. They could be mid-range, for example mood disorders or anxiety disorders, or can be really extreme. For example, psychotic disorders.

In all these disorders, there's an element of drama, element of theater play, element of production.

The protagonist, in this case, the mentally ill patient or the mentally ill client, is the thespian, is acting or play actor. In this case the mentally ill patient or the mentally ill client is thespian, is acting or play acting, it's like a character in a movie and the whole thing feels very unreal.

The escalation is immediate, disproportionate, and you want to grab these people by the lapels, whatever they're wearing, and just shake them and say, wake up. What are you doing? Are you nuts? Why are you escalating? Why are you making this much, much worse? Where is the need? What's the need? Why do you need to be so dramatic? Why do you need to introduce an element of insanity, unpredictability, disproportionality, indeterminacy, fear into the whole situation? Aren't there other ways to tackle stress, catastrophizing, panic, anxiety, depression, adversity, conflict? Does it all have to go to hell in a handbasket?

And there's no way to get to these people.

Because when they are in the throes of enacting their personal dramas, they're no longer with us. They're somewhere floating, detached.

Indeed, many, many of these clients and patients, when they are being erratic or dramatic, unpredictable, or arbitrary, or capricious, or dangerous, or psychopathic, they are also at the same time dissociative.

They experience amnesia or partial amnesia. They simply forget what they had done. They go through phases of de-realization. It's as if reality is not real. It's a kind of fantastic movie-like, cinematic, theatrical space. And whatever they are doing to you and to themselves has no consequences because it's just a script. it's just a piece of fiction.

Depersonalization, which is another dissociative mechanism, they don't feel inside their bodies sometimes.

So in many dramatic and erratic and crazy making moments, the person who is on a rampage, the person who is out of control, is also dissociative. He is not there. He's not inside his body. Depersonalization. He is not in reality or he perceives misperceives reality as unreal. He loses reality testing and that's de-realization. Or there is a memory gap or a memory lapse for the entire period.

Dissociation is actually in this sense, amnesiac dissociation, depersonalization and derealization, is a criterion in some of these mental health disorders, most notably in borderline personality disorder.

So, crazy making, drama, theater plays, rendering your life a movie. This involves dissociation. This involves slicing yourself off your own life. Standing aside as an observer, sometimes a disinterested observer, and just letting the energy out, letting it all go.

There are a lot of internal processes that are happening at the same time.

For example, hyper introspection, immersion in one's self, so that environmental awareness is at a zero or at a limit, actually acting from within as if there's no outside, which is essentially a psychotic feature.

This happens to narcissists in mortification. It happens to borderlines when they're abandoned or rejected, especially cruelly and abruptly. This happens to psychopath when they see red, the famous Irish red mist, you know.

So there's a lot of withdrawal, a lot of avoidance of reality, environment, other people, including intimate partners and significant others, and kind of shutting the gates withdrawing the bridge being beyond positioning oneself behind a moat in a fortress under siege.

Drama and crazy making are desperate attempts to fend off invaders and intruders and to redress the perceived asymmetry of power.

By acting crazy, by acting disinhibited, by being evil and cruel, I'm going to regain the power that has been taken away from me. I'm going to have the upper hand, and therefore I'm going to be safe.

It's an anxiety reaction, actually.

Now, each of the mental illnesses has a different combination of etiology or aetiopathology and behavior.

So the crazy making or the dramatic erratic behaviors in narcissism are not the same as they are in borderline or in psychopathy or in histrionic personality disorder or in bipolar disorder or in psychotic disorder or in paranoid disorder, the personality disorder.

So we need to delve deeper to decipher and deconstruct the acts of crazy making and drama and the choice of drama.

Because drama is a choice. Ultimately these are choices.

I mean, if you talk to borderlines or even narcissists and they will tell you, you know, I can't control it, I can't help it. That's who I am.

That's of course nonsense. These are choices. They are learned choices. They are acquired choices. They are survival strategies and coping techniques developed over decades starting in early childhood.

But still, ultimately, their choices. We know that they are choices, because as the environment changes, these behaviors sometimes vanish.

For example, in prison or in the army. We also know that following therapy, for example, dialectical behavior therapy. Many of these behaviors abate or disappear altogether.

So they are choices, absolutely. There is willful control, this voluntary control of these actions and inactions, of these escalatory moves and defiant conflictive postures. They're all utterly under control.

Let's start with narcissists and paranoids.

Now before we proceed, you know my position. I think paranoids are actually narcissists. The paranoid says, I'm at the center of attention. It's a malign attention, malevolent, but I'm still the center of attention. And I'm important enough to be pursued by the CIA or aliens or whatever.

So the paranoid positions himself as the pivot around which events and other people rotate, he's like an axis. And so there is a centrality, a self-imputed centrality of the paranoia, which is indistinguishable from the self-imputed importance of the narcissists. Both paranoia and narcissism are forms of grandiosity.

Now in extreme cases, of course, paranoia is a hallmark of schizophrenia and so it has psychotically tinged. But still this is grandiose psychosis.

So narcissists and paranoids as far as I'm concerned are in the same group, paranoid personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.

Now, why do these people engage in drama and in crazy making?

Because they're prone to fantasy. And what is a fantasy, if not a form of drama? A fantasy is a theater play.

Narcissism and paranoid ideation are fantasy defenses gone awry.

So the narcissist always inhabits a never-ending tale or land of drama. His entire inner world is dramatic, populated by internal objects and introjects which represent other people.

And the same goes for the for the paranoid. There the game is a foot, there's some conspiracy unfolding, there's referential ideation, ideas of reference. Other people are busy, occupied in planning the demise or the end of the paranoid.

And so everything and everyone revolves or revolve around the paranoid and the narcissists. And this swirl, this cloud is the drama.

The narcissists and the paranoid feel dead. They feel absolutely vacated, empty, when their lives are routine and drab and predictable and safe and stable. They hate these things.

Psychopaths hate the very same things for another reason because they have a very low threshold of boredom. They're bored easily.

But narcissists and paranoids, they have a cognitive distortion, it's known as grandiosity, but how can you trust that you are perfect and brilliant and amazing and unprecedented and unique and a genius and super important, cosmically important? How can you trust any of this if there's no drama around you if other people don't affirm this and confirm it with their behavior or misbehavior?

So grandiosity and paranoia are the twin engines of dramatic erratic behavior in narcissism and paranoid personality disorder.

With the borderlines, the situation is not the same. I mean, the reasons are not the same.

The borderline engages in dramatic behavior because she feels vulnerable. She feels that she's about to be hurt, that she's about to experience pain.

The borderline is dysregulated. She is ill-equipped to regulate her internal environment.

Emotions overwhelm her. Her moods are labile. She is like an ocean in storm. She cannot, she is skinless. It's as if she doesn't have a skin and everything immediately impinges on her inner core, if shethe core she believes that she has, actually she doesn't have.

But so she constantly experiences pain, being overwhelmed, being drowning, and so she's vulnerable.

As a defense against this vulnerability, most borderlines are aggressive. The aggression can be directed inwards and then the borderline becomes self-trashing, so destructive, self-harming, self-defeating. Or the aggression can be directed outwards, which is the more common with borderlines. And then the borderline can even become violent or dangerous, especially when she switches to the secondary psychopathic state, decompensates, loses her defenses, and acts out.

So in the case of borderlines, the drama and the crazy making are a form of signaling. Whereas with many victimhood oriented people, there's virtue signaling, the borderline signals aggression. The borderline's crazy making and drama is a message. I am crazy. Don't F with me. I am unpredictable. Don't scorn me. I am dangerous. Don't abandon me. I'm dramatic. Don't drag me down.

So vulnerability plus aggression. Aggression, compensatory aggression, aggressioncompensation, this is the background to the borderline's dramatic erotic behaviors.

What about psychopaths?

Psychopaths are exactly the opposite of borderlines, whereas the borderline feels constantly exposed, constantly unprotected, unsafe, open to assault, vulnerable, fragile, broken, damaged, brittle, psychopath feels exactly the opposite. The psychopath feels that he is invulnerable, impermeable, invincible, untouchable, king of the world, king of all worlds, emperor or whatever he sees. This invulnerability is actually an engine of drama and crazy making because the psychopath feels disinhibited.

He believes that he is above the law. He is a rule unto himself. He makes the rules as it goes along.

And yet they can be contradictory, of course, because borderlines suffer from identity disturbance. Psychopaths do not adhere, do not conform, do not sign up to any set of values or beliefs or commitments. They are human beings or wannabe, imitation human beings, reconstructed on the fly time and again.

So you never come across the same psychopath twice. It's like a river.

And so this invulnerability leads to a behavior which doesn't obey or conform to social mores, cultural edicts, sexual scripts.

Psychopath feels he can do anything he wants. And so this leads to coercion and reactance. Psychopath is defiant. He's contumacious. He rejects authority. And he imposes on other people, his will and his will is the ultimate and only arbiter that everyone has to succumb and it's subjugation or nothing.

And so the psychopath's drama and crazy making are manipulative, they are Machiavellian. They are ways to render people submissive, to tame them, to brainwash them, to coerce them into behaving ways which please the psychopath or cater to his goal orientation, fulfill his goals.

Histrionics are also dramatic, people with histrionic personality disorder. Also, of course, dramatic drama is the core feature of histrionics. They're crazy making but again for a completely different set of reasons they crave attention, they would do anything to gain attention and that includes hyper sexualize and objectify themselves and the attention is embedded in a fantasy.

And that is why the histrionic person misjudges reality. For example, the histrionic person misjudges the intensity of intimacy.

So a histrionic would claim to be in love with someone or about to marry someone when that alleged intimate partner is not even aware of this.

So histrionics escalate generally everything. They escalate their emotionality ostentatiously and conspicuously. They escalate their sexual behavior. They dress provocatively and skimpy. They misjudge the depth and intensity of relationships, especially intimate relationships. Everything is blown out of proportion. Everything is bigger than life.

To be histrionic is to be dramatic. And the drama in this case and crazy making have a single role in mind, and that is to obtain and to secure attention.

Now, the narcissist is focused on narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply is intended to support the self-inflated, grandiose view of the narcissist.

The histrionic is hell-bent on obtaining any kind of attention, just to be noticed. It's as if when she is not noticed, she doesn't exist. So it's a need to be seen writ large and gone awry and embedded in a fantasy of, I am being seen all the time, even when this is not happening.

And these are the root causes of the dramatic behavior of the histrionic.

In bipolar disorders, we have the manic phase.

The manic phase involves losing touch with reality and again entering a fantastic space which is very much theatrical and cinematic where everything is possible and that's why bipolar is in the manic phase engage in harebrained crazy schemes, get rich quick schemes, or amazing inventions which will change the world, or, you know, adventures, circling the globe in 80 hours, or, you know, crazy things.

So the craziness of the borderline, the insane dramatic element in the bipolar, I'm sorry, the insane dramatic element has to do with a misapprehension of limitations, shortcomings, one's own weak points and flaws and frailties.

And so at that point, reality testing is impaired beyond measure.

The bipolar perceives himself or herself as divine in the sense that she's omnipotent or omniscient.

And there is a convergence here between the manic phase of bipolar and narcissism.

And I encourage you to watch the two or three videos I made about this misdiagnosis when manic bipolar are misdiagnosed, or vice versa.

At any rate, the crazy making in the drama in bipolar are intended to support the plans, the unrealistic, grandiose plans of the bipolar.

Not the grandiosity itself because the bipolar is utterly convinced, he doesn't need any proof, bipolar do not seek narcissistic supply, unlike narcissists.

The narcissist is vulnerable, is fragile. The narcissist doesn't fully trust his own grandiosity.

So the narcissist needs constant reassurance that it is the greatest of them all the bipolar doesn't the bipolar believes himself to be godlike anyhow he doesn't need anyone to tell him that if people are stupid enough to not notice that it's their problem but he does need reassurance and succor when it comes to his super insane unrealistic crazy making grandiose plans and that's where the drama comes in.

And finally in psychotic disorders the drama and the crazy making are the direct outcome of the inability to tell external reality from internal reality, something known as hyper-reflexivity.

The psychotic confuses his internal space with the world out there. And because of this confusion, many processes which are internalized in healthy people and even in not so healthy people, many internal processes in the psychotic person are externalized.

And because internal processes, mental processes, by definition, involve all kinds of defense mechanisms, ups and downs, repression, there is forbidden material, trauma, and so on so forth.

The inner world is very chaotic. It's not structured. It's chaotic. It's volcanic. It's an earthquake, constant earthquake, with prequakes and post-tremmas. That's the inner world.

When this inner world is externalized and misperceived as reality, of course, behaviors become very dramatic, very erratic, very unpredictable, very crazy making and you can see it for example in the movie Joker which is a masterpiece for all ages.

This was a brief overview of dramatic behaviors and crazy making.

If you're in a relationship with any of these people, with the narcissist, with a borderline, with a psychopath, with a histrionic, with a bipolar, with someone who has a psychotic disorder, you are in for a roller coaster of your life. It could be even dangerous or risky.

Because of their inability to tell reality apart from theater, they can end up shooting you in one of the scenes with a prop, so to speak, metaphorically speaking. You could become a victim of their own need to reenact their internal environment and then reenact the world to conform to it you could be collateral damage here you have been warned.

Apocalyptic. Have you ever heard this word before? I haven't. I woke up with it this morning. It's a new word, to the best of my knowledge. And it is the way that narcissists introduce drama and crises and catastrophes into their otherwise mundane and dreary and intolerably stable lives.

What is a difference between the narcissist's apocalyptic and the borderline's drama? Do they fulfill different psychological roles?

Stay with me for the answer.

And who is me?

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the Faculty of SIAS-CIAPS, Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies.

Phew! This over with, we can make some progress.

Now, every self-styled expert and his dog and his mother-in-law would tell you that borderline personality disorder is just another name for complex post-traumatic stress disorder, CPTSD.

And as usual, I've been the first. In 1996. I've written an article introducing Judith Herman's concept of CPTSD into domestic violence and abusive relationships.

Since then, of course, the whole thing has been corrupted and distorted.

Borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, are not the same as complex trauma. They are not the same as CPTSD.

Borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder are different ways of reacting to CPTSD.

Borderline personality disorder is not the same as complex trauma. It is a specific type of a multi-layered pattern of reaction to CPTSD. It is partly genetically and partly neurobiologically determined.

And the same goes for pathological narcissism.

Pathological narcissism, it is a form of idiosyncratic reactive pattern to early childhood, CPTSD, trauma suffered in early childhood.

These are therefore reactions.

However, as I just said, there are different forms of reaction.

In narcissism, the emphasis is on cognition, cognitive overcompensation. That is because the narcissists is unable to access positive emotions. He buried them deep, together with shame and guilt.

The borderline, on the very contrary, emphasizes emotions, so she has cognitive under-representation, emotional overcompensation, also known as emotional dysregulation.

The borderline's emotions overwhelm her, drown her, disregulate her, make her loose control.

So there is a difference between the styles, the cognitive styles and the emotional styles of narcissists and borderlines.

One is cognitive and one is emotional or hyper-emotional.

But both of them do catastrophizing and both of them do apocalyptic.

Both of them engage in exaggerating the outcomes and the impacts of events to the point of catastrophe, anticipating disaster, preparing oneself for the worst possible scenario and so and so forth.

This is known as catastrophizing. It is a cognitive distortion. It is the assumption that if anything can go wrong, it will and egregiously so, in a way that is both compounded, irreversible, and all-encompassing, ubiquitous and all-pervasive.

And this is catastrophizing.

Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion and therefore we should have expected to find little of it in borderline personality disorder because borderline personality disorder is about emotions, not about cognition.

Accordingly, borderlines should not catastrophize.

Similarly, apocalyptic.

Apocalyptic is the deliberate introduction of crisis, disasters, catastrophes, drama into one's life for a variety of reasons which we'll deal with in a minute.

That is usually a form of emotional thinking, emotional response.

We would have expected the borderline to engage in apocalyptic.

And yet, narcissists do as well.

Why is that?

Because they are mediating vectors, they are transmission mechanisms between pathological narcissism and salient features of borderline, such as emotional dysregulation.

That's a convoluted way of saying that when narcissists are exposed to stress, anxiety, and trauma, they become borderlines.

And when borderlines are exposed to stress and trauma and anxiety, they become a lot narcissistic.

They transition, they change roles when they are subjected to the exigencies and vagaries of reality.

When the borderline anticipates abandonment or faces rejection, she becomes a bit psychopathic, secondary psychopath.

Coupled with her grandiosity, this gives rise to essentially pathological narcissism.

When the narcissist is exposed to deficient narcissistic supply, or to mortification, public humiliation, or to a severe narcissistic injury, the narcissist loses control, loses it, becomes emotionally dysregulated and is indistinguishable from the borderline.

That is why both the borderline and the narcissist engage in catastrophizing and in apocalyptic.

The second vector of transmission is paranoia.

So the first vector is stress, anxiety, trauma.

The second vector is paranoia.

Paranoid ideation includes both catastrophizing and apocalyptic. Paranoid ideation is grandiose. The paranoid is the center of the world. He is the pivot around which other people revolve with their malevolent intentions and conspiracies.

The paranoid is at the center of attention. He is the life of the party, so to speak.

So paranoia or paranoid ideation is a form of narcissism.

Definitely, as far as grandiosity goes, it's a cognitive distortion and the paranoid catastrophizes.

The CIA is going to assassinate me. Donald Trump is going to appoint me vice president. You know, horrible things are going to happen.

So this is a form of catastrophizing and it's very common in paranoia. The paranoid, having been exposed to his own delusional catastrophizing, then reacts with apocalyptic.

Paranoid generates drama, crisis, introduces real-life disasters into his otherwise peaceful and mundane life, pedestrian life.

So these are the two vectors that cause flux and transmission between narcissistic pathologies of the self and borderline personality organization.

Now what are the roles? Why the Apocalypse? What are the roles of apocalyptic?

Why introduce drama and crisis into your life if you can avoid them, if they're avoidable?

Who wants to be subjected to danger, to risk, to crisis, to drama, to the slings and arrows of other people, to malevolent intentions, to conspiracies. Who wants this? Who seeks this?

We're not talking about insane people. We're not talking about psychotic people. We are sometimes talking about very rational people.

Why would they do this?

For several reasons.

First of all, drama and crisis are controlled and manipulation tools. They're Machiavellian.

By creating drama and crisis, the narcissist enhances his or her ability to control the environment because she's or he's the source of the drama and the crisis. He or she has privileged information about the unfolding of the drama and the crisis. So the secret script, the covert plan.

So drama and crisis are about control and about manipulating others.

Drama and crisis also serve as an organizing and explanatory principle. Two principles. Organizing principle and explanatory principle.

The drama or the crisis structure the narcissists' or the borderline's life. They give them shape and direction and purpose.

They need to survive the crisis. They need to re-channel your energy.

All this organizes your life, affords your life with some kind of structure, channels your life, if you wish.

The drama and the crisis also serve to imbue your life with meaning, to make sense of your life.

If you are the subject of a conspiracy, for example, that would explain many things.

If you are in the throes of a divorce from a malicious, malevolent, scheming and conspiring partner that would go a long way towards explaining your state of mind, your state of finances and so on so on.

So drama and crisis serve to explain life, to structure light, to make sense of life.

And of course there's the element, the antisocial element, the psychopathic element, of thrill-seeking and risk-taking, which are embedded and inseparable part, an integral part of drama and crisis.

Drama and crisis are forms of defiance and contumaciousness, hatred of authority.

Drama and crisis lead the narcissist or the borderline to a territory which is essentially psychopathic, adventurous, gratifying.

And so it serves to uphold the borderlines and the narcissists' view of themselves as unique, special, amazing, fascinating, unprecedentedit serves to uphold the borderlines and the narcissists' view of themselves as unique, special, amazing, fascinating, unprecedented, somewhat unpredictable.

Drama and crisis therefore buttress, uphold grandiosity. They also invert the locus of control from external to internal.

The narcissists and the borderline have an external locus of control.

The borderline goes to the extreme of handing over the regulation of her state of mind, her moods and her emotions to an intimate partner or special friend. She is totally out of control in every sense of the word. Someone else controls the borderline.

Similarly, the narcissist believes himself to be the butt and the victim of conspiracies, maligning influences, envious people, other narcissists, and so on so forth.

Victimhood is an external locus of control. You're not in charge of your life. Someone else determines it for you.

Similarly, external regulation in borderline is a form of external locus of control.

But when the borderline and the narcissists apocalyptic, when they initiate apocalypse, when they initiate crisis and drama and disasters, when they risk everything, when they go on adventures, when they disregulate themselves and others, when they do all this, they are in control. They are in charge. They're calling the shots. They're running the script. They're the directors of the film of their own life.

So this is a form, drama and crisis, a form of regaining control over your life, devolving an internal locus of control.

This is very common in narcissistic mortification where the narcissist would say I made it happen. It's all because of me. I pushed them to behave this way.

That's a way of subverting reality, reframing it to reestablish an internal locus of control.

The narcissists often find themselves, and the borderline, often find themselves trapped in a life which is unwanted, a life which is alien to them, a life that puts them down, depresses them, causes them anxiety, a hateful life. A life which they resent and reject and would rather not live.

But how to transition out of such a life? How to give up on one phase of life and move on to another? How to affect a life transition, what Gail Sheehy called passages? How do you dump your old life abscond with everything you are and everything you have and start anew, reinvent yourself?

The only way narcissists and borderlines know how to accomplish this is through what Schumpeter called creative destruction.

They destroy everything in an orgy of crisis and drama and insanity and crazy making and acting out and defiance and contumaciousness and criminality.

They destroy everything, but they regard this as creative, a creative effort, an act of creation, because they are at the same time inventing a new life for themselves, which is more palatable, accords more with their grandiose self-perception, or somehow elevates them in their own eyes, or at least a new life that has much more potential than the old one.

The pedestrian, the mundane, the routine, the dreary, the stable, the predictable, they are shackles. The narcissists and the borderline feel imprisoned in this kind of life.

Commitment, investment, hard work, no way. Study, no way.

This is for the hoi polloi. This is for the masses.

The narcissists and the borderline are such unique entities that they should cruise through life entitled to its benefits without any commensurate effort or accomplishments.

And in order to do this, in order to embark upon this trajectory of constant internally generated transformation, they need to destroy.

So they go through phases of construction and destruction, construction and destruction, and there's never reconstruction.

They never visit the same place twice. It's like a river. You can never step into the same river twice. Thank you, Heraclitus.

So, creative destruction.

The same happens on a mega scale, in institutions, nations, geopolitics, the same process of apocalyptic.

Our civilization has become both borderline and narcissistic. Our civilization is a personality disorder.

For many reasons which I've gone into in many other videos which I encourage you to watch. But this is more or less a well-established fact.

Younger generations are five times more narcissistic than previous ones. This is the situation nowadays.

Social media, the technology, technology caters to grandiosity, to atomization, to solipsism, to rejection of the other, and so on so forth. It's a narcissistic ambience or environment.

And the masses, the narcissistic masses, feel that they are being held hostage and enslaved by rapacious, venous, and mendacious, no less narcissistic, possibly psychopathic, elites. Elite is the new curse word. Narcissi and elite.

The masses regard these elites and the values of these elites as avowed enemies.

The enemy is not another country or even another ethnicity. The enemy, the enemies of the elites, the West, governments, academia, migrants, mainstream media, science, the finances industry, and of course, inevitably, and always the Jews. These are the enemies.

And the enemies of your enemies are your friends. So the enemies of the elites are the friends of the masses.

Terrorists, anti-Semites, conspiracy theories, Russia, Putin, China, populist authoritarian, the old right. These are all the friends of the masses only because the only qualification to be friends of the masses is their hatred or rejection of the elites.

The masses abuse democracy and empowering technologies in order to destroy the established order and this is the apocalyptic phase of narcissism.

This is Jose Ortega y Gasset, famous book, Revolt of the Masses, 1933, if I recall correctly.

And this revolt of the masses, which is essentially narcissistic apocalyptic, always results in mob rule, occlocracy, and in atrocities. And we are very nearly there.

Today is the Vaknin trifecta, three strikes and you're out. So I'm out.

Apropos trifecta and three strikes. Are you caught in a drama triangle? Vaknin, you ask. What is a drama triangle? Well, that's what I'm here for. Your favorite professor of psychology and the author of Malignant Self-Love: NarcissismRevisited and Revisited and Revisited.

The Karpman Drama Triangle is a particular case of triangles and triangulation in general, which we're going to discuss a bit later.

The drama triangle is actually a social model and it's a social model of any human interaction. It maps a type of destructive interaction that occurs among people in conflict.

The conflict could be in an interpersonal relationship, could be in business, could be among friends, even technically among nations.

So there are three actors in the drama, which is why triangle.

The first class of actors are the oppressors or the persecutors.

The second class are victims.

The third class are rescuers or saviors.

And the reason it's called a drama triangle is that Stephen Karpman, who came up with the eponymous Karpman triangle, wasn't actually an actor. And he didn't want to call it a conflict triangle because it was, you know, not new wave enough.

So he called it a drama triangle because he was an actor.

And the thing is that in his model, people are acting. It's very important to understand.

The victim in his model is not an actual victim. It's someone who is feeling like a victim. And above all, acting as a victim.

Karpman clearly believed that people act. They are given roles and these roles are known in family system theory as emergent roles.

They are given roles, they are allocated roles by intimate partners, they are located roles by society, by friends, by family.

And then they either accept these roles or they reject these roles. And once they accept these roles, they act the roles.

His first article, Stephen Karpman's article, was titled Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis.

And he analyzed, believe it or not, read Little Red Riding Hood as a model of conflict, reminiscent very much of Bruno Bettelheim, who was both a call artist and a brilliant lay psychologist.

Karpman at the time was just a graduate of Duke University, and he studied under Eric Berne.

Eric Berne wrote the seminal book, Games People Play, which I cannot emphasize enough that you should read. And he is the father of transactional analysis, which is an extremely powerful form of psychotherapy.

And so they kind of meshed together and Berne took the concept of drama triangle and introduced it into structural analysis and transactional analysis.

What is this drama triangle? It's the connection between personal responsibility. Remember my previous lecture, where I kept calling you to accept personal responsibility for what's happening to you.

So the triangle connects personal responsibility and power in situations of conflict. And the triangle implies that people are playing roles.

And now these roles are shifting. They could shift suddenly from victim to abuser. They could shift from abuser to rescuer.

But usually these shifts are destructive. So we more commonly we discuss destructive triangles, although in principle there could definitely be constructive triangles.

And so again I remind you there are three roles in the triangle. There are two up positions, persecutor and rescuer. There's one down position. The down position is victim.

And of course if you organize two ups and one down, you get a triangle, an inverted triangle.

What is the victim? The victim is not an actual victim, as I said, someone is feeling and acting like a victim.

And the position of the victim in the triangle is, poor me. I'm victimized. I'm oppressed. I'm denied my needs. I'm helpless. I'm powerless. I'm ashamed. I'm unable to make decisions. I'm unable to solve problems. I'm unable to progress with my life. I don't take pleasure in life. I'm anhedonic. I don't achieve insight. In short, I'm dysphoric.

And if the victim is not persecuted, that's bad, because the victim has a role and he is used to being a victim.

So what does the victim do? The victim goes and looks for a persecutor.

And this process is called projective identification. It's when the victim tries to convert people, for example an intimate partner, to act as an abuser or to act as a persecutor in order to preserve the functioning of the triangle within a comfort zone.

And similarly, the victim seeks a rescuer.

So victims always seek two functions. Persecutor and rescuer, a savior, who will save the day, but at the same time perpetuate the victim's negative feelings about himself or herself and the environment and other people.

Because if you need saving, if you need to be saved, you're in really, really problematic place.

The rescuers line is, let me help you. I'm here to help you.

It's an enabler. A rescuer actually feel guilty if they don't go to the rescue.

But rescuing is a negative function, not a positive one, because it keeps the victim dependent. It doesn't allow the victim permission to experiment, to fail, to experience consequences of choices and decisions, to go through pain and hurt and process them.

All the coaches and self-tied experts online, they are rescuers. They enable your victim status, your victim mentality and your victim stance. And that's exceedingly bad for you as far as your mental health.

And the rewards to the rescuer are enormous. The rewards are enormous.

The focus, first of all, shifts from the rescuer to someone else.

So it's like by taking over someone else's life, by micromanaging someone else's decisions, choices, partners, they kind of fend off the need to think about their own lives, to focus on their own problems and responsibilities and chores and functions and roles.

It's a defense, a rescuer engages in defensive tactics. He cannot or she cannot actually cope with her own life, so she's a busy body. She takes over other people's lives.

And the rescuers in studies have been shown to have high anxiety and multiple mental health issues.

You're warned. When you find a rescuer online who poses as an expert or a coach or whatever, that's someone with serious mental health problems and extreme anxiety. And you are the instrument for reducing this anxiety. You are their new addiction. You are their source of supply.

The rescue role is pivotal because the actual primary interest of the rescuer is avoidance of their own problems. It is disguised as altruism, empathy, concern for victims' needs, but it's none of the above.

And finally there's a role of the persecutor the villain, it's a morality play remember, it's a drama because Karpman was an actor.

So the persecutor or the villain, his line is it's all your fault, alloplastic defenses. It's not. I did nothing wrong. I'm either misunderstood or I'm maligned. I'm conspired against. That's the paranoid posture, opposition.

The prosecutor is controlling. He is blaming, he's critical, oppressive, angry, authoritarian, rigid and superior.

In short, a typical persecutor would have very pronounced narcissistic strains.

And so the drama triangle arises when someone takes on the role of a persecutor, another person takes on the role of a victim, and a third person takes on the role of a savior.

And there the drama unfolds. It's a theater play. It's a movie with three participants. Three act drama, not monodrama.

And the person, each of these three, wants to enlist others. So collaboration emerges organically.

The persecutor also is searching for a victim and a rescuer. The rescuer is searching for a victim and a persecutor.

Only when they are, all three of them are within the triangle they feel whole. They feel whole because they identify with their roles, they acquire identity through the functioning of the triangle.

Studies have shown that the rescuer is encouraged by both the victim and the persecutor to enter the situation.

It's not true that only the victim enlists the savior. The persecutor has a hand in it too. He sometimes pushes the victim towards the third party, and that third party opposes or pretends to be the savior.

And so these players, these three players, they take roles of their own and these roles are not static.

And so you could have multiple scenarios. The victim suddenly can turn on the rescuer and cast him as a bad guy.

And the rescuer then will react by becoming a persecutor, and then the persecutor will defend the victim, protect the victim and become a savior.

So the roles are in flux all the time.

And the reason the whole situation goes on, the reason the theater play is never ending in effect, is that each participant have unconscious psychological wishes and needs, and the triangle meets, caters to these needs, without having to acknowledge a broader dysfunction, without having to point out the harm and the damage done in the situation as the whole.

And by the way, the damage is not limited to the victim.

The persecutors' mental dysfunctions and mental disorders are aggravated and amplified within the triangle. The saviors mental dysfunctions and disorders are the same. Everyone is worse off for having participated in the destructive triangle.

Each participant is acting upon selfish needs. Each participant is highly entitled and narcissistic or egotistic at least. There's no genuine altruistic response here. There's no real empathy. It's all fake, fake belief, make belief. It's all not real. It's unreal. It's a renouncing reality.

So as Karpman wrote, any character might ordinarily come on like a plaintive victim.

It is now clear that the one can switch into the role of persecutor, providing it is accidental, and the one apologizes for it.

So a victim can actually become an abuser, we call it today overlay. A victim can suddenly adopt the role of a narcissist or a psychopath, and we know that victims of complex trauma, CPTSD, are indistinguishable from borderline and many of them display behaviors which are actually the behaviors of secondary psychopaths, psychopaths with empathy and emotion.

So victims can and do become abusers within the triangle, multiply, but as opposed to the persecutor, the victim would say this was an accident, or I was just reacting. That's reactive abuse. I had the right to react this way.

The irony is that the persecutor perceives himself to be the victim in the triangle. And so he also is likely to use the very same arguments.

The motivations of the rescuer are the least obvious.

We know victim, we know persecuted. These are classic roles.

What's the savior doing there? Why is he there?

He has covert motives. He has mixed motives.

His benefits are what we call egoic benefits.

He, being the one who rescues, caters to his grandiosity, provides him with narcissistic supply.

He has a surface motive. And the surface motive is that he is trying to resolve the problem. He is making great efforts to help everybody, especially the victim.

But this is facade. This is a veneer. It's fake. It's faint.

Because the real reason rescuers rescue and saviors save and coaches and experts help you quote unquote is actually to not save you, to not rescue you, to not succeed.

They need you to perpetuate your victimhood status because this caters to their grandiosity and they need this. They get a self-esteem boost to be a rescuer.

To be in a rescue status that's highly dignified, that's respected, that's socially commendable.

They derive pride, satisfaction, narcissistic supply, enjoyment. They love that people depend on them and trust them.

So they act in a way that looks as though they are empathic and try and really to help, but at a deeper level, they sabotage you, they undermine your healing, they prevent you from recovery. They don't let you grow up.

Growing up is only, you can grow up only via crisis and friction with reality and pain. Pain is the engine of growth.

They don't let you experience this.

They shift the blame and the guilt and everything onto the abuser and absolve you, like the old Catholic Church used to do with indulgences. They absorb you from all your sins, they take away your personal responsibility, they teach you learned helplessness, which is a topic we're going to discuss a bit later, because they want to continue to have their payoff.

And so the relationship between the victim and the rescuer is actually what today we call codependency. The rescuer keeps the victim dependent by encouraging her victimhood.

The victim gets their needs met as well by having the rescuer take care of them.

The victim infantilizes, the victim regresses to a childhood face. She becomes a child. Totally helpless.

And it is the savior or the rescuer who is there in the parental role.

Remember the shared fantasy? Rescuers and victims create a shared fantasy. Very much a replica of the shared fantasy with the original abuser.

It is therefore a form of narcissistic abuse.

And so people who participate in the triangle have a primary role. Let's call it a role of habit, habitual role.

So they're either victims, usually, rescuers, typically, persecutors, gleefully, when they enter the triangle.

They start with the habitual roles because the habitual roles are roles that they had studied as children in the family of origin. They were parentified so they become rescuers. They were rejected and ignored by a dead mother so they become victims or they become persecutors.

The family of origin conditions the person, teaches the person the emergent role in adulthood and this is the emergent role that the adult brings into the drama triangle.

And participants each have a role, that's very true. They identify with this role and they usually enact this role.

But once you're in the triangle, the triangle has a life of its own. It's like the Bermuda triangle, you vanish and you have a life of your own. And the triangle has a life of his own.

And the triangle rotates you.

And before you know it, you find yourself a persecutor. And before you know it as a persecutor, you find yourself saving the victim from the alleged savior who had become a persecutor.

It's rotation. Each triangle is a payoff for the people playing inside the triangle.

And how to emerge from this triangle?

Because this triangle is a giant sucking sound, you know. How to get rid of this?

Triangle is a good way of describing trauma bonding, for example. How do you get rid of it?

You deprive the actors of the payoff, and we will discuss it a bit later.

You prevent them from getting any payoff.

You don't give narcissistic supply to the rescuer. You don't automatically accept the victimhood stance and victim mentality of the victim. And you punish or you incentivize the persecutor to stop persecuting.

You take the payoff away. You empower, for example, the victim. the persecutor doesn't have power anymore.

So because persecutors are addicted to power, to having power. It's a power play, like in rape.

Now, the Karpman triangle is one of many triangles.

There's a theory of triangulation. It was first published in 1966 by Murray Bowen. And it's part of his family systems theory, which to my mind is the most powerful theory of what's happening inside your head. Most powerful theory of the mind in psychology. And my favorite.

Murray Bowen worked mostly with schizophrenics and I'm not going to details now but schizophrenia gives you a window into the mind that no other mental disorder can provide with the exception perhaps of narcissists and borderlines.

And that's why perhaps Kernberg thought that narcissists, borderlines and psychotics are one and the same, almost.

Anyhow, Bowen came up with the concept of triangulation.

Here is what he said originally.

Triangulation is a process whereby a two-party relationship that is experiencing tension will naturally involve third parties to reduce this tension.

So when people find themselves in conflict, they reach out to someone else.

You have a fight with your wife, she goes to her mother. You had a fight with your wife, your brother bats in. You had a fight with your wife, she goes to her mother. You had a fight with your wife, your brother bats in. You had a fight with your wife. She picks up another man in your face.

So these are all forms of triangulation, introducing a third person to regulate the environment of the dyad, the environment of the couple.

And the resulting triangle actually is very functional and much more comfortable than the original dyad, the original couple, because it can contain much more tension.

Why? Because the tension is shifted.

So even in case of cheating, amazingly, actually cheating, which is classic triangulation, it's introducing a third intimate partner into what should have been an exclusive relationship.

Even there, there are improvements in anxiety, tension, and inter-couple conflict.

That's why many men joke that their cheating wives are much more easy to get along with.

So, triangulation reduces anxiety, tension and increases, enhances the functioning of the original couple, strangely.

Bowen suggested two concepts. One is differentiation and one is triangles.

And he used the word triangle and not triad, because he said the triangles are integral part of relationships, even relationships of two people, couples.

So, if you leave a couple to evolve, most couples oscillate between closeness and distance, approach and avoidance. These are minor oscillations.

If one of the members of the couple is a narcissist, or if he has any mental health issue, especially cluster B personality disorders, the approach avoidance will be extreme.

But approach avoidance is a repetition compulsion feature of most couples. We all feel suffocated at times and withdraw and avoid and we all feel the need for intimacy and love and compassion and being held. And so we approach.

This is an integral part of the dynamics of any couple.

And so this creates imbalances. And most of the time the imbalances can be resolved internally, especially if there is good communication, but sometimes they cannot. And then the only solution is to introduce a third party.

Now the third party could be a family member. Third party could be a couple therapists, marital therapist, but the third party could be a lover. The third party could be someone to flirt with.

Any third party actually brings forward some resolution of the conflict, some resolution of the approach avoidance.

Now, the resolution could be a dissolution of the couple. If the couple is sufficiently dysfunctional, it causes harm to its members. It's better to dissolve it.

And sometimes the trigger, the push necessary to dissolve it is the introduction of a third party, but that's a positive development, not a negative development, because exiting the dysfunctional couple, exiting the dysfunctional dyad, where there's a lot of tension, a lot of depression, a lot of negative emotionality and affectivity. What's wrong with it? It's a good thing.

And very often love affairs are the bridges to the dissolution of such couples, which are not good, not healthy, and should be dissolved.

So in general, triangulation is actually a good thing, again, contradicting everything you hear online from wannabe experts and self-styled experts.

Bowen introduced it as a good concept.

And so he said that to stabilize the relationship, the couple often seek the aid of a third party to help reestablish closeness.

A triangle is the smallest possible relationship system that can restore balance in times of stress.

The third person assumes an outside position, even if he's a lover. It's still an outside position. The couple is primary it has primacy and so even a lover defers to the couple if push comes to shove.

The lover walks away the couple remains when the stress the outside position is very comfortable and very desired position, very gratified.

The inside position has the anxiety. The inside position has the tension. The fights are between the members of the couple. The lover or the outsider or the therapist or the friend or the family they benefit because they're in position of a sage of a guru they enjoy sex they i mean they get the benefits friends with benefits they all the all the hard work goes on inside inside the couple and there but this is exactly what generates the emotional closeness that restores the couple. The outsider serves to preserve the inside couple's relationship.

Here's another new thing you're learning. Triangulation is healthy.

What about abusers, narcissists, psychopaths, run of the mill abusers. What about them?

Well, they tend to create pathological or perverse triangles.

Nathan Ackerman in 1968 described a destructive triangle and he wrote, We observe certain constellations of family interactions which we have epitomized as the pattern of family interdependence roles those of destroyer or persecutor the victim of the scapegoating attack and the family healer or the family doctor.

And so Ackerman recognized the pattern of attack, defense, counterattack as shifting roles within a destructive or pathological triangle.

Okay, I said that Carpman, and even I would say Bowen and Ackerman, they all think that the victim is an act.

You're acting the role of a victim. Tomorrow you can act the role of an abuser easily. The decision is yours. The switch is possible totally. It's 100% your decision. You're a victim, in other words, it is implied but not said because it's politically incorrect and it's taboo and you're not supposed to say this.

But the victim chooses to be a victim. The victim chooses her role in the triangle. She could easily shift.

So what's the difference between this and victim playing?

We discussed victim blaming in the previous video. This is not about victim blaming. It's about understanding the intricacies of being a victim, the existential state of victimhood.

So what's the difference between Karpman, Bowen, Ackerman, the Triangle, and what is called victim playing, or playing the victim card, or self-victimization?

The difference is that the victim in triangles maintains reality testing. She usually remembers what had happened. She usually describes more or less accurately. She may exaggerate, but there will be a kernel of truth to what she's saying. It will all be reality-based.

Victim playing is the fabrication, lying about abuse, exaggeration of victimhood to the extreme.

And this is done to, in order to justify the abuse of others, to manipulate other people, as a coping strategy, because of attention-seeking, or because of a wish to diffuse responsibility, to push it away, to pass the buck.

So victim playing is very common with abusers, actually. Abusers play the victim and with victims who are essentially narcissistic, psychopathic, borderline, secondary psychopaths, and they use victimhood to kind of disguise their contributions and their responsibility in what had happened, in the abuse.

So we have a set of unsavory characters. And our empaths, for example, they engage in victim playing. Absolutely, 100% in victim play.

It's a powerful indicator that these people are covert narcissists or psychopathic or at the very least borderline.

Because they are trying to create a morality play and they engage in splitting where someone is all bad, the abuser, and someone is all good, the empaths, and they aggrandize themselves in the process.

These are strong indications of narcissistic, pathological narcissistic defenses.

Victim playing by abusers is done in a variety of ways, by dehumanizing the victim, by diverting attention away from acts of abuse, by claiming that the abuse was justified because of the other person's bad behavior. The victim made it happen. She caused it. She provoked me.

Grooming abusive power and control by soliciting sympathy and empathy and romantic emotions from other people in order to gain something. Assistant access, money, sex, whatever, supporting or enabling the abuse of a victim, proxy, abused by proxy.

So all these are forms of victim playing and abusers frequently play the victim.

And they play the victim for two reasons.

First of all, justifications. Even abusers need to feel egosyntonic.

Many abusers have a self-image and self-perception as good people, morally upright people, people who would never harm a fly.

And so they need to justify to themselves, first of all, why they had damaged, caused pain and hurt another person.

And this is called in transactional analysis existential validation.

So many abusers would victim play in order to feel good with themselves, to justify themselves, to deal with a cognitive dissonance, because there's an inconsistency, there's a contradiction, there's a conflict between the way they treat other people and what they believed about themselves.

They believe about themselves is they're good people. Good people don't abuse.

So if good people don't abuse and I'm a good person, I don't abuse. So what I do is not abuse. It's something else. Reactive abuse. I've been victimized. I'm just reacting.

And similarly, victim playing justifies to others and it's a strategy of avoiding or evading blame and guilt and shame, deflecting judgment or condemnation and ultimately deflecting punishment, social punishment or legal punishment.

Manipulators play the victim role. Who is me? Poor me. Look what he's done to me. Look how he destroyed my life.

This is to play the victim role. They portray themselves as victims of circumstances. As victims of someone else's behavior, that they had not control over, could not have had knowledge of, and could not have predicted or anticipated.

Like natural disaster, like a virus, just happened to them. They're totally passive. They didn't do anything. They didn't contribute to anything. They are responsible for nothing. They're not adults. They're poor and pure children.

And so this way they gain pity or sympathy, empathy, compassion, comfort, they get something from someone.

When you see victim behavior that is goal-oriented, intended to secure something from you, emotionalsustenance, narcissistic supply, sympathy, empathy. If the victim wants something from you, your feedback in some way, shape, or form, that's victim playing.

Caring and conscientious people cannot, altruistic people, empathic people, cannot stand to see someone suffering, anyone.

And so manipulators target such people. They find it easy and rewarding to play the victim card and that way they get cooperation and sympathy. And it's highly rewarding and it's highly successful.

William Ryanwrote the following in 1971 in his book Blaming the Victim: "The talent for high drama draws people to them like moths to a flame. Their permanent dire state brings out the altruistic motives in other people."

It is difficult to ignore constant cries for help.

In most instances, however, the help given is of short duration.

And like moths in a flame, helpers quickly get burned.

Nothing seems to work to alleviate the victim's miserable situation. There is no movement for the better.

Any efforts rescuers make are ignored, belittled or met with hostility.

No wonder that the rescuers become increasingly frustrated and ultimately walk away.

Jordan Peterson has a whole chapter dedicated to this in his book 12 Rules.

Okay, victim playing is therefore an attention-seeking technique, and for example, Munchausen syndrome is a form of victim play.

It's a strategy to elicit rescue and being saved, and of course it's a mechanism to obtain a variety of emotional rewards like narcissistic supplies, sympathy, empathy, etc.

You secure feedback input from their environment, and you are enabled and empowered via victim playing.

Victim playing actually empowers and enables people, but in a bad way.

In a bad way, because it doesn't allow progress, evolution, personal growth and development. It gets you stuck in the same place.

It's like a one-trick dog, one-trick pony. It's the only trick you know.

I need something, I'll play a victim. I need money, I'll play a victim. I need empathy, I'll play a victim. I need to get rid of my husband, I'll play a victim. You know, I play a victim. It's the only thing I know how to do.

And the language of playing the victim is all over. I mean, you can find it in mean, you can find it in corporate settings, you can find it inwhen you interact with your children.

It's a boundary issue. It's a boundary issue because the victim invades, breaches and violates your boundaries in many, many ways.

The typical victim is very disempathic. She lacks empathy. Watch the previous lecture.

And it's very demanding, very clinging and very needy. And it's a bit of a dishonest strategy. It elicits an empowering response, but the victim is not seeking to be empowered.

On the very contrary, the victim wants you to perpetuate her state as a victim, because it gets you to do things for her.

Okay?

Transactional analysis distinguishes real victims from people who had adopted the role of victim in bad faith. Authenticity versus bad faith. That's an existentialist approach, Jean-Paul Sartre.

So there are authentic victims and they're bad faith victims.

What's the difference between the two?

Authentic victims want to stop being victims. They dedicate all their energy, all their thoughts, everything to leverage their capacities to improve their situation and stop being a victim.

Bad faith victims also leverage all their capacities and all their resources in order to remain victims, because victimhood works for them.

And you will always find any number of unscrupulous gurus, coaches, and experts who will help you to remain a bad faith victim, will help you to get stuck in your victimhood stance because it pays, it's profitable.

And so among the most predictable interpersonal games described by Eric Berne, he described a game, a more common among victim players.

Eric Berne has a book called Games People Play where he describes games, he recasts, reframes, reformulates interpersonal relationships as games.

And one of the games is victim playing, and he said this game revolves around the sentence, look how hard I've tried, and I'm still a victim.

The psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who was an iconoclastic figure in the 60s and 70s, he said it will be difficult in practice to determine whether or not or to what extent a relationship is collusive where one person is predominantly the passive victim by consent.

And when these people are not real victims, but merely playing the victims.

It's almost impossible. Just by observing and analyzing, we can't really tell if someone is an authentic victim or a bad faith victim, you need to observe that person a very long period of time.

And if that person remains a victim for years or months, something's wrong. It's probably a person who is acting the victim.

Because to be a victim is gratifying, aggrandizing, functional, and guarantees favorable outcomes from an empathic, altruistic environment.

The problem is even more intense, more egregious.

Once a pattern of victimization has been internalized, it's kind of double bind when victimhood becomes your identity, who you are, not what you do, but who you are.

It's like an actor in a film, in a movie, and the actor gets confused and he thinks suddenly that he is the character, not that he is acting the character, but that he is the character.

Object relations theory explored the way that the false self possesses and creates a permanent sense of victimization, a sense of always being at the hands of something external.

Because what is the false self?

The false self is not you. It's out there. It's an external entity.

And you are fully hostage of that false self.

From the age of two or four or six or nine at a maximum, you had been kidnapped by the false self, you had become a hostage.

So of course you will naturally evolve into a victim and adopt a victim mentality.

That's why all narcissists would tell you that they are victims, because they are victims. They self-victimize.

They surrender themselves, subjugate themselves to the hands of this moloch, this idol, this God, the false self.

It's a form of human sacrifice. They sacrifice the true self in this form of idolatry.

And to break the hold of the negative complex and to escape the passivity of victimhood, that requires to take responsibility of your own life, your choices, your decisions, your desires, your long-term actions, and taking responsibility is very frightening.

The existentialists, starting with Kierkegaard, Sartre, I mean, you name it, all the existentialists will tell you that angst, existential anxiety, is because you have a choice, because you can choose.

And why do we elect dictators? Why do we give power to dictators?

Because together with the power, dictators take away from us personal responsibility. The message of the dictator is leave it to me, you're no longer responsible. Things go bad it's not your fault, you're not to blame, you're not guilty. We want to get rid of personal responsibility.

And one of a major ways we avail ourselves of the burden of responsibility and angst is by becoming a victim, because victims are passive. They're not responsible. Poor me.

And this is of course what is known as learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is when someone had endured repeated aversive stimuli. In other words, when someone had been exposed to very unpleasant situations time and again and again.

That's why it's learned. It's learned because you learn to expect bad things to happen to you. Bad things happen also to good people.

So learned helplessness is your reaction, your fatalistic reaction, your deterministic reaction, your belief that the world will only meet out to you, give you bad cards, that you will always experience only bad things, that things will never be right, that you will endure only pain and hurt.

And that's what you can expect from your relationships, from your intimate partners, from your children, from a business colleagues, from the world at large.

This is learned helplessness.

And until recently we thought that people accept their powerlessness. At the beginning they try, they flail about, you know, they try to escape, they try to change things, they try to avoid unpleasant, aversive, hurtful and painful situations. They try everything.

But even when they had failed and everything they had tried, they learned to accept that they are helpless. And even when we show them that they are not helpless, that they are other options, they have already learned helplessness.

So they won't countenance, they won't even consider our advice. They would deny that there are any options, any exit strategies. They are deeply enmeshed, mired in, immersed and embedded in helplessness, end of story. They are unable to contemplate any alternative.

And so this is what we had believed until recently.

But recently we are coming to the conclusion that it is helplessness that is learned.

Our natural state is a state of helplessness.

Sorry, let me repeat. Lately we have come to the conclusion that it is helpfulness that is learned.

We learn helpfulness. We learn that we can help ourselves. Learn that there are solutions, options, exit strategies, ways out, this we learn.

We are born and we spend the first few years of our lives helpless. So helplessness is not learned, it's the natural state.

We need to emerge from helplessness. It's not learned. It's the natural state. We need to emerge from helplessness, to emerge from victimhood by learning that we can help ourselves.

And so in human beings, helplessness is intimately connected with self-efficacy. The more we learn skills, the more we acquire knowledge, the more efficient we become in obtaining goals, securing favorable outcomes from the environment, from our environment, human environment, natural environment. The more efficacious we are, the less helpless we feel.

Helplessness and self-efficacy counterbalance each other. The higher this one is, the lower this one is, and vice versa.

We are born with helplessness and we acquire learned self-efficacy.

And the individual's belief in the innate ability, capacity to obtain goals is the foundation of self-efficacy, sometimes called it self-esteem or self-confidence. It's strong, but it's a close approximation.

The more helpless you feel and you are 100% helpless as a victim, let it be clear, the message that you are getting from coaches and experts and all these con artists, crowd of con artists online, is you are helpless, you're a victim, there's nothing you could have done.

They teach you helplessness.

And over time, helplessness always leads to and resolves in clinical depression and other mental illnesses.

I want you to understand that you are risking your mental health.

A state of victimhood is a state of learned helplessness, is a state of incipient depression and other severe mental illnesses.

If you have a real or perceived absence of control over your life, over the outcomes of situations, you want to die. Life is not worth living.

An external locus of control is the most horrible thing that can happen to a person.

So recently.

So this is a death verdict, a psychological death verdict.

American psychologist Martin Seligman initiated research on learned helplessness in 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania and he was actually an expert on depression.

He saw so many cases of learned helplessness and depression that he said, well, let's get to grips with it, let's study what this is, what this thing is. It seems to be the core of depression.

Self-victimizing, victimhood and helplessness of the core of depression.

And so he and later, many others, Meyer, others, they experimented with dogs and these are amazing experiments. I advise you to go online and look for videos on Seligman-Meyer experiments with learned helplessness.

And they reach a conclusion that there is only one cure for helplessness.

Seligman discovered that dogs don't try to escape. He administered to them all kinds of shocks and don't ask, and they didn't try to escape.

And he asked himself why the dogs are not trying to escape. He made it possible for them to escape if they wanted to, but they didn't want to.

And he asked why they decided to not escape? Why did they decide to endure suffering? Why did they decide, in other words, why these dogs had decided to become victims?

And his answer was because they expect that nothing they do will stop the shocks. The dogs lost all self-efficacy.

The dog said to himself, listen here, there's nothing I can do about this cruel, sadistic human, Seligman. Nothing I can do. I'm a cruel sadistic human, Seligman. Nothing I can do. I have to sit here in the cage and be electrocuted. I'm at his mercy, he's my abuser, I'm a victim, I'm a canine victim.

And I'm sure that had these dogs lived today, there would have been coaches and experts online catering to their victimhood status.

And so what the experimenters tried to teach the dogs to get rid of learned helplessness.

So what they did, they took the dogs and they moved their legs replicating escape, replicating, running away.

And gradually, the dogs learned to move their legs and they ran away.

So you need to teach victims and people with learned helplessness, you need to teach them how to help themselves.

You don't need to tell them yes you were victims, yes you're passive, yes you're nobodies, yes the abuser, you couldn't do anything, you were helpless. I mean it's wrong messages, catastrophic messages.

You need to tell them on the contrary, you're strong, resilient people. You could have done some things, but you made a mistake of not doing them. Here's what you could have done. One, two, three.

You need to teach helpfulness.

Threats don't work. Rewards don't work. Helplessness and victimhood are very addictive. You need rehab, victim rehab, where you get rid of your victimhood as you would get rid of your drinking or drug addiction.

And so there are numerous experiments conducted later in the 70s, 80s, 90s, to this very day, linking depressive effects, depressive states with a lack of control or a perceived lack of control over abuse and other aversive stimulus.

So people, for example, perform mental tasks, even if they're subjected to torturing noise and pain and so on, they perform mental tasks perfectly if they believe that they can stop the noise.

If people have a sense of I am empowered, I am strong, I'm resilient, I can solve my own problems, I'm in control of myself, internal locus of control, they can endure anything.

The same group of people, when they were told there's nothing they can do about the noise or the pain, deteriorated. Their functioning deteriorated dramatically.

Simply being aware that there is an option, there is a way out, there is an exit strategy, was substantially enough to counter any abuse, any torture, any pain, any aversive stimulus.

There was an animal study not long ago, nine years ago, when animals were given control over stressful stimuli, they were stressed, they were shocked and other things, they were deprived of food, but when they were given to believe that they had control over these situations, their whole brain activity changed and many of them didn't use the solution.

Humans and animals. They had options, they had exits, they had ways out, and yet they preferred to endure the torture and the pain from a position of strength, not as victims. They chose to not avoid the stimuli.

Animals that lacked control failed to act at all and their brain activity is very different.

So a human's reaction to a perceived lack of control is both universal, helplessness, victimhood, but with individual idiosyncrasies.

So learned helplessness is very specific to individuals and very specific to situations. It can be sufficiently generalized, but still we need to inspect each case.

Another reason why self-styled coaches, self-styled experts and gurus and other forms of con artists are doing you a disservice because they generalize the victim state. They generalized learned helplessness and it is expressly untrue.

So the variations between the way we experience victimhood and learned helplessness is that they depend, these variations depend on what we call attributional or explanatory style.

Towards the end of the lecture, I will discuss attribution errors and how they affect helplessness and victimhood, how someone interprets or explains what has happened, how someone perceives the abuse, reframes it, and analyzes it, understands it, it affects the likelihood of acquiring learned helplessness and subsequent depression.

People with pessimistic, negativistic, explanatory style tend to see negative events such as abuse. They tend to see them as permanent. It will never change. I will never change. I will keep attracting narcissists. They will keep abusing me. It's my fault. I can't do anything correctly.

So it's personal. It's pervasive. It's permanent. And they're likely to suffer from learned helplessness and depression.

There was a scholar by the name of Bernard Weiner, and he published the most detailed account of attributional approach to learned helplessness. He has an attribution theory.

And there he discusses globality, specificity, stability, instability, internality, externality. These are all features that determine how you experience helplessness and whether you adopt a victimhood stance.

For example, global attribution occurs when the individual believes that the cause of negative events is consistent across different contexts.

Specific attribution is when the individual believes that the cause of a negative event is unique to a particular situation.

Stable attribution is when the individual believes the cause to be consistent across time.

Unstable attribution is when the individual thinks that the cause is specific to one point in time, a result of some circumstance.

External attribution assigns causality to situational or external factors or people. Internal attribution assigns causality to factors within the person. It's very close to locus of control.

And so those with internal, stable and global attributional style for negative events are more at risk for depressive reaction to failure, defeat, abuse, other aversive experiences.

Learned helplessness is a factor in a wide range of situations, not only in interpersonal relationships, not only in abuse.

In emotionally abusive relationships, the victim often develops learned helplessness. It's when the victim confronts the abuser, tries to leave the abuser, but the abuser dismisses or trivializes the victim's feelings, invalidates the abuse, pretends to care but does not change, impede the abuse, the victim from living somehow.

So it's true that emotionally or abusive relationships involve learned helplessness.

But learned helplessness is everywhere. In the classroom, in my classroom students, some students repeatedly fail and I can't convince them that they can improve their performance because they attribute the failure to themselves. They say I'm like that and I can't succeed.

So continued failure, loss of self, social consequences only enhance the learned helplessness, which then leads to failure, etc.

It's a vicious cycle. It's very difficult to break.

And in all this, there's a fundamental attribution error.

One famous attribution error is what we call the Dunning Kruger effect.

The Dunning Kruger effect is when people believe themselves to be less fallible and more clever than other people when in actuality that's not the case.

In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias, attribution effect, it's the tendency to overvalue dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others, and at the same time undervalue situational explanations for those behaviors.

Lee Ross coined the phrase after some of a classic experiment by Edward Jones and Victor Harris in 1967.

So fundamental attribution error is when people explain the behaviors of others and when they do it, they don't explain, so it's like when they explain the behavior of other people, they would explain it the behavior of other people because these other people are like that.

This is their essence. This is their psychology. They behave in certain ways because they are like that. He's abusing me because he's an abuser.

But when they explain their own behavior, they attributed to some circumstances.

I abused him because he abused me. I abused him because I was in a bad mood.

So it's like he's abusing people because that is his essence. It's his quiddity. It's who he is. Who is? He's an abuser. I'm abusing people because things happen to me. Circumstances change. I'm reacting. I'm provoked.

And so this is called attributional error. Situational factors you attribute to yourself, psychological factors you attribute to other.

This is the actor-observer bias.

So let's take an example.

You see someone who is very clumsy and he fell over and broke a tray with many glasses and so.

Then you judge his behavior, you say, oh, he is clumsy, he is careless. It's a dispositional judgment.

He broke the glasses, not because he tripped over something, not because of something external, but because of something internal.

He broke the glasses because he is like that. He's a glass breaker. He's clumsy.

But if a minute later you were to trip over and break the same number of glasses, you would tell yourself that something was wrong with the way the glasses were arranged on the tree. Or someone left something and you tripped over it. You would try to find clues, cues in the environment, not inside yourself. You wouldn't say, oh, I tripped over because I'm clumsy. in most cases. You would say, oh, I tripped over because ABC in the environment.

So victims, victim proneness or victim blaming that I've mentioned in the previous lecture, it's a form of fundamental attribution error. It's known as the just world phenomenon.

I recommend that you read articles by Aronson, Wilson, Akert, and Sommers, article published in 2016.

The just world phenomenon is the belief that people get what they deserve, and they deserve what they get.

And this was first described by Melvin Lerner. It's also known as the just deserves.

Attributing failures to dispositional causes, attributing failures to someone else's psychology, makeup, rather than to situational causes, which are unchangeable and uncontrollable, this satisfies our need to believe that the world is fair and we have control over our lives.

We are motivated to see a just world because this reduces perceived threats, reduces anxiety, gives us a sense of security, helps us to find meaning in difficult and unsettling circumstances, benefits us psychologically.

So we would say he broke the glasses because he is like that. Now that I know this about him, I can predict his future behavior and I can control it. I can never give him glasses again. He is an abuser. Now I can control it. I know who he is. I know what's he going to do? I know how he's going to behave. I'm in control.

But the just world hypothesisalso results in a tendency for people to blame and disparage others. Victims blame and disparage abusers and abusers blame and disparage victims. Even victims of a tragedy, even victims of an accident, even victims of rape or domestic abuse.

So we tend to blame them in order to reassure ourselves of our insusceptibility to such events.

She got raped because she is provocative and promiscuous. I am not provocative and promiscuous. I will never get raped. I abused her because she provoked me. If I were to live with another woman, she would not provoke me. I would not abuse her.

So these are defenses.

We attribute to other people badness, corruption. We attribute to other people negative things.

And when it comes to us, we are passive victims of circumstances, of others, of abusers. We are in a way eternal victims of the world.

And this is where you don't want to end because this leads to depression and severe mental illness.

You can go from bad to worse. You can exit an abusive relationship, but if you understand it wrongly, if you reframe it wrongly, if you cast yourself in the role of an eternal victim, who did nothing wrong, could have done nothing wrong, could do nothing wrong. It's not responsible and contributed nothing. You're going to end up with mental illness.

And I'm not sure which is worse. When your abuser is external, or when your abuser is internal in the form of a mental illness that is really who you are. It's your spouse, your colleague, your neighbor, your boss, your own child. They seem to be in a constant state of crisis.

But the crisis doesn't feel real. It feels contrived. It feels artificial.

There is a lot of emotional dysregulation, ostentatious displays of hyper-emotionality. There is switching between incompatible, irreconcilable self-states.

The sweetest person could become a demonic psychopath.

There's chaos, disruptive behaviors, sabotage, passive aggression, identity diffusion or disturbance. You can't recognize the same person from one minute to the next, from one day to the next. There's a lot of mixed signals. I hate you. Don't leave me. I love you. I wish you were dead.

There is inconstancy, indeterminacy, capriciousness, arbitrariness, and unpredictability.

In one word, there's a lot of drama.

Why the drama in Cluster B personality disorders? The cluster that is also known as the dramatic, erratic cluster, and for good reason.

Today, we will understand the role of drama in the lives of these people and what their drama does to you.

And no, I'm not talking about my videos.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and I'm also a professor of clinical psychology.

Start with a definition.

Dramatization is defined by the APA, American Psychological Association Dictionary, as attention-getting behavior, such as exaggerating the symptoms of an illness in order to make it appear more important than the occurrence of the same illness in another person.

In psychoanalytic theory, dramatization is the expression of repressed wishes or impulses in dreams.

So dreams are dramatic.

There are a few common features to the drama in the lives of all Cluster B personality disorders.

Cluster B personality disorders couldn't be more different to each other.

The psychopath is cold-hearted, cunning, scheming, calculated, Machiavellian, callous, dysempathic and heartless.

The borderline, on the other hand, is overflowing with emotions such as love and dedication and so.

So they seem to be incompatible, but what unites them all is drama.

And the drama in the lives of the psychopath, the antisocial personality-disordered person, the patient with borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and the much forgotten histrionic personality disorder, the drama in the lives of all these actors has a few basic common underlying features.

It is important to understand that drama enhances self-efficacy.

Drama is perceived by the disordered person as a positive adaptation because drama secures outcomes.

When you as a borderline or a narcissist or even a psychopath, histrionic, when you use drama, you get results.

Drama therefore enhances your ability to extract favorable outcomes from an environment which is sometimes indifferent in the best case or hostile.

Drama is also a form of external regulation. By using drama, you elicit and solicit highly specific reactions from people. These reactions are used to regulate internal psychodynamics, internal psychological processes. Your sense of self-worth if you're a narcissist. your sense of safety and stability if you're borderline.

So this is external regulation and drama is a tool intended to secure this form of regulation because internal regulation is missing.

Drama is addictive. It's addictive because it's a form of risk taking. There's a lot of adrenaline involved. There's a lot of dopamine involved. I'm kidding you not. It's hormonally addictive.

Drama is also a kind of challenge, challenge to oneself and challenge to the environment. That's why it's so intriguing and so interesting and so captivating and so fascinating and so amazing.

Drama is a mystery. You never know how it's going to end and you never know how it's going to unfold. You cannot second guess the reactions of other people. You cannot anticipate and predict fully the way the environment would adapt to your drama and alter itself, transform, owing to your drama.

So drama contains a mysterious, adventurous element which goes hand in hand with risk-taking and thrill-seeking, psychopathic traits, by the way.

Drama also kind of goes hand in hand with grandiosity.

Because if you are at the center of the drama, let alone if you have initiated the drama, that makes you important. You're in the limelight. You're in the center of attention. Everyone revolves around you. Everyone tries to resolve your problems or predicament. Everyone is trying to help you or take you down. Whatever the case may be, you are suddenly the pivot and the axis around which everyone sort of revolves.

And so drama helps to distort cognition.

If you are grandiose like the narcissist, drama helps you to believe your own confabulations and self-deception.

It self-enhances. It allows you to buttress your fantastic, inflated self-concept, self-image and self-perception.

Only important people, only unusual people, only exceptional people find themselves amidst drama.

Drama is a hallmark and a sign and a badge of your exceptionalism and your uniqueness.

Drama is a narrative, for us.

Dramas are mini theatre productions, mini movies.

So drama involves a plot. There's a plot, there's a storyline, it's a piece of fiction, and it's a narrative. And it's a narrative that resonates with everybody's childlike wonder.

When we witness drama or when we are involved in drama, let alone when we initiate drama, when we engender it, we feel as if we were children.

There's a sense of wonder. There's a sense of what would happen next. Thrill, as I said. There's a lot of thrill in this. It's a little like binge watching, a mystery television series or a thriller on television. It is as if you were catapulted into a movie and you're a character, a protagonist.

There's a bit of fictophilia here, a bit of even fictosexuality.

And so, drama fosters dissociation.

It cuts you off from reality. It impairs your reality testing. You're no longer embedded in your environment, in the world at large, with other people, with situations that you have to cope with, strategies you have to adopt. All this is forgotten because all your resources, mental resources, are involved now, consumed by the drama.

So drama imposes huge costs in terms of mental resources. It is depleting and it renders the participants, especially the recipients of the drama, the ones who are exposed to the drama, willy-nilly, unwillingly, not voluntarily. It exposes these people to huge costs, it depletes them and then it makes them defenseless, vulnerable, malleable, and amenable to manipulation.

Drama is therefore Machiavellian.

Drama in some cases, not in all cases, is a reenactment of early childhood conflicts.

For example, there's a lot of drama in the shared fantasy of the narcissist, idealization, devaluation, discard.

It's all extremely dramatic because none of it is real. It's counterfactual.

Counterfactuality is a crucial element in the drama of Cluster B personality disorders.

And in the case of the narcissist at least, there's a reenactment of early childhood conflicts and an attempt to find a different solution, to end the story differently with a maternal substitute.

And this involves drama, because the minute you convert, for example, your intimate partner or your best friend, the minute you convert them into maternal figure, what you're actually doing, you're imposing on them a role.

It involves role playing. Role playing in the theater of the absurd, which is your early childhood recollections, an early childhood shame, an early childhood pain.

You coerce people around you as a narcissist. You coerce them into your theater play. You make them, force them to say the lines and play the script, play out the script, or even become inanimate props in your mega production in the theatre of life.

A lot of drama involves approach avoidance, repetition, compulsion, especially in borderline personality disorder.

But all people with cluster B personality disorders have an insecure attachment style.

And so dismissive avoidant and anxious and so on.

So the relationships, the interpersonal relationships of people with cluster B personality disorders involves a kind of idealization in the case of borderline and narcissists or approach in the case of psychopath and histrionic so there's an approach and then internal dynamics cause the disordered person to walk away, to push people away.

For example, in the case of the borderline, there is engulfment anxiety. The borderline suffers from twin anxieties, abandonment anxiety, the clinical term is separation insecurity, and engulfment anxiety.

When she gets too close to someone, when there's the intimacy that emerges naturally, when her love is reciprocated suddenly, she's terrified, she feels suffocated, she feels engulfed and consumed, she's about to disappear and she runs away.

Approach avoidance. It's a repetition and it's a compulsion. It cannot be helped.

But the very dynamic of approach and then avoidance and then approach and then avoidance and so on injects instability and unpredictability into the relationship.

In short, it creates drama. It elevates drama into the organizing principle of the relationship.

These are the dynamics of insecure attachment.

One of the major roles of drama is to attempt to generate theories of mind and internal working models.

Allow me to explain.

A theory of mind is a theory about how other people minds function. What makes them tick? How likely they are to behave in certain ways and to avoid certain behaviors.

And so this is called the theory of mind. The process that leads to the formation of a theory of mind is known as mentalization, for Naji's term.

So people with cluster B personality disorders were unable in childhood to develop healthy processes of mentalization.

Consequently, they are bereft of theories of mind. They don't have a theory of mind.

When they grow up as adults, they attempt to generate a theory of mind. They attempt to understand other people somehow, because they lack empathy.

And in the case of the narcissist and the psychopath, and probably the histrionic, there's no access to positive emotions, they lack the basic tools of comprehending other people, their social cues, their body language, their emotions, even their cognitions.

It's very reminiscent of autism spectrum disorder.

Drama is used by Cluster B personality disordered patients. Drama is used as a way to generate a theory of mind or theories of mind regarding people around them.

Similarly, an internal working model is a theory. It's a model that describes how relationships work and the various functions of the external environment, including other people who are known as external objects.

So the internal working model, for example, tells you how intimate relationships work, what to expect, what to avoid, how to act, their scripts embedded in the internal working model, sexual scripts, relationships, scripts, and so.

Again, people with cluster B personality disorder do not possess internal working model, or their internal working models are highly disrupted or delusional or deformed or insecure or paranoid.

So it's a problem they don't have realistic internal working models that allow them to interact with the environment in a self-efficacious agentic manner.

Drama is used by these people, they use drama to generate internal working models on the fly.

So now I've given you a mouthful.

People with Cluster B personality disorders use drama to generate theories of mind about other people and internal working models about relationships with other people on the fly.

So they use drama to say, okay, now I know what makes this person tick, what motivates this person, what this person wishes and dreams and hopes and wants, and now I can relate to this person via an internal working model.

But how does drama serve this purpose? How do these people use drama to come up with late onset theories of mind and very belated internal working models.

Well, drama is a way, is a form of probing.

These people use drama to probe, to test, to dismantle the world, the environment, situations, circumstances, take apart other people and look inside relationships.

The way a child does with the toy, you know, when you give a toy to a child, the child tries to take it apart in order to understand the internal mechanics, the mechanism, what makes this toy tick and how to relate to this toy in the most efficient manner. That's what children do.

And so when a child, a very young child, is faced with television, they may wish to take the television apart to see if there are small people inside.

It's the same with Cluster B personality disorder people.

They use drama to take the television apart, to take other people apart, to disintegrate the world, to dissolve it, to decompose it, and to study it.

They probe, they test, and they dismantle the universe.

Drama is a blunt force instrument, a tool, a wrecking ball, a tool that can destroy everything and does destroy everything.

But it's not destruction for its own sake. It's not wanton destruction. It's destruction which is more scientific in nature.

Let me break this thing into smithering so that I can see inside it, inform and generate a theory about it.

And that's one of a major roles of drama.

Now, a lot of drama, especially in borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, to some extent, in psychopathy, a lot of drama involves intermittent reinforcement.

Hot and cold, I love you, I hate you.

Reminiscent of approach avoidance, but on a micro level, whereas approach avoidance cycles are much longer in time, you know, an approach avoidance cycle can take years, intermittent reinforcement is a daily occurrence.

You can never predict the mood, you can never anticipate the language, the attitude, the motivation and the behavior of these people.

And they generate in you a dependency on their next move.

They hurt you and then they are the only ones who can take the pain away.

This is known as trauma bonding.

Drama is intimately connected with trauma bonding and with intermittent reinforcement to the point that I suggest to call it drama bonding.

Drama also monopolizes other people. It monopolizes the attention of other people, the presence of other people, the resources of other people.

Drama generates object constancy. It's fake. It's ersatz object consistency. It's not real.

Because it depends crucially on the perpetuation and perpetration of the drama.

If the drama ceases or goes away, the people who are involved in the drama walk away as well.

But drama for a while, as long as it lasts, gives the impression that people are interested in you as the source of the drama that they're there for you that they will help you that they're interested in you that you're the focus of attention that you're the center and so drama guarantees the physical presence and the mental wherewithal of people around you.

And so drama compensates for the lack of object constancy in Cluster B personality disorders.

People with Cluster B personality disorders have object in constancy, or in the case of the borderline, introjecting constancy.

Be that as it may, an inconstancy, an impermanence to use Jean Piaget's language, an impermanence related to other people.

It's as if people with Class B personality disorders say, I don't know if that person who is important to me, who is significant, who means something to me, or I don't know if that person who I am about to exploit in whom I've invested so much, I don't know if this person is going to stick around.

You're beginning to see that drama is a form of channeling and sublimating aggression. Drama is aggressive by definition because all dramas involve destruction. Some dramas involve construction, but the initial stage always involves some kind of perturbance, some kind of disruption, some kind of destruction.

And dramas are destructive. And he says all dramas are aggressive.

They could be overtly aggressive, externalized aggression. They could be passive aggressive, underhanded and stealthy and hidden occult aggression. They could be self-directed aggression, internalized aggression. For example, attempted suicide or stentatious and conspicuous abuse of oneself via substances or you name it. All these are forms of drama.

Dramas are used to project punitive introjects and then force people around you to conform to the content of these punitive interjects.

In people with Cluster B personality disorders, they are really very evil and problematic and difficult processes, dynamics taking place internally.

These dynamics are intolerable, they are unbearable to the suffering person himself or herself.

A narcissist internally has a bad object, an internalized bad object, something that keeps informing the narcissists, that he's inadequate, inferior, stupid, ugly, this, that.

Narcissism is a compensation for this. Same with borderline to a large extent, albeit with quite a few differences.

But there is, in all these cases, there's a dynamic, a dynamic that is essentially egodystonic, a dynamic that is not acceptable to the individual, dynamic that is ego incongruent, a dynamic that is disruptive, that is uncomfortable, that is hated, that is rejected by the individual.

So, drama is a way to export this dynamic, to project it onto someone else, and then to force that someone else via the drama.

To force that someone else to become a persona dramatist, a participant in the drama, a character, a protagonist in the drama, and adopt the rejected part.

So the person with Cluster B personality disorders rejects a part of himself or a part of herself, rejects internal dynamics, which are highly intolerable and unbearable, projects them on someone else, and forces that other person who is the subject of the projection, or the object of a projection, target of the projection, forcing this someone else to conform to the projection and to play his is or part in the play in the game in the movie.

And so this is known as projective identification this process is known as projective identification.

But not all drama, even in Cluster B personality disorders, not all drama is created equal.

The specific content of the drama ties in with the highly concrete and specific self-concept content of the drama, its contours, its unfolding, its evolution, its internal dynamic, and most importantly its plot, its narrative, the all derivative, the derivatives of the psychodynamics and the goals of the underlying disorder and the disorderof the individual.

So you could conceive therefore of drama as a kind of fantasy within a paracosm, within an alternative reality.

So in the case of the borderline, the narcissist and the histrionic, dramas are enactments of fantasies.

And that's why we have psychodrama, form of therapy, which uses drama.

Because drama allows you to reframe reality in ways which are conducive to mental health.

However, in the case of narcissism and borderline personality organization and histrionic personality disorder, the drama is a fantasy that is used to displace reality, to substitute for reality.

The counterfactual drama becomes reality, and so it is a paracosm. It is an alternativenon-reality in effect.

And so these fantastic elements in the drama, they serve psychological functions, they cater to psychological needs.

For example, in the drama of the narcissist, the fantasy, fantastic elements in the drama, would support and buttress the narcissist inflated, godlike self-image or self-concept.

In the fantasy of the borderline, there's a lot of drama, of course. Borderline's fantasy is highly dramatic, and the drama would serve to uphold and sustain and maintain the borderline's self-regulation via an external object.

So dramas are highly functional and one could even say that as long as the mental illness is there, dramas are actually survival strategies or positive adaptations because they channel the fantasy, they structure it in a way that allows the disordered individual to become self-efficacious.

Like in codependency, some cases drama allows the individual, the borderline, the narcissist, the psychopath, exactly like in codependency, drama allows the individual to control from the bottom.

In this highly specific type of drama, the control from the bottom drama or the codependent drama or the dependent drama.

In this type of drama, there are displays of feigned helplessness, a kind of power asymmetry. I'm weak, you are strong, you will save me.

There is ostentatious dependency. There is neediness.

And the idea is for the drama to trigger the savior, healer, fixer complex in vulnerable people, people who are vulnerable to this message.

So that's why borderlines match perfectly with narcissists because the borderline's drama is a drama of neediness, clinging, helplessness, and so on, and it triggers in the narcissists the savior, rescuer, guru, teacher, father, godlike complex, the Messiah complex.

Of course, all this, the dynamic that I've just described, this interaction involves regressive infantization.

The drama-making individual renders herself baby-like, as dependent as a baby, as needy as an infant, as helpless as a toddler.

And so it converts people around the disordered individual into parental figures, saviors, rescuers, healers, fixers, and they fit well into the Karpman drama triangle.

A video dedicated to it. Karpman, Dramatriangle.

Now let's go into the specific disorders.

Start with antisocial personality disorder, aka psychopathy.

Now people are asking me, by the way, before I proceed, about sociopath, psychopath, this and that.

The official clinical term is antisocial. Psychopathy is not a recognized clinical term. There's no psychopathy in the DSM, for example.

Sociopath or sociopathy is the old word that we used for psychopath or psychopathy.

There is no difference between psychopaths and sociopaths. Sociopaths are not less and not more and not different to psychopaths because it's simply the older word that has fallen out of use.

Okay, that's the clinical academic background. If you go online, everyone and his dog is a self-styled expert and they would tell you otherwise, but it's up to you to decide who knows best.

Now in the case of the psychopath, drama is used to secure control, to manipulate people.

How is this accomplished?

The psychopathic drama is very menacing, it is intimidating, it has overtones and undertones of catastrophizing, something horrible is going to happen.

And the drama of the psychopath creates information asymmetry. It's like the psychopath knows something, you don't.

And this something that he knows, this information overload, in the case of the psychopath, this elevated level of access is very important. It has to do with survival. It's a crucial bit of information that you're missing.

It creates in you, as the recipient or the target of the psychopath's drama, creates in you anxiety, disorientation, a sense of dislocation.

And this induces dependency on the psychopath.

When you're in the presence of the psychopath, the psychopath would create, intentionally, drama to enhance uncertainty. This uncertainty creates anxiety, is anxiogenic, creates anxiety, is anxiogenic, creates anxiety in other people, and they look to the psychopath to reduce this anxiety.

They begin to regard the psychopath as anxiolytic, it's the only way to reduce anxiety, to feel comfortable and safe.

So this is the role, the main role of the psychopath's drama.

The borderline's drama has multiple roles.

That's why drama is so embedded in borderline. That's why it's a critical diagnostic criterion, actually, in borderlinepersonality disorder.

Because it caters to a panoply of needs and regulates a series of very crucial dynamics, moods, emotions, and even cognitions.

Start with the fact that in borderlines, external drama is used in order to drown out internal drama.

Drama is present in the borderline's life all the time. Every second, every micro second of every second or every minute, or every hour, or every day, all her life, all his life. Half of all borderlines are men, I repeat.

So there's always drama.

However, a lot of the time the drama is internal.

There is this cacophony of clashing voices or internal objects that argue with each other. It's a mess. There's a lot of drama internally.

Sometimes this internal drama becomes unbearable, threatening, overwhelming.

And so then the borderline creates, deliberately, on purpose, creates external drama.

External drama is so cacophonous and so noisy and so perhaps threatening and so destabilizing and so disorienting that it drowns out the internal drama. It silences it, at least for a while.

And so this is first function.

The second function, borderlines use drama to recruit other people, to recruit them as special people, special friends, intimate partners, you name it. Enablers, colluders, collaborators, and so on.

The drama is used to recruit people, to participate in the borderline's shared fantasy, to share the burden.

Drama loves company, exactly like misery.

So if you dramatize your situation, including your internal situation, if you dramatize your mental illness, if you dramatize your neediness and helplessness, if you dramatize it, you recruit other people, people who are empathic, who are helpful, or sometimes interested.

You also, of course, attract predators. There's a risk attached to this strategy.

But be that as it may, you share the burden of your internal drama by generating external drama and bringing into the ambit, into the remit, of the internal drama, people from the outside.

You could look at it this way.

The external drama in the borderline's life is a way of projecting the internal drama and involving other people in it so that the burden of the internal drama is shared and dissipates.

The last function, a very important function of drama in the borderline's life is to avoid intimacy.

Drama, of course, alienates people, pushes them away. That's one way of avoiding intimacy.

But this is another thing.

The borderline mistakes intensity for intimacy.

So as far as the borderline is concerned, if something is high-strung and colorful and unpredictable and volcanic, then it's very intimate. She mistakes intensity for intimacy.

The dramas are very intense and are perceived, therefore, as very intimate.

The truth is that there is some merit to this thinking.

We have multiple studies that show that in dramatic situations, for example, in war, in prison, there's a lot of bonding taking place. There's a lot of intimacy that is created among victims, for example, of the same natural disaster.

So drama does engender intimacy.

Problem with the borderline, she's incapable of transitioning from dramatic intensity to pedestrian intimacy.

Whereas most healthy people are capable of this. They could experience intimacy with someone in a dramatic situation, but then take it on and continue with it, continue to run with it in daily life.

The borderline is incapable of this, which is why the borderline constantly generates drama. It's her habitat. It's her natural milieu. It's her comfort zone.

The borderlines don't do daily life, pedestrian, mundane, humdrum very well.

We go to the histrionic.

The histrionic uses drama as an ostentatious display of hyper-emotionality and hyper empathy. That's why many empaths, so-called, are actually histrionic or narcissistic.

So the drama in the case of the histrionic is intended to attract attention, but not to the histrionic as an individual, to attract attention to her traits and to her behaviors.

Look how emotional I am. Look how empathic I am. Look how open I am. Look how amazing I am, but amazing in the sense that I am, I can afford you, I can provide you with an experience that you've never had before because of my intensity.

So we could regard the histrionic as far as drama is concerned as a combination between borderline and psychopath.

The histrionic uses drama as a form of virtue signaling or trade signaling and then captures the individual, captures the target, and controls and manipulates the target.

And finally, the narcissist, of course, although narcissists don't like to be the last ones, most narcissists would resent me for this.

As far as the narcissist is concerned, drama in the narcissists' life is used to attract attention. It's an attention-seeking behavior.

But it is also used to self-enhance. The drama is tailored in order to yield an outcome or a resolution or a consequence that somehow enhances the narcissist self-concept or self-image.

So the drama would lead to kind of denouement to an end that supports the narcissist's view of himself or herself.

Half of all narcissists the women dramas in the dramas in the narcissists life are highly weaponized, instrumentalized, and functional, and therefore they're much more pinpointed than the dramas in the borderline's life.

The dramas substitute for narcissistic supply.

So when narcissistic supply is reduced, there's a protracted state of reduced narcissistic supply or deficient supply, when there's a state of collapse and the narcissist is hunting for more cells of narcissistic supply or deficient supply when there's a state of collapse and the narcissist is hunting for more cells of narcissistic supply sometimes futilely the drama comes in.

Drama is a simulation of narcissistic supply to start with. You're dramatic, people pay attention to you. That attention is misconstrued as narcissistic supply by the narcissists.

So drama is simply a way of, it's a cry for help. The narcissist's drama is a cry for help. It's like saying, hey, guys, pay attention to me. I'm here. See how amazing I am. See how Godlike I am. You know?

And the only way to get your attention, the only way to secure your presence and monetize your eyeballs, so to speak, is to create drama. So that's what I'm doing.

It's a way to open the spigot of narcissistic supply.

Now finally, drama allows the narcissist to distract himself in a state of collapse. State of collapse is when the narcissist is absolutely unable to obtain supply. No matter what it does, he fails to obtain supply. That creates a major crisis. It creates depression, so there's a mood disorder attached to it.

That's why drama is also very common in the manic phase of bipolar disorder.

So it creates this internal drama of unvanishing and disappearing. I cannot exist through anyone's gaze because no one is looking at me, no one is interested in me. It's horrible and it's a sense of despair.

And so, drama is used to forget about it, to somehow distract the narcissists.

The dramas of the narcissists are very often self-defeating and self-destructive. The dramas of the narcissists generate threats to the narcissists' existence, well-being, freedom, prosperity.

And so at that point, this creates an existential crisis. And when you're in existential crisis, when you're fighting for your life, I mean, narcissistic supply becomes a secondary consideration when you're fighting for your life.

So the drama is used to distract the narcissist from the fact of his or her collapse. At the same time, the drama allows the narcissist to self-supply.

I'll give you an example.

If the narcissist creates a drama which is paranoid, the narcissist convinces himself that he is at the center of some conspiracy, malign intent or malevolent attention.

This paranoia places the narcissist firmly at the center of attention of the conspiracy, the center of attention of the colluders. And so that constitutes self-supply. It restores the flow of narcissistic supply via a delusion, a paranoid persecutory delusion.

And of course, it creates drama.

So drama is used simultaneously to distract the narcissists from the fact, from the reality of no supply, never mind what I do, and at the same time, self-supply, by, for example, saying, I am not getting supply because I'm the target of a conspiracy, because people are envious of me.

So the drama has a dual role in this case to restore supply and make the narcissist deny the absence of real quality narcissistic supply coming from outside sources.

That's been a dramatic video and I hope you will recover and stay tuned for additional dramas in the Sam Vaknin YouTube channel.