It is important to understand that collapse in Cluster B personality disorders causes dysregulation. Dysregulation is the emotional reaction to collapse.
In this sense, people with borderline personality disorder experience mini collapses, like mini black holes, mini collapses one after the other, whenever they are emotionally dysregulated.
Emotional dysregulation in the case of borderline is a reaction to perceived or anticipated abandonment, rejection, humiliation, so forth.
And the borderline's depth of emotions, her inability to self-regulate internally, causes her to go through repeated mini collapses.
The narcissist is far more resilient. His defenses are much stronger, and so narcissists experience collapse more rarely, mainly when they cannot obtain supply, we'll discuss it in a minute.
But the affinity between collapse and dysregulation is very important.
These states are overwhelming, or in the case of narcissists on some occasions, they're mortifying.
Now there's a lot of utter nonsense on mortification by self-styled experts and coaches and you name it. Ignore. What they describe is actually narcissistic injuries, not mortification.
If you want reliable scientific information about mortification, keep to this channel, search for the word mortification and you will be rewarded.
Okay, so collapse is this dysregulatory and overwhelming. What is the locus of collapse?
The locus of collapse is a fancy way of saying what causes collapse, the etiology, the causation of collapse.
So in the case of the narcissists, the lack of attention. When narcissistic supply is deficient, not forthcoming, not regular, or if there is good reason to assume that it's turned off, there's not going to be a narcissistic supply anymore.
The narcissists then reacts with a state of collapse.
The sense of self-worth of the narcissist is highly sensitive to the flow of narcissistic supply. And his inability to maintain it in any stable manner, inability to stabilize the sense of self-worth, leads directly to collapse.
In the case of the psychopath, a failure to accomplish goals or the clarity that goals are unattainable, both induce in the psychopath a state of collapse.
In the case of the borderline, a threat to external regulation via rejection and abandonment and so and so forth. This would cause a state of collapse.
A lack of object constancy or a lack of introject constancy may induce a state of collapse if the object or the introject are crucial to the sustenance and maintenance of internal equilibrium and homostasis.
So in the case of the narcissists, if the object is a source of narcissistic supply, a lack of object consistency, the possibility of losing the object would induce a state of collapse.
In the case of the psychopath, if the object is closely affiliated with the goal, if the narcissist wants to have sex with someone, take money from someone. That someone is the critical object.
And the case of object in constancy, when the psychopath is afraid of losing the object, may induce a collapse.
So the locus of collapse is varied across the cluster B spectrum, but all cluster B personalities, and quite a few others, for example, paranoid personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, all of them experience collapse.
Collapse, therefore, is on the one hand dysregulatory because it's overwhelming, it's threatening, but on the other hand, it seems to be some kind of regulatory mechanism.
The reaction or the compensation in the state of collapse is either a narcissistic psychopathic or avoidant schizoid.
Whenever someone with a personality disorder goes through a state of collapse, they either withdraw, avoid, isolate themselves, and kind of lick their wounds, process everything that has happened, try to come up with a new framework to make sense of everything and to move forward. That's one type of reaction.
Or on the very contrary, they become highly narcissistic and psychopathic, highly defiant, the externalize aggression, become grandiose, become entitled in your face, sometimes dangerously violent.
Now we could map reactions, compensatory reactions to collapse according to the locus of collapse.
It doesn't matter so much what is the underlying personality disorder, interestingly. What matters much more is the locus of collapse.
So for example, if the collapse is the outcome of a lack of attention or lack of ability to secure attention in covert states like covert narcissism. In this case, the reaction would be in all probability avoidant schizophrenia.
But if the collapse is the outcome of failure, failure to attain or to obtain goals, the compensation or the reaction to the collapse is likely to be psychopathic and narcissistic.
So the reason for the collapse, the etiology of the collapse determines the type of reaction to the collapse.
And because collapse is experienced universally in all Cluster B, or most, in all Cluster B personality disorders and in many other personality disorders, it stands to reason that collapse fulfills some kind of function in the dynamic of personality disorders.
And those of you who want to learn more about it may wish to watch the lecture I gave in McGill University. Just type McGill, MCG ILL, into the search bar, then you will find the lecture where I explained the role of the collapse as a mediator, a mediator in type transition.
I'm not going to interact.
All cluster B personality disorders and many others for example schizoid, schizotypal, paranoid personality disorders, even obsessive compulsive personality disorder, they all have a psychopathic protector self-state. This is most pronounced and most common in borderline and narcissism, as well as in all types of covert personality disorders.
There's a psychopathic protector self-state. The role of this self-state, as the name implies, is to protect, to isolate the person from the environment in a way which would restore a sense of safety, stability, predictability and determinacy.
In other words, the role of the psychopathic protector self-state is to emulate a secure base, provide the individual with a secure base. It's an internally generated secure base, and in many respects, is self-deceptive and delusional, but it still does the job.
When this psychopathic protector self-state takes over, so there's a collapse and then there's a reaction to the collapse.
And the collapse could be as bad as mortification, and in any case, it's overwhelming and disregulated.
So there's a reaction to the collapse. And the reaction to the collapse is compensatory somehow.
There's a change, there's a modification of behaviors that renders the environment less triggering, threatening and then the protector the psychopathic protector self-state comes forward.
It's a secondary psychopath in the case of the borderline. Someone with the borderline personality disorder would become a secondary psychopath. It's a primary psychopath in the case of covert narcissism, for example.
But it's a psychopath all the same.
The job of this psychopathic self-state is to broadcast, to signal to the environment, don't mess with me. I'm dangerous. And also to restore a sense of safety. Don't worry. I'm here to protect you.
It allows the individual to experiment with another type. So an overt narcissist under the aegis and protection of the psychopathic self-state, a grandiose overt narcissism may become a covert narcissist. A covert narcissist will become an overt narcissist. And so on and so forth.
So there is type transition under the umbrella and the protection of the psychopathic self-state experimentation is rendered and perceived as safe.
There's a lot of interplay between schizoid states, narcissistic states, covert states, overt states. There's a lot of experimentation going on.
And this is known in clinical psychology as identity confusion.
So we're beginning to see the sequence.
Collapse. Compensation to collapse or reaction to collapse. The emergence of a protective psychopathic self-state, experimentation with other types or different types of personality disorder, because the original type has failed. The original type has engendered a collapse, so it cannot be trusted anymore. And there's a wish to experiment with alternatives.
But it is not safe to experiment with alternatives under normal circumstances. It is, however, perceived and rendered safe when there is a psychopath protecting you.
So that's the role of the psychopath.
This experimentation with a variety of types, variants of personality disorder, is very reminiscent of what Eric Erickson called the moratorium. It's a form of identity transition or identity formation.
In Eric Erickson's theory of psychosocial development, the moratorium is a period of experimentation, especially in adolescence.
There's this implicit task of discovering who you are and of separating and individuating from the family of origin. It's also embedded in a social context.
Young people try out alternative roles, alternative sexual orientations before committing permanently to a single identity.
Some adolescents are unsuccessful. They negotiate the period of moratorium poorly. They can't make up their minds. Experimentation has failed.
And then they experience confusion over roles and identity. Their identity is diffuse or disturbed and they have a problem with roles as Marcia's theory teaches us.
So what happens to the narcissist after the collapse is similar to this. It's a kind of experimentation with other options, other possibilities.
I used to be an overt, grandiose narcissist. It led me nowhere. It created a collapse. I've been mortified. It's horrible. I don't want to feel this way again. Let me try to be a covert narcissist and see how it works for me.
So this is kind of taking into account the fact that the narcissist's mental age is much younger than his chronological age is. Six years old maybe, nine years old.
The moratorium explanation makes a lot of sense. It's actually a very very young adolescent trying on other identities and other alternatives.
In all these processes there are a few emotions and a few processes and a few processes, you know, a few emotions and a few processes, you know, a few dynamics which are invariant. They characterize all types of collapses for whatever reason in all personality disorders, overt and covert.
Number one, anger. There's righteous indignation. There is a righteous externalization of aggression.
Libby, the great scholar of narcissistic mortification, differentiated between internal and external solution in the vast majority of collapse states as distinct from mortification.
In mortification the two solutions interplay, sometimes there's an internal solution, sometimes external solution.
But in collapse, in states of collapse, there's always an externally directed anger, rage, aggression, and it's righteous. It's perceived as moral, as if the person with the personality disorderhas experienced extreme injustice, and he's reacting to it with indignation, moral rage, moral injury, and so and so forth.
Number two, during the fluid period after the collapse and when the compensation is just forming but the psychopathic protective self-state has not emerged yet in this interregnum, interim period, there is a lot of goal orientation.
The goal orientation is a harbinger of a protector psychopathic self-states, because the psychopath is goal-oriented. So there's the emergence of goal orientation.
And the goal orientation is compulsive, is overwhelming, the goal is perceived as irresistible. And so there's a reduction in impulse control and an inability to delay gratification, an emphasis on instant gratification.
It is at this stage that collapsed personalities, people with personality disorders who are undergoing a collapse, it is at this stage that behavior becomes extremely anti-social and possibly even criminal.
The anger, coupled with goal orientation, coupled with lack of impulse control, coupled with the need for instant gratification, it creates impulsivity, recklessness, dangerous, criminalized, antisocial misconduct. This is very typical of collapsed states.
Collapsed states involve a lot of rumination. Collapse states involve a lot of rumination.
There is a kind of fixation or obsession with the collapse locus, with the causation of the collapse, with the etiology, the reasons for the collapse.
And there's this rumination and obsession and constant self-analysis and other analyses and it coalesces with the anger, it feeds the anger.
Actually, there's good reason to claim that the rumination is the fuel of the anger. The reason for it's kind of a rationalization of the anger.
I've been wronged. I've been the victim of injustice. There's a lot of self-victimization in this process.
And those of you who have had the misfortune of spending time with narcissists and borderlines are intimately acquainted with this phase.
And finally there's a resolution under the umbrella protection of the protector psychopathic self-state.
There's a resolution the individual settles on one of the two families of solutions, the narcissistic psychopathic solution or the avoidant schizoid solution.
In both cases, it's a form of self-checkmating because both cases involve self-defeat or self-destructiveness.
If you're schizoid and avoidant your life is constricted and narrowed then of course this is a form of self-defeat if on the other hand you become narcissistic and psychopathic in your face defying reckless and so you may end up in prison that's a form of self-destructiveness.
So both solutions are kind of self-involved self-negation, self-denial. Both solutions are going out with a bang.
And the psychological mechanisms involved are decompensation. Decompensation is a very common reaction in cluster B personality disorders.
When these people are faced with stress, tension, anxiety, fear, or threat.
It is a common myth and misconception propagated by ignorant self-styled experts that psychopaths are fearless and they experience no anxiety.
It's complete nonsense. The opposite is true, by the way, according to recent studies.
So all Cluster B personality disorders react very dysfunctionally and very badly to stress, tension, anxiety, fear, afraid.
And especially in borderline and narcissism, less so in histrionic and psychopathic and antisocial personality disorders.
But in narcissism and borderline, there's a process called decompensation.
Decompensation is a breakdown in an individual's defense mechanisms, resulting in progressive loss of normal functioning and a worsening of psychiatric symptoms.
In other words, they flip, they become more and more, not wackos, more and more crazy. Out of control, they disintegrate.
To resolve this, somehow recover from this there's a need to regain mastery, regain self-control and if necessary regain self-control by somehow controlling or dominating the environment.
There's a dissonance at the core of this whole process of collapse.
Because collapse challenges head onthe grandiose inflated, fantastic godlike self-perception of narcissists, psychopaths, borderlines, and histrionics.
So there's a huge dissonance involved, cognitive emotional dissonance and so forth.
To resolve this dissonance the individual cannot use defense mechanisms because of the decompensation he cannot in otherwise reframe and falsify reality anymore.
The input from reality is not filtered anymore and cannot be ignored or denied anymore.
And the input from reality is quite clear.
You're a failure. You're a failure. You've been defeated.
It's a shaming input.
So to overcome this combination of dissonance and decompensation, compensation renders the individual helpless.
All the instruments and tools which were used in the past as defense mechanisms to fend off reality, isolate the individual, somehow create a fantastic paracosal space, alternative virtual reality, alternate reality.
These tools broke down and the dissonance is on full display and fully accessible, creates huge amounts of rage, shame, envy, hatred, self-hatred, self-rejection, self-loathing, and so negative affects.
So to resolve this situation, which is intolerable but also life-threatening, there's a need to regain mastery, regain control of yourself and of the environment by pretending that you are the sole authority, the soul and only power, the exclusive master.
And this of course is the source, psychological, psychodynamic source of defiance.
Defiance in your face, contumaciousness, rejection and hatred of authority, they're all intended to regain mastery.
If I'm defiant, it means I'm not dependent on you, it means I don't care about you, it means I couldn't care less what you do or don't do. Your choices do not affect me. I'm invulnerable, I'm untouchable I'm impermeable I am I'm the one and only.
So defiance recklessness contumaciousness they are all forms of signaling to the environment and to oneself that you're in control again. Control has been reasserted.
Rationalization is involved.
The individual affected rationalizes the defiance. Uses externalized aggression, misconduct actions in a way that would sit well with some rational explanation of what had happened to it.
So this is Libby's famous internal solution and external solution.
I have been the victim of malevolent people. So now I'm taking my revenge, for example. That's a kind of rationalization of externalized aggression and the assumption or reassertion of control and mastery by pretending to be the sole decision maker.
I'm going to decide when these individuals are punished because I'm Godlike.
There's a suspension of reality here, suspension of causality, definite it's as if actions don't have consequences as if the present has no future as if you will never have to pay the price for your choices and decisions no matter how egregious they are.
It's a form of magical thinking.
But it does the trick.
In the wake of collapse, it restores these pretensions, these actions, this aggression, they restore egosyntony.
And they constitute the total reactivity, the total reactance, if you wish, total reaction to the collapsed state, is a form of self-supply. It's a form of self-audiencing.
It's as if the individual has given up on the environment, it's given up on other people, it's given up on reality in the world at large, as if an individual says the only environment I can trust is me, my internal environment, the only person I can trust is me, me, me, me. I'm my own best audience. I'm my own best admirer and fan. I'm my best, most reliable source of narcissistic supply. I will never abandon myself. I never reject or betray myself. There's no fear of betrayal trauma or anything.
So let me focus on myself.
Even when the solution is narcissistic, psychopathic, the solution, the reaction to the collapse is narcissistic psychopathic, it still involves denouncing the environment giving up on the environment shunning it attacking it rejecting it.
The schizoid avoidant solution or reaction to collapse is of course renouncing the environment.
So the choices between denouncing the environment and renouncing the environment.
So the choices between denouncing the environment and renouncing the environment narcissism psychopathy or schizoid avoidant.
Denouncing versus renouncing.
In any case the environment becomes irrelevant and the person the individual who's been affected by collapse, comes totally self-contained and self-sufficient via self-audiencing and self-supply, nurtures his wounds, waits until mechanisms involving cognitive distortion and so on rebuild the grandiosity, restore the false self and then the individual is ready and willing to take on the world and he does.
Then there is a re-emergence from the cocoon and a second round of engaging with the world on his or her own terms, of course, until the next collapse. Inevitable, guaranteed collapse.
Again, in very rare cases, collapse comes through a process known as narcissistic mortification.
All in all, the cluster B personality disorders are not actually stable conditions. They're very fluid, they're in fluxto cluster B personality disorders, a psychodynamic rigidity. Rigidity is nothing to do B personality disorders, a psychodynamic rigidity. Rigidity is nothing to do with these disorders. On the very contrary, they are chimeric, they're kaleidoscopic, they're ever shifting, the shape-shifting. And the collapse is the mediator of all these transitions much more in my lecture to McGill University faculty thank you for listening.