I would say it's exactly the opposite, actually. I think it's reverse. I think the way it is presented is wrong.
I think the ability to thrive in intimacy, an integral part of the intimacy skills, this ability is inextricably linked to the capacity to maintain and enforce personal boundaries.
In personality disorder patients, both the ability to thrive in intimacy and the capacity to maintain and enforce personal boundaries, both of them are sorely compromised.
People with personality disorders don't do intimacy, they can't do intimacy. Even if they are driven to have and to do intimacy, they want intimacy, they desire intimacy, they fantasize about intimacy, nothing they want more. They can't, they don't have the necessary skills and they are compromised by the fact that they don't have personal boundaries. They don't have personal boundaries because the separation-individuation phase in the childhood of people with personality disorder, this phase of separation from the parent and becoming an individual, individuation, was disrupted. The parent bridged the child's boundaries, did not allow the child to separate.
So the adult, the child turned adult, has the same problem. He or she doesn't have personal boundaries and how can you have intimacy without personal boundaries?
Now, in most literature and many self-styled experts, they get it wrong. They put the cart before the horse. They say that in intimacy, you should have strong personal boundaries.
They don't realize that you can't have intimacy without strong personal boundaries.
Intimacy, however fleeting, whatever the nature of the intimacy, even if it's merely physical intimacy in a one-night stand, all intimacy is a tightrope act.
On the one hand, intimacy involves the disclosure of vulnerabilities and the relaxation of firewalls.
In intimacy, we open ourselves up in full view and we disclose shortcomings, failings, vulnerabilities, soft points, chinks in the armor. We become vulnerable, become exposed.
So this is one major component of intimacy. We put up these firewalls, we put up these protections and defenses and fortresses and moats. We put them up to fend off, to reject unwarranted or coerced attention.
We want to keep out people who try to impose themselves on us with no respect to who we are, what we want, what we don't want, etc.
So the first act of intimacy is dismantling these defenses. This is exactly exposing vulnerability.
But on the other hand, real intimacy entails the maintaining of personal autonomy, agency, self-efficacy, independence. In other words, real intimacy is about separateness, is about being separate from the person you're intimate with. Separated and together, it's like a Venn diagram where you have these two circles and they have an area in common. That area in common is the intimacy.
But intimacy maintains the separateness, the autonomy, the independence, the agency, the self-efficacy of its constituents.
Intimacy is a balancing act between separateness and togetherness, sharing commonalities and having a private life separate from the partner where the partner sometimes has no access without feeling insecure or challenged or damaged somehow or angry.
So on the one hand, you open up. It's like opening the borders after COVID. You open up and you allow the internet partner to come in.
But on the other hand, you don't give up on yourself. You don't suspend yourself. You don't become nothing or nobody.
By allowing the other in, you are actually sharing your uniqueness, your separateness. You bring into the bargain that which your intimate partner does not have.
Your world, people in your world, experiences, memories, things that the other that your partner does not possess and now has access to.
Intimacy is an act of generosity. To attain intimacy, one needs to feel sufficiently secure of one's core identity.
There's no intimacy without identity. You need to feel sure of who you are, your self-worth, your self-esteem. You need to have internal regulation and you need to have personal boundaries. You need to feel so safe within your personal boundaries that you don't mind to invite a guest in.
You don't feel invaded. You don't feel threatened. You don't feel annulled or annihilated. You don't feel that you're absorbed or assimilated. You don't feel that if you invite someone in, you're going to disappear because they're going to take over. He's going to body snatch or mind snatch.
So only people who are secure of their core identity, self-worth, self-esteem, internal regulation and personal boundaries, only secure people in secure attachment styles. Only they do intimacy well.
So the mentally ill, they tend to enmesh, they tend to engulf, they tend to merge and fuse with other people. And as they do it, they disappear into the other person and they expect the other person to disappear into them like a chimera, an organism with two heads, a twin fleckin, a soulmate.
So mentally ill people on the one hand disappear into the partner, but on the other hand, terrified by this process of self-annihilation and rebirth, resurrection, phoenix-like within the partner, terrified by this process, they push the partner away and they flee, they run away, they escape.
And this is known as the approach avoidance repetition compulsion. It's fear of abandonment on the one hand and fear of engulfment, fear of disappearing on the other hand.
This dysfunctional attachment style is the outcome of twin contradictory anxieties, abandonment or separation anxiety and engulfment or enmeshment anxiety.
The young people, I mentioned the young in my lecture, young people today have majority of them have insecure or dysfunctional attachment styles.
They don't want to do intimacy. They don't have relationship skills. They confuse intimacy with engulfment or they confuse intimacy with the threat. They regard it as a threat.
Why? Because they've had no other experience except meaningless emotionless casual sex, hookups, nothing else. Majority of them have never been in an intimate relationship.
By age 25, they have zero experience at intimacy.
What do they have experience in?
The opposite of intimacy.
Erotic intimacy, fake intimacy, the one night stand intimacy. In one fifth of the cases, the other person, the other party remains anonymous, nameless. It's a stranger picked up in a party. No one knows.
And in the majority of these encounters, both parties are drunk, senseless, wasted, drugged.
So the young youth, the generation millennials and the Z generation, they have tremendous deficiencies in relationship and intimacy skills because they don't have the chance to experience even intimacy in relationships because the code, the sexual script, the romantic script of today is that I'm cool if I'm detached. I'm not clinging. I'm not needy. I don't need you. It's a form of psychopathic defiance. It's a form of contumaciousness. I don't need anyone. And I just want to use your body for the night and I'm not going to bother you after that because I'm not dependent on you. I'm independent. It's my psychopathy.
The younger generations are technically, clinically psychopathic. I hope I answered your question. I'm very pessimistic, very, very pessimistic. The very foundation upon which the species, the existence of a species depends. The very foundation had been undermined tremendously in the last 60 years, tremendously, irreversibly in my view. And it negates our biology. It negates our hormonal systems. Our body is built for intimacy, built for relationships, built for appropriation, built for togetherness, built for community. We are constructed, we are machines, built to be social and loving.
And yet everyone is telling us academics. I mean, everyone's telling us love is outdated. Go for the sex. Don't dare to evoke emotions or attachment in any of this. Be cool. Be empowered.
It's a pernicious, toxic message propagated by a pernicious, toxic establishment.
No wonder there are conspiracy theories about how the elites want to eradicate the non-elites.
It definitely looks like it. I don't think there's any conspiracy, but it's shocking, shocking what the academic establishment is doing to our young and head down to our young.
It's a crime against humanity. Nothing short of that. And yeah, and feminists as well.
Thank you.