The other day I came across an amazing, unprecedented phenomenon. A comment on one of my YouTube videos that I failed to delete. It's a pleasure, you know, I can't control it.
Okay Shoshanim, what did the comments say?
Sam, that's me. How exactly does the intimate partner regulate the borderline's emotions? How does the regulation occur? What does the partner do to effect emotional regulation in the borderline?
Now, I coined the phrase external regulation to describe a form of internal regulation, and I did this in order to discombobulate you. Look it up.
External regulation is when the process of internal regulation is misattributed to an external source.
Now, in healthy, normal people, the control of moods, emotions, interaction with reality, reality testing, etc. All these come from the inside. There is a sensation, there's a feeling, there's an experience of innate control, in hearing, something that is embedded somewhere in your chest or something.
In external control, the control of moods, emotions, reality testing, cognitions, you name it. Emotions are the main thing, but many other things are being regulated on a regular basis.
So in external regulation, the internal processes of regulation continue apace, exactly like in normal or healthy people, but the individual firmly believes that the regulation is coming from the outside.
This is a kind of misattribution, or if you wish, kind of attribution error.
And this is the topic of today's video.
How does the borderline experience this regulation that is coming from the outside, the hand of God, if you wish? What is taking place in her mind or his mind? Half of all borderlines are men. What is taking place in her mind when she interacts with someone, she believes is reaching inside, reaching inside her brain, inside her mind and rearranging the furniture. How does it feel? What does she feel? How does she interpret it? What kind of narrative or story is she telling herself?
That's the topic of today's video and who better qualified to discuss it than what?
Ma.
Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse and a professor of clinical psychology in multiple universities lately.
Okay, let's delve right in.
We all have a regulatory system. Regulatory systems are a group, a set of interacting mechanisms that act in order to maintain equilibrium, homeostasis, any other stable state.
So regulation within or mediated via the regulatory system is about stability.
The main purpose of regulation is to maintain stability. Even financial regulation, for example, the Fed, national banks, even financial regulation is about maintaining stability.
Now, human beings regulate many things all the time, physiologically, but also psychologically and mentally. Processes that happen in the brain, they regulate people, for example, regulate consciousness.
There are many activities taking place within your mind that are aimed at managing or changing the state and contents of consciousness. Avoiding pain, seeking pleasure, sick in thrills, risks and variety, etc.
Self-destructive activities. Self-harming, chemical intoxication, self-mutilation, substance abuse, they are also forms of efforts attempts to regulate states of consciousness.
They are self-destructive, self-defeating, they're dysfunctional, they're wrong, but they are still about regulation.
It's everything, many of the things we do have to do with this desperate need to keep the environment, the internal environment, stable, fixed, predictable.
What the borderline does, she outsources her ego functions. Functions that normally take place within the individual, in what was known in psychoanalytic literature as the ego, these functions are relegated to the outside.
A typical borderline would outsource these functions to an intimate partner or a special friend, a special person, someone with whom she feels safe to experience intimacy and to expose her vulnerabilities.
These kind of people are rare and when the borderline finds them, she unburdens herself. She stops to exist in a way, she deactivates herself. And she allows these people from the outside to interfere, intervene in her internal landscape, in her inner space, and carry out the functions that she should have carried autonomously.
This is a symbiotic relationship, and we'll discuss it a bit later.
The transfer of ego functions to the outside, to an intimate partner, to a special friend, to a special person, the transfer, this by the way happens in autism to some extent, this transfer of ego functions is utterly automatic. It's not a decision. It's not like the borderline sits alone at home, eating a TV meal, and debates with herself whether to kind of convey her ego functions to someone or relegate them to someone.
This is not the way it works.
When she comes across someone who fulfills the criteria and I refer you to my video about managing the borderline enchantress when she finds someone who meets the criteria she automatically dislodges her ego functions, transfers them to that person and becomes a passive recipient, receptacle, a container, of the other person's decisions, activities, choices, personality, predilections, and so on.
She becomes a blank canvas upon which the other person can paint himself or herself. She's 100% responsive to cues and stimuli from the outside. It's a very interesting transformation to behold.
And it involves the following.
The regulation of emotions and moods.
The other person, the special friend, the special person, the intimate partner, the other person is granted absolute power to alter the moods and to control the emotions, to evoke them, to silence them, to trigger them, to deactivate them, total control over the operating system of the borderline.
With a single word, this specific individual can plunge the borderline into complete depression and despair or into narcissistic elation of indescribable proportions.
Power is infinite, unlimited, exorbitant, if you wish.
The same effect on the borderline's moods applies to her emotions.
That person from the outside, the external regulator, can trigger and provoke and elicit any emotion, negative or positive, love or hatred, fear or a sense of safety, anything, envy, compassion.
It is as if the borderline's mind has been transmitted remotely into someone else to do with as he or she pleases.
And gradually, with time, protocols emerge, keywords, triggers, buttons to be pushed. The two parties settle into kind of ritual where one of them has all the power and the other one controls that person from the bottom via her helplessness and neediness and clinging.
It's very reminiscent of codependent dynamics. The borderline signals her needs.
For example, now she needs to be elated. Or now she wants to experience a modicum of depression and despair. Or now she wants to feel love. Or now she hates, or needs to hate.
And then she expects the partner to respond in kind, to push the right buttons, to say the right words, to behave in specific ways.
When she experiences engulfment anxiety, the partner is supposed to walk away. When she experiences abandonment anxiety, the partner is supposed to be 100% of a time, present. When she loves the partner, he is supposed to act in a lovable way. When she hates the partner, he is supposed to become obnoxious.
The partner is molded by the expectations of the borderline while maintaining the power to gratify, satisfy, or realize these expectations.
Self-actualization of the borderline is a derivative of the decisions and choices made by the intimate partner or the special friend within a ritualized highly structured context and again watch the video about the enchantress, the link is in the description. It is a cult-like situation, it's a paracosm, it's a shared fantasy and it drifts away from reality the longer the partners are enmeshed and embedded in this out of context, decontextualized, self-generated, on-the-fly ambience and environment.
When the borderline is in this arrangement when she has found someone she could trust to regulate her from the outside or someone she could attribute to the regulation that actually takes place inside her.
When she finds someone like that and they have established their shared fantasy, the borderline experiences a sense of unitary completion, as if she has been a partial person, and then she has found her complement.
She has found someone to complete her and to become unitary, a single unit, a single organism.
It's a holistic perception. It's benign.
It's not like the narcissist takeover, which is essentially hostile and exploitative. It's not like the codependent, co-dependence strategies, which are Machiavellian in many cases, and involve control.
In the case of the borderline, it's more about submission. It is true submission, kind of Islam, if you wish, it is true submission that the borderline emerges into the wholeness, into the completed perfection that is the symbiotic merger and fusion with an intimate partner or the special person.
At that point, the borderline experiences something very rare for her.
And again, I say her, half of all borderlines are men.
The borderline experiences something very rare.
Balance, equilibrium, homeostasis, a secure base, a sense of safety, stability, predictability, the glimmerings of object constancy.
The borderline is incapable of experiencing introject constancy. In other words, she is incapable of creating stable representations of other people in her mind.
She is capable of object constancy, but she is distrustful of people. She is terrified of exposing her vulnerabilities, of being hurt, rejected, abandoned, humiliated, shamed. She's terrorized by the potential of other people to harm her somehow.
She, therefore, avoids to the best of her ability intimacy unless it is with someone who she then designates the special person or the special frame or the intimate partner.
So very few get chosen.
A borderline may fleet, like a butterfly, you know, a light on multiple people, but she doesn't really become herself very often, takes a special kind of partner.
And then when she feels this internal resettling, internal settling, actually, not resettling, internal settling, internal cohesion, internal correspondence, internal resonance, that is all encompassing, all pervasive, ubiquitous and yet warm, accepting, embracing.
It is only then that she allows herself to experience object constancy with her loved one, with her one and that feels utterly oceanic it's like going back to the womb and we will discuss in a minute the parental implications of this but it's like going back to the matrix, to the womb.
And it is this exactly that triggers in the borderline, her engulfment anxiety.
By going back to the womb, she is being unborn. She is annihilating herself, annulling her so.
By merging and fusing symbiotically with her loved one, the borderline vanishes.
She gradually transitions from full-fledged organism to a single ovum or sperm or whatever.
And then not even that.
There's a risk of disappearing altogether.
This creates engulfment anxiety and the famous approach avoidance, repetition, compulsion.
It's all about the avoidance and mitigation of pain.
The motivating force, if you wish, the motivating dynamic, the motivating emotional landscape in the borderline's life is hurt and pain, agonizing, excruciating, debilitating, fiery, consuming pain.
Her entire life is dedicated to the designing and implementation of strategies to skirt this pain, to avoid it, to mitigate it, to ameliorate it, to ignore it, to deny it, to reframe it, to do something with it.
When she finds a person to love, when she finds an intimate partner or a special person or a special friend, what have you, she allows herself to feel the pain.
She allows herself to feel the pain.
She perceives love as pain. She perceives love as a form of slavery, addiction. It's painful. It's a painful experience.
And her solution is to self- infantilize.
She regresses. She becomes an infant, a toddler, then an infant, then a newborn, then in the womb. She infantilizes, regresses almost to a previous incarnation, if you believe in this kind of nonsense.
And at that point, she expects the intimate partner or the special friend to assume the parental role and the parental discourse.
She childifies herself. She reduces herself into a childlike state, fully expecting the other partner to respond in kind by becoming a parental figure and engaging in parental speech.
And so this is the way she avoids the pain.
It is as if she says, I'm a child, don't hurt me. Or as if she says, I'm a child, I'm incapable of understanding the profundity and extent of adult pain.
And so having been consumed by her intimate partner, by her lover, by her special friend, having consumed, subsumed, assumed, having merged and fused, having become this perfection, which is holistic and which is a secure base, safe, stable, determinate, predictable, this introduces structure and order into the borderline's otherwise utterly chaotic personality organization, world and life.
It reduces the chaos. It's an anti-chaos strategy.
And within this structure and order, she strikes a bargain. She negotiates a deal. It's a contract. It's not transactional. She's not a gold diger. It's not transactional. Give and take. I'll give you sex. You give me money for sex. Not this kind of thing.
But it is still contractual. There are rights, they're corresponding or commensurate duties. And there are rituals and protocols. They're all very rigid and embedded in any deviation, any divergence from this contractual landscape triggers the borderline, renders her extremely anxious, paralyzed with fear, anticipation, and injuries and mortifications.
Borderline is a very, very fragile structure, very fragile person. And as opposed to the narcissists, she does not have well-developed narcissistic defenses.
And so she is a kind of narcissist without the shell, a turtle without the shell.
And this is why she keeps getting overwhelmed internally as well as externally.
She has no defenses to speak of, except very primitive, infantile defenses, which are not up to the task, for example, splitting.
She needs nurturance. She seeks satisfaction and gratification of her wishes and aspirations, dreams and hopes and fantasies, accomplishments. She needs a horizon. She needs hope.
The borderline's relationship with her loved ones is a relationship of eternal hope springs. Hope springs eternal there. It's not malignant optimism.
The borderline is pretty grounded in some ways because she is highly paranoid and suspicious. She sees through people. Most people are transparent to the borderline, but she wants some hope.
Because she is, by nature, depressive and even suicidal, she needs some counterpoint. She requires some counterweight.
And it is the role of the intimate partner to provide her with hope.
It is the mere presence of the partner.
The partner doesn't have to do much, honestly. It is the mere presence of the partner that is sufficient.
The mere constancy of the object, the mere existence, the mere availability of the partner or the loved one of the special person, they're enough to ignite in her a flame of hope.
And it is not a consuming flame. It is an energizing flame. It is the warmth in a cold winter day.
This is how she perceives the relationship, like some kind of a flame. A flame that keeps you warm, a flame that keeps away the wild animals, a flame around which you can tell stories, narratives that comfort, that reduce anxiety, that make the world habitable. It's like a campfire.
The intimate partner has to intercede with reality. Reality is intermediated via the intimate partner or via the special person.
The borderline has no access to reality, no contact with reality, except through the intermediation and intercession of other people, people she trusts.
I call it vicarious reality testing.
We know a lot about regulation, regulatory functions. There is even a theory known as regulatory focus theory.
Regulatory focus theory is a conceptual framework. It discusses motivation and behavior.
The theory suggests that people are fundamentally either promotion oriented or prevention oriented.
When people make decisions and choices, when they pursue certain courses of action, when they anticipate consequences and outcomes, when they position themselves, when they adopt goals and so on so forth, they're either focused on prevention or focused on promotion.
And according to the theory, promotion-focus self-regulation is concerned with nurturance, with accomplishment of needs, and with the pursuit of wishes and aspirations.
This the borderline is incapable of, except through the intermediation of another person.
The promotion focus self-regulation results in sensitivity to positive outcomes and to relative pleasure from gains. Freud would have called it the pleasure principle.
Prevention-focused self-regulation is concerned with safety and security needs, and is focused on meeting duties and obligations. It results in sensitivity to negative outcomes and to relative pain from losses.
This is exactly the internal landscape of the borderline. She is prevention focused, has self-regulation.
It is intended to prevent pain and other adverse consequences.
And so the theory says that your disposition towards either obtaining gains or avoiding losses influences your dominant motivations and affects your behavioral choices.
This is exactly what happens with the borderline.
Her propensity, her disposition towards preventative measures, avoiding pain, reducing stress, walking away from untoward adverse, dangerous circumstances, not dangerous, but unpleasant circumstances.
This attitudinal, motivational space of the borderline causes her to adopt strategies which relegate promotional self-regulation to an intimate partner or a loved one or a special friend.
It's as if the borderline says, I am half a person. As I am, all alone, I'm half a person. I'm capable only of preventing, I'm capable of preventing loss and pain, but I'm incapable of making myself happy. I'm incapable of experiencing pleasure.
And so I need you, my intimate partner, I need you, my special person, I need you, my loved one. I need you to bring pleasure and happiness into my life.
And it is via pleasure and happiness that I regulate my internal environment that I avoid, for example, suicidality.
This is more or less the deal between the borderline and her loved ones, her nearest, dearest and closest.
And when we apply regulatory focus theory to borderline, we understand the borderlines communication patterns, the way she organizes her life, the organizational principles that control her life, the way she performstasks, many things, I will not go into them right now.
I hope I've answered the question that this video started with.
It's not easy. It's not easy to understand or accept a person who vacates herself, empties herself on purpose.
She kind of accepts her emptiness, her void, the black hole, which is her essence, and tries to fill it in, tries to negate it somehow, via other people.
But she does it intentionally and deliberately, strategically.
And so it's the equivalent of embracing the emptiness as a tool of motivating people to negate it.
This is the paradoxical nature of the borderline's existence.
She is an emptiness. She seeks to destroy herself by destroying this emptiness.
And she derives pleasure, satisfaction, comfort, a sense of safety, all the positive emotions, love by destroying the emptiness that she is.
It's a paradoxical strategy.
The only way for you to be happy is to not be anymore.