It is time for your Vaknin Doze. Vaknin, you say? Who is Vaknin? Sam Vaknin, are you living under a rock? Sam Vaknin, the author of Malignant Self-Love and Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology to the detriment of all his students. And today we are going to discuss, as usual, a plethora of topics somehow mysteriously interconnected via my gigantic intellect. Okay, enough modesty. Let's get to business. The narcissist, as you know from my previous videos, those of you who had survived my previous videos, the narcissist demands two out of three essays, the famous three essays. He demands two out of three essays from his so-called intimate partner in the shared fantasy.
What are these three essays? Sex, of course, number one, supply, both narcissistic supply and sadistic supply, if he is a sadist. And the third is services, all kinds of services. As a driver, as a cook, as a chambermaid, as a personal assistant.
So the narcissist expects at least two of these three. It could be supply and services. It could be sex and services. It could be sex and supply.
Unfortunately, that's it. These are the three permutations.
And if he doesn't get, if he's not getting these two out of three, well, he moves on to devalue and discard.
Actually, the trigger or the signal for devalue and discard is when more than two of these three essays are missing or begin to be missing.
But the three essays are only one brick in a two brick wall. And the second brick is what I call the E2A.
So again, three essays and E2A. What is the E2A? Sounds like a Pentagon brief. The E2A is something the narcissist expects as well.
Unmitigated exclusivity. That's the E. Adulation. That's the first A. And availability. Unlimited, instant, on-call, on-demand availability.
So I repeat, exclusivity, adulation, availability, E2A, three essays, sex, supply, services, E2A, exclusivity, adulation, availability.
If the partner denies him any of these three or any of these six in combinations, at that point, the narcissist devalues and discards the partner.
So when it comes to the three essays, two out of three are enough. When it comes to the E2A, all three should be present. The partner should be exclusive, adulate the narcissist, and be immediately available on-call.
If any of these three is missing, the partner is devalued and discarded.
Now, the narcissist can discard the partner in a variety of ways.
For example, he can absent himself from the relationship emotionally. He can stop having sex, withdraw sex. He can simply vanish, disappear physically.
There are many ways to discard the partner.
So two out of three essays and E2A. The only exception to these rules, and they are steadfast rules, they apply to all types of narcissists, all subtypes.
The only exception is the compensatory cerebral narcissist.
Yeah, you're right. It's getting more complicated by the video. Compensatory cerebral narcissist.
The cerebral narcissist is a narcissist who leverages his intelligence, his intellect, his education, and his erudition. He leverages these to obtain narcissistic supply, to secure adulation, admiration, adoration, and attention. That's a cerebral narcissist.
He doesn't have much of a body, but he has a big brain, no brawn or brain. And he uses this brain, he puts it on display as in a kind of a pyrotechnic exhibition, which attracts admirers and adulators and fans, and even heterosexual women, women who are attracted to intelligence. Genius narcissist, narcissist with the Wunderkind musk, the musk of genius, that genius narcissist doesn't lack for female attention or male attention.
The compensatory cerebral narcissist is a cerebral narcissist who does all this, leverages his intellect and intelligence and knowledge and so on. He does all this because he's trying to compensate for a deep set sense of inadequacy, for lack, for a feeling that he is somehow inferior to others.
And the narcissism on display is compensatory. It compensates for this.
The compensatory cerebral narcissist demands only supply and services. He does not want sex and he expects only total adulation and availability, but not exclusivity.
And this is the only type of narcissist who does this. All other narcissists expect two out of three S's and E2A exclusivity, adulation and availability.
The compensatory cerebral narcissist expects only supply and services, adulation and availability. The compensatory cerebral narcissist goes through lengthy bouts of celibacy.
And these are the trenchant outcomes of egregious self-hatred, self-loathing and self-punishment grounded in fathomless self-rejection.
But in addition to that, the cerebral narcissist, like all narcissists of all types, is actually a misogynist if he is a man or a misandrist if she is a woman. And this misogyny or misandry, they are couched in ideological terms of grandiose superiority.
A typical compensatory cerebral narcissist would tell you, I need and I want nothing from women or men. I don't need anyone. I don't need anything and I don't want anything.
And consequently, no one has power over me. I am not like everyone else. Everyone else needs sex, wants sex, pursues and chases sexual partners. I'm above this. I'm superior. I'm an intellect. I'm a brain and only a brain.
It's a rejection of the body, of course. And in many ways, it's a form of body dysmorphia. And it is, of course, a manifestation of grandiosity.
So when the cerebral, when the compensatory cerebral narcissist rejects sex and forgoes exclusivity, he's displaying his grandiosity, which had ossified to the point of ideology.
Grandiosity is a very misunderstood cognitive bias coupled with a defense mechanism. I've discussed this at length in other videos. It's a set, grandiosity is a set of psychological defenses founded on cognitive biases and on an impaired reality testing.
The main function of grandiosity is to uphold and buttress a distorted fantasy self-perception, a counterfactual self-image.
But this self-image, the locus of the fantastic grandiosity, can be negative, not only positive. This is where all self-styled online experts spew nonsense.
Grandiosity is not about being the best, being the greatest, being perfect. No, it's not. It's about upholding the narcissist's self-image and self-perception. And if the self-image and self-perception are negative, the narcissist is vehemently going to protect these negative self-perceptions and self-image. He's going to be emotionally invested. He's going to be affected in his negative self-image and self-perception. He's going to brag. He's going to feel proud of his negativity, of his deficiencies, of his deficits, of his lacks, and of his biases.
Narcissists affect, emotionally invest, in being extreme, not in being perfect.
And so the locus of the grandiosity, the locus of the fantasy, the self-image, or the self-perception can absolutely be negative. A narcissist, for example, can be proud of what a consummate failure is, what an amazing unprecedented loser is, how humble he is, how downtrodden, how mistreated, how virtuous, how saintly, how whorish, how unattractive he is, and so on.
So, all you have to do is visit the online communities of incels. Incels are the vast majority of them, are narcissists, and yet they are narcissists who brag about being actually ugly, repulsive, unattractive. I've dedicated a whole video to this, the masochistic, the masochistic anti-narcissism.
So, it's not about being perfect, it's about being the perfect adjective, the perfect winner, but also the perfect loser, the perfect success, but also the perfect failure, the perfect beauty, but also the perfect ugliness.
As long as it is perfect, the grandiosity is invested there.
And this is precisely why the compensatory rebel narcissist rejects sex and rejects and forgoes, gives up on exclusivity because his grandiosity is invested in his lack of sexuality, in his celibacy, in his unattractiveness, in his non-existence, non-corporeal existence, non-bodily existence. He negates his body to perfection. He perfectly rejects his imperfect body.
All other narcissists are not like that, of course, and that is why they do expect to have sex, to receive sex from the intimate partner, and they do expect her to be exclusive.
In these cases where the narcissist is invested in negativity, the grandiosity will be invested in negative automatic thoughts. It will serve to aggressively defend these thoughts against challenges and countervailing information from the outside.
Anyone who had administered cognitive behavioral therapy to a narcissist knows that I'm right. The narcissist would argue with you if you try to kind of disabuse the narcissist of some patently erroneous counterfactual negative automatic thoughts, the narcissist will fight back tooth and claw.
You tell the narcissist, but wait a minute, you're handsome, you're not ugly, and the narcissist will disparage you and tell you that you're an idiot. He is ugly. He's the ugliest man on earth. There's never been anyone uglier than him and never will be, etc.
This is his claim to fame. This is where his grandiosity resides.
Okay, I'd like to move now to the second part of the video, which has to do with borderlines.
Borderlines are very confusing characters, and they're very confusing characters because borderline personality disorder is a misleading misnomer. It's not a personality, it's an assemblage of self-states, each one coming very close to being a separate personality. And these self-states or sub-personalities or pseudo-identities, these self-states are very often mutually exclusive. This is known as identity disturbance.
The borderline doesn't have a core, stable, predictable identity.
And so, borderlines are likely to say things, to exclaim, to argue in ways that throw the listener off in ways that confuse and befuddle and puzzle.
For example, one of the most common exclamations of the promiscuous or otherwise dysregulated borderline is, now I want to settle down. Now I want to have a stable lifelong love relationship.
Why shouldn't we believe the borderline when she says this?
Because it's not true. This statement is attributable to a single self-state, in flux, in transit.
Healthy folks, healthy people, transition through phases in life. Healthy people evolve, normal people grow and develop in a linear, predictable fashion. A leads to B, B inevitably, ineluctably leads to C.
The borderline is not the same. She is more cyclical than linear. The borderline cycles between beliefs, behavioral norms, preferences, priorities, fervent wishes, plans and schemes.
In this sense, she resembles, to some extent, the patients with bipolar disorder.
This constant cycling, this personality in flux, is exceedingly, exceedingly confusing.
And so, there is no stable or foreseeable core.
This identity disturbance simply means that when the borderline tells you, I've had a long phase of, I don't know, casual sex and promiscuity and drunkenness and drug addiction and I don't know what. And now, I'm cleaning my act up. I'm sorting out my life. I'm planning to have a stable, loving, long-term relationship. I'm planning to settle down. I'm planning to conform and to become normal, like everyone else.
Do not believe her, of course. She knows not what she is saying because she is not saying anything. It's not she who is saying this. It's a self-state, highly dissociated from the other self-state, although not completely.
So, the borderline's sudden adherence to prudery, exclusivity, domesticity is a self-delusion. It's a self-deluding sham. It's a fantasy or an experiment.
The borderline used to prefer young men or young women and now, suddenly, he or she prefer older men or older women. She used to prefer casual sex. Now, she wants exclusive sex. She used to have pseudo-relationships, which lasted weeks or months and now, suddenly, she wants something which is going to be lifelong.
She was itinerant. She moved all over the globe, and now, suddenly, she wants to settle down in a tiny hamlet or some village or some township somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Is this likely, such changes are unbelievable because they are not believable. They are incredible. They have no credibility. They do not reflect any external or internal reality.
They are, again, a fantasy defense or an experiment.
The borderline wants to experiment with an alternative lifestyle, with a new choice in men or women, with a new type of sex.
So, the borderline is a constant experiment in the making. She is unlikely to persist. There is no stability in borderline by definition. She is likely to revert to an earlier phase.
Now, she wants to settle down. She wants to be sexually exclusive. It's temporary. It's not going to last. She is going to revert to a promiscuous, unbounded, decompensated and dysregulated formal sex.
Now, she wants to have a family and children. Worry not. She is going to divorce sooner than you can bat your eyelids. She wants to settle down in an apartment or a place, a location, a country. It's meaningless. It's utterly meaningless. It's ethereal. It's ephemeral. She is a butterfly. She is not an elephant. And she recurrently pendulates, fluctuates between several mutually exclusive self-states, which share nothing in common or little in common.
Who is she? There is no, there's nobody there. It's a compendium, an assemblage, a theater production. Can you rely on this for life? Of course not. Can you take anything she says for granted as a reflection of her inner mental state? Of course not.
It's, again, a single self-state that is making these choices and decisions.
Is she tired of her current lifestyle? You bet. That's why she is transitioning to another lifestyle. When she gets tired of that lifestyle too, you can bet you. You can bet she'll get tired of that lifestyle too and then she's going to revert to the previous lifestyle or to a totally new lifestyle.
The borderline gets easily tired of and bored with it. People, intimate partners, places, professions, locations, hobbies, wishes, preferences, priorities, beliefs, values, identity, disturbance. That's why the history of the borderline is checkered, unexpected, tumultuous, bizarre, quantum leaps, no logic, no rhyme, and no reason, because it's not a single person. It's very, very close to dissociative identity disorder.
Indeed, if you were to push a borderline, stress her massively, reject her, humiliate her, abandon her. If you were to do this on a permanent basis for a long time, she will devolve into a totally dissociative state. She will become someone with dissociative identity disorder, temporary, transient.
And many border lines display behaviors which are dysfunctional, not only to themselves, but undermine the very possibility to realize ostensibly long-term decisions, life-altering decisions.
Consider, for example, border lines who are habitual cheaters. Of course, serial cheaters and habitual cheaters do not have to be border lines and we do not have any statistics, believe it or not, as to how many border lines cheat habitually. How many of them betray the trust? How many of them are unfaithful? How many of them are adulterous? Strangely, bizarrely, I would say, we don't have statistics for this.
Anecdotally, anecdotally, if you go to online forums or the literature, it seems that border lines tend to cheat more and more often, but this is mere anecdote and speculation.
Still, habitual cheaters, serial cheaters, who are also border lines, have been studied and have been studied well. They are masters of evasion and obfuscation.
And border lines have two favorite self-justifying refrains. When you confront the borderline and ask her, why did you cheat in almost every single one of your relationships, she's likely to use two sentences. These sentences are even documented in the literature repeatedly in multiple studies, papers, articles and books.
So the first thing a borderline, habitual serial cheater would tell you, the relationships I had cheated in and on, these relationships had been already dead when I cheated. So yes, it's true that I cheated on most of my boyfriends, on all my husbands, etc. But I did this because the relationship had already died. I was actually not cheating because there was nothing there.
The thing is, of course, that relationships can be either on or off, nothing else. Either a relationship is on or it is off. As long as a dyad, liaison, connection, relationship, as long as it is on, in a state of on, it is very much alive, it's not dead.
Behaving as if the relationship were off when it is actually on is deception and betrayal at their ugliest and most extreme. And doing it time and again is highly narcissistic and borders on psychopathy. Both characteristics of borderline personality disorder, borderlines have grandiosity and they switch to psychopathic states when they are stressed.
The second sentence that the borderline is likely to use is, the relationship was sexless. There was no sex there anymore. I wasn't getting what I needed, so I cheated.
In the majority of cases, this is a lie.
When you investigate more deeply, you discover that the relationship was not sexless, not in any sense of the word that I'm aware of, definitely not in the lexical sense, not even in the clinical sense.
We define a sexless relationship as a relationship where there have been fewer than 10 sex acts in a year.
So when you study the relationships of borderlines who are serial or habitual cheaters, you discover that these relationships were not sexless. The other partner, for example, may be attempting to have sex, or the sex is merely unsatisfactory, but it is there. In many cases, the cheaters are the ones who undermine the sex with passive-aggressive behaviors or by rejecting the partner outright.
Only in a vanishingly minuscule number of instances known as sex aversion is sex utterly absent from the relationship, and even then, of course, the only right thing to do is to negotiate an open relationship and, failing that, walk away.
I don't wish to appear as though I'm castigating or chastising borderlines or any other mental illness. This is not a value judgment. This is the description of what we observe. This is a field diary. It's like going to the field and observing, I don't know, a tribe. These are observations which are evidence-based with regards to borderline behavior.
Borderlines is closely associated with recklessness. In the case of sex and relationships, it's associated with promiscuity.
But why do I say that the borderline cannot transition from promiscuity to a stable, long-term, sexually-exclusive relationship? Why do I insist that she is unlikely to persist and very likely to revert to a promiscuous phase?
Because there are two types of promiscuity.
You know, there is this saying, once promiscuous, always promiscuous. There's a saying, once a cheater, always a cheater. And there is this piece of advice. If you're in a relationship with a promiscuous partner, they will always cheat on you. They can't help it. It's an addiction to sexual attention.
But are these statements true? If someone is promiscuous, is she likely to be always promiscuous? If someone is a cheater, is he likely to cheat again? And if someone used to be promiscuous and now you're married to her or to him, are they likely to misbehave? Are they likely to cheat on you because they're addicted to sexual attention and can't help it?
Well, studies are unequivocal. I refer you also to popular books like Carrie Cohan's books and so on. But studies are pretty unambiguous, pretty clear about this. All these sentences are true. All these sentences are true. Someone who had been promiscuous in early life for a protracted period of time and promiscuity had been the dominant type of sex in their lives, sexual practice, they're likely to be promiscuous lifelong. Someone who had cheated once is three to five times more likely to cheat.
If you're in a relationship with someone who had been promiscuous, she is likely to cheat on you much more than someone who had never been promiscuous.
All these statements are true according to all the studies we have.
As the author and therapist Carrie Cohan observes, promiscuity, she calls it loose girl syndrome, loose girl syndrome.
Promiscuity is a lifelong condition which is often associated with mental illness and with substance abuse.
But when the literature fails, is in making the distinction between two types of promiscuity, formative promiscuity and situational promiscuity.
Formative promiscuity is the learned use of sexual attention to regulate negative moods and negative affects, negative emotions.
Formative promiscuity is a form of self-soothing, self-medication, an attempt to reassert control over a life perceived as adrift, meaningless and spiraling out of control.
Formative promiscuity, in some respects, has the same psychodynamic that drives the narcissist's solicitation of narcissistic supply.
The formatively promiscuous person seeks attention, sexual attention, which serves to regulate ego functions, such as a sense of self-worth, reality testing.
Exactly as the narcissist solicits narcissistic supply for the same purposes, for precisely the same purposes.
Formative promiscuity is what we call process addiction. It's a process addiction. It's an addiction to an activity, not an addiction to a chemical substance.
Process addictions start usually in early adolescence and they persist throughout the lifespan. It's extremely rare to read yourself to get rid of a process addiction. Your chances to get rid of a chemical dependency are much higher than your chances to get rid of a process addiction.
Formative promiscuity being a process addiction is extensive, is lifelong. You cannot eradicate it. It's going to erupt sooner or later, even if you're married to someone you love dearly, have a family, a stable life and everything, your promiscuity will take over in the most unexpected moments.
Formative promiscuity, process addictions characterize all interactions with potential sex partners.
Regardless of the promiscuous person's life circumstances at the moment, the promiscuous person can be completely, utterly, unmitigatedly happy, content, invested in a meaningful primary relationships and then she will go to a bar and someone will smile at her and she will find herself in a hotel room with him.
As simple as that, she can't help it. She's an addict and this is the type of promiscuity of the borderline.
Borderlines have process addictions. One of them is promiscuity, addiction to sexual attention.
Situational promiscuity is something completely different. It's a reaction to trauma, most commonly a reaction to rejection, to neglect, to abandonment by a loved one. Situational promiscuity is limited in time. It is responsive to overcoming and processing grief and depression. It is very common, for example, after a difficult or unexpected divorce.
In this case, there's a lot of mourning, a lot of depression and difficulty to process the suddenness and abruptness of the lifestyle change.
And so promiscuity seeps in. It appears, it's situational.
Once the grief had been processed, the person is likely to revert to a more healthy lifestyle and more healthy sexual choices.
Situational promiscuity also disappears. Once the circumstances change, for example, when a new love interest emerges or a stable relationship is established, that's not the case with formative promiscuity.
Formative promiscuity is permanent, constant, utterly regardless of what's happening in the promiscuous person's life. And it is the only form of promiscuity common in borderlines.
You had been warned. Now go get them.