Self-destructive Narcissist = Masochist? (Compilation)

My name is Sir Wackenin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and a Professor of Psychology, and I'm churning out videos as though my life depended on it.

You know what?

It may well be.

So, today we are going to discuss anti-narcissism.

And we're going to connect anti-narcissism to sexual self-trashing.

We're going to connect sexual self-trashing to masochism.

In short, we're going to have us a joyride in the Disneyland of the human mind.

Stay with me.

Awake, please.

Okay, start with anti-narcissism.

Anti-narcissism is not about being a nice person.

Many people, including Wikipedia, by the way, make this mistake.

That anti-narcissism is about suspending the ego, ego death.

I don't know what.

It's not about Nelson Mandela.

It's not about elevating the community above the self.

It's not about subjecting oneself to the greater good.

It's not about being an altruist.

It's not about being charitable.

It's not even about being a nice person.

Anti-narcissism is actually a mother form of narcissism.

It has a close affinity to covert narcissism.

But it precedes covert narcissism as a theoretical construct.

And it made a given rise to the clinical diagnosis of covert narcissism, which, by the way, is now an official part of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 5 in everything but name.

They don't mention the words covert narcissism, but they describe it.

Okay.

The word anti-narcissism was coined by a French psychoanalyst in 1964.

His name was Francis Pash.

Francis Pash was a very cantankerous old chap, very grumpy, reminds you of someone, and he was clashing with everyone about how to conduct psychoanalysis, how to cure patients, should we cure patients.

His therapy, a coercive system where the analyst imposes his internal world on the patient, on the client, etc., etc.

So he was fighting with everyone.

But one of his more obscure contributions was the concept of anti-narcissism.

At the time in the 60s, there was a big debate involving Lacan and others.

What is narcissism?

What is the role of narcissism in psychological development?

Jung said that narcissism is a part of a process called introversion and that introversion is a crucial phase in the development or constellation of a self.

Freud said long before Jung that narcissism is a bad thing.

It's very good when you're a baby, but if you remain stuck with narcissism when you're an adult, you remain a baby.

So it's not good to be a baby when you're an adult.

In narcissism, when you're an adult, it's called secondary narcissism in Freud's language and it's considered to be pathological in the Freudian branch of psychoanalysts.

It was this huge debate in the 60s and in the 60s, the dominant psychological theory was indeed psychoanalysts, psychoanalysts, psychodynamic schools, object relations schools and so on and so forth.

One of the offshoots of Freud and his family, Anna Freud and others, Pash said that anti-narcissism is where the kafexis, the investment of emotional and cognitive resources is not inside, is not in the self or the fragmented self, but instead it is externalized.

It is thrown out, it's projected.

So while the classic narcissist overt and covert, grandiose and covert, all types of narcissists that we know invest their mental resources in themselves.

They are, for example, autoerotic, they are grandiose, they generate fantasies to support their self-image, inflated self-image, they invest a lot of energy in securing narcissistic supply.

So while the vast majority of narcissists are self-oriented, even though they don't have a self and they don't have an ego, they're kind of this protoplasmic mass that is goal-oriented and the goal is narcissistic supply.

It's very much like a virus.

The virus doesn't have a nucleus and yet it is purposeful.

The virus has a purpose, has a goal and has a trajectory and mode of operation and action.

The same with the narcissist.

There's nobody there.

There's no self.

There's no ego.

There is an investment in this absence, if you wish, in the empty schizoid core as Seinfeld and others, a country and others called it.

So Pash said, well, that may be the majority of narcissists, but there is a small group of narcissists who take this investment, these mental resources, this energy, these emotions, these cognitive emotions, negative emotions, these cognitions.

What they do,

they divest it. They divest it. They give up on these resources.

They throw them away or they give them out and they do this not because they get anything, not because they obtain anything, not because it helps them to secure some goal, not even for narcissistic supply that is generated from the outside, as we shall see a bit later, they do this in order to generate self supply.

But to all appearances, looking from the outside, they appear to be benevolent, saintly, altruistic, charitable, helpful, supportive people, loving and caring and compassionate and empathic.

And yet this is all an externalization of energy that in the normal run of the mill, pedestrian narcissists goes towards buttressing grandiosity.

So these narcissists are grandiose, but in a very different way.

And they are invested in narcissistic supply, but generated from the inside, the core, the engine of narcissistic supply in their case, in the case of anti-narcissist, the engine is inside and the supply is self-generated.

It's the most extreme form of schizoid reclusivity.

It's being the loner's loner.

It's like cutting yourself off from everyone and everything and becoming a totally self-sustaining, self-containing unit of production and consumption.

So their interactions with other people are interactions of giving.

It's about giving.

It's about helping.

And people are very grateful to them and love them and admire them.

But this admiration and gratitude don't touch them.

They are non-reactive to it.

Most anti-narcissists are actually schizoid.

And they find human company, including sex, to be very burdensome, very unpleasurable.

They are unhedonic when it comes to human company and all human interactions, sex included.

So they don't need people.

Why do they do this?

Why do they help people?

Why do they become pillars of the community, saintly figures and so on?

Because as you will see a bit later, it's part of their masochism.

We are talking to remind you about anti-narcissists.

The original thinker, Christopher Bolus, B-O-L-L-A-S, who came up with the "unthought known".

I recommend to you to seek out the videos, my videos in which I discuss his concept of "unthought known".

The concept of "unthought known" is at the core of cold therapy, the treatment modality that I developed.

For I am in great debt to Christopher Bolus and I am in admirer, unbeknownst to him.

So Christopher Bolus introduced the "unthought known", but he also introduced an elaboration on Pasha's concept of anti-narcissism.

He said that anti-narcissism is a self-limiting kind of narcissist.

A narcissist who refuses to develop himself, a narcissist who refuses declines to leverage his talents and skills, a narcissist who seeks defeat and failure, not an exaggerated sense of self-importance via success, but an exaggerated sense of self-importance via defeat.

It's like they are broadcasting to the world.

Look how total and perfect my failure is.

They revel in the impeccability and totality and absoluteness and perfection of their defeats.

It's like the only thing they are truly good at is failing.

The only thing they succeed in is failing and their only expertise is defeat.

Everyone is proud.

We are all proud of things we are good at.

They are proud of their failures because they are good at failing.

We are all proud of our expertise or knowledge or scholarship.

They are proud of their defeats because they are experts at defeat.

This is the core of their grandiosity, their own humiliation, their own deterioration, their own degeneration and decomposition and disintegration, their own failure and defeat, their own ending up at the bottom of the ladder on the scrap heap of their own personal history, alone bereft, homeless if possible.

As he said, this anti-elaborative person stews in his own juice and adamantly refuses to nurture himself.

So the anti-narcissist deep inside is actually hostile, is actually sadistic, but he covers up for this core, this seething volcanic core, this miasma of emanations of hatred, loathing, envy.

He covers all of this up with a self-effacing facade of care, compassion and consideration for others.

Does it remind you of something?

Yes, that's the antecedent of the covert narcissist.

That is the first formulation and the first construction of the idea of a covert narcissist, a shy, fragile, vulnerable narcissist, a narcissist who doesn't dare, narcissism who doesn't dare to speak its name, the homosexuality of the zoo of narcissism, the hidden propensity, the hidden proclivity, the hidden orientation.

So the anti-narcissist is what we would call today the covert narcissist.

It's a narcissist.

But with one variation.

The covert narcissist actually seeks success.

Fantasizes about success, about power, about sex, about money, about access, about contacts, about fame, about celebrity.

So the fantasies of the grandiose narcissist and the fantasies of the classic covert narcissist are the same.

But the anti-narcissistic covert narcissist, his fantasy is self-degradation, despoiling, demeaning himself, denigrating himself, debasing, humiliating himself, falling apart, disintegrating, failing at everything, being defeated, being trodden upon, being trampled on.

These are his fantasies.

And they are, of course, masochistic fantasies.

So the anti-narcissistic covert narcissist is a masochist.

Simply when covert narcissism teams up with masochism, we get the anti-narcissistic covert narcissist.

Another great mind who I quote very often is Andrei Green.

Those of you who were unfortunate enough to watch my previous videos recall Andrei Green because of his construct of the dead mother, the absent or selfish or narcissistic or insecure or codependent or paranoid mother who refuses to let her child separate and individually, thereby creating sometimes narcissist.

So Andrei Green got involved in this fracas, in this debate, and he also contributed to our understanding of anti-narcissism.

But before we go there, let's summarize what we know.

There are grandiose narcissists and classic covert narcissists.

These people are revolved around grandiosity.

All the grandiose narcissists, covert narcissists, classic narcissists, and the covert narcissists of all types, somatic, cerebral, you name it, all of them revolve around securing narcissistic supply so as to uphold a sense of grandiosity and an inflated self-image.

Now the covert narcissist secures supply in underhanded passive-aggressive ways or via another narcissist, in which case it is an inverted narcissist.

The grandiose narcissist just goes at it, daring do.

He takes the initiative, he extracts narcissistic supply from his human environment.

There's a third type, the anti-narcissistic covert narcissist, masochistic covert narcissist.

That is type of narcissist who does not seek to uphold this grandiosity.

On the very contrary, he wants the kind of supply that will put him down, humiliate him, prove him to be a loser, display in full view his defeats and failures, self-lagulation, self-torture, self-humiliation.

That's the third variant.

And Greg Rehn said that anti-narcissism is negative narcissism, negative narcissism that seeks to self-destructively abolish any vestige of ego.

In other words, seeks to abolish the true self.

The anti-narcissist is actually, because you remember the classic narcissist has a schizoid core.

Schizoid core is a vacuum chamber.

It's a vast emptiness encased in a rigid shell.

And on this core, there are layers and layers, like an onion, there are layers and layers of grandiosity, exploitativeness, lack of empathy.

Put all of these together and you have a narcissist.

So all narcissists have an empty schizoid core.

The anti-narcissistic, the anti-narcissistic narcissist, the anti-narcissistic covert narcissist, the masochistic narcissist has only the core.

He doesn't have these onion layers.

He has only the empty schizoid core.

So he seeks annihilation.

His existence is emptiness.

He exists only when he does not exist.

For him to exist is to not be.

Hamlet to be or not to be, do not be.

To exist is to not be.

Unbeing or not being is the essence, the quiddity and the quintessence of the anti-narcissistic, masochistic narcissist.

The covert, the second type of covert narcissist.

The emptiness, he guards the emptiness like a hallowed treasure.

He nurtures it, he cultivates it and he feeds this emptiness with self annihilation, self destruction, self defeat, self trashing as we will see in a minute.

This way he renders himself one with a schizoid core.

He is at ease, he is at peace, his anxiety is ameliorated, his depression disappears.

The reason for ego destiny, for anxiety and for depression in narcissism is the gap between the narcissist and internal constructs such as the ego ideal.

So the narcissist is in constant dissonance between himself as he is and internal constructs which expect him to be different, call upon him to be different.

It's the same with the anti-narcissistic masochistic covert narcissist.

The anti-narcissistic narcissist is an emptiness, that's his core, that's who he aspires to be.

Ultimately he wants to merge with his real essence like all of us do, all of us want this and he is no exception but his essence is an absence.

To become an absence he must self-destruct.

Ironically self-destruction in the case of the anti-narcissistic covert narcissist, self-destruction is self-construction.

Completion is the only form of existence, the only way to guarantee existence.

Unbeing is the only shape of being.

When the anti-narcissistic narcissist destroys himself to smithereens, ruins himself, defeats himself, fails and disintegrates, it is then that he becomes one with his empty schizoid core which is nirvana, total sense of calmness, no dissonance.

When you are one with your essence that's happiness, that's ironically mental health.

So as Andrei Green writes, anti-narcissism is negative narcissism that seeks destructively to abolish the vestiges of the ego.

Andrei Green suggested that there is what he called dual narcissism.

Dual narcissism, he said that one type of narcissism has to do with the life force, with the drive to life, with the libido, with the arrows in Freud's language and another type of narcissism has to do with the death force, fanatos or destudo or motido in psychoanalytic parlance or lingo.

So he said one narcissism associated with life force, one with the death force and he called it the duality of narcissism or dual narcissism or positive narcissism versus negative narcissism.

He says positive narcissists they want to reach unity, they want to reach unity, negative narcissists they want to reach zero, they aim with nothingness.

So the positive narcissists want to become one, the one, God, the totality, perfection, omnipotence, omnipotence, omnipotence means everywhere, everything.

And the negative narcissists want to become nothing, he wants to become zero, he wants to vanish.

It is by vanishing that he exists.

Narcissist is his essence, his internal experience is that of absence.

Like who is doing the experiencing?

If there's nobody there, no self, no ego, no nothing, I mean who is doing narcissistic narcissist has internal objects, interjects, pieces of important people in his life, mother, father, teachers, all kinds of personality constructs without the personality, influential people, etc.

So he has numerous internal vestiges of emotions, strained cognitions, they're all there in that space.

And they're the ones who are introspective, they're the ones who observe the narcissist and give him marks, you know, you almost made it, one more push and you're zero, one push and you're nothing.

The concept of Andrei Green is very much like Francis Pash actually.

As far as Francis Pash said that anti-narcissism is something that is characterized by object and direction and Andrei Green is saying the same.

Anti-narcissist object is zero or nothingness and his direction is inward.

So this leads us to questions of masochism.

And I debated with myself because I'm the only one I consult, I need to consult with the most intelligent person I know.

So I debated with myself how to approach the subject of masochism, but not masochism in a classical sense, the sexual masochist or the psychological masochist.

But masochism is a feature, is a figment, is a dimension of narcissism.

And I thought I would begin by something that all of you would understand and that is sex.

Well almost all of you and that is sex.

Let's talk about a type of behavior that can be divided into healthy and masochistic, but from the outside observing the healthy version and observing the masochistic version, you may be forgiven if you make the mistake of thinking they are one and the same.

So let's talk about the difference between promiscuity and sexual self-trudging.

Let's start with the fact.

The number of sexual partners of both men and women until age 31 seems to have risen dramatically over the past 13 years.

Some studies say that the number of sexual partners had tripled, but only for a small minority of people.

The average is skewed by the hyperactivity of a small minority.

Anyhow promiscuity indiscriminate sex with relative strangers, promiscuity is non-normative.

But there is a huge difference between promiscuity and sexual self-trudging.

Both of them by the way are kind of narcissistic activities.

That's why promiscuity is intimately associated with borderline personality disorder, with histrionic personality disorder, with psychopathic personality disorder.

Self-trashing is also a narcissistic activity.

It's like let me see how low I can go.

The lower I go, the more perfect I am.

I'm perfect in trashing myself.

It's like an art form.

Self-trashing becomes an art form and the person who self-trashes herself is an artist and she's proud of how low she can go, how deep she can sink, what horrible and disgusting things she does.

And you know when you stand aside and you see two people, one of them is promiscuous, one of them is self-trashing person, self-trasher I will call them.

You can't tell the difference.

They behave, they look, they act, they make choices, they make decisions which look absolutely identical, not the same, identical.

But the psychological background is dramatically different.

These are two types of grandiosity, dramatically different types of grandiosity.

Self-trashing is always compulsive.

Promiscuity is not compulsive.

Promiscuity is impulsive.

Self-trash promiscuity is situational but it's never compulsive.

Self-trash, self-trashes, people who self-trash sexually cannot help themselves.

They have to self-trash because self-trashing is not about sex.

It's about finding your own identity.

It's about merging with the empty schismicore.

Promiscuity is about disappearing, about not being, about obtaining peace and calm by vanishing, by merging with your empty schismicore, about reducing your anxiety.

So promiscuity is an active role.

It is often experienced by promiscuous people as an empowering lifestyle, a choice, a conquest, promiscuity boosts the participant's self-esteem and restores their sense of their inner locus of control.

To cut the long story short, they feel in charge.

Promiscuous people feel in charge.

Self-trashing in contrast, in contrast distinction, self-trashing is not the same.

Self-trashing is masochistic.

It is self-punitive. It is self-punitive. It's passive.

Self-trashing is chiefly intended as an anxiolytic, anxiety ameliorating or anxiety reducing medication.

It's an antidepressant.

Self-trashing is self-medication.

The person who self-trashes sexually, she self-medicates via temporary self-loathing, sexual self-annihilation.

It's like she says, the only way to get rid of my anxiety and depression is to not be, to not be for a while.

If I trashed myself sufficiently, I will cease to be.

In self-trashing, the preliminaries, flirting, courting, dating, talking, dancing, socializing with others, all these preliminaries are perfunctory, minimal or in most cases, non-existent.

Sex for the self-trasher, for the sexual self-trasher, sex is the first move, not the second and not the culmination of any process.

The self-trasher actually ends up bedding, going to bed with unattractive mates as a way to further despoil and degrade herself. She typically engages in kinky, reckless or extreme sexual acts in the first few minutes with unknown strangers.

Alcohol and drugs frequently precede both promiscuity and self-trashing, but their use is different.

The promiscuous person uses substances, alcohol, drugs to disinhibit themselves, to get over shyness or social mores or values.

They want to overcome these and do things they would not normally do if they were sober.

This process is called disinhibition and promiscuous people disinhibit themselves with alcohol and drugs.

Self-trashing people leverage alcohol and drugs to numb themselves, to numb themselves, to put themselves to sleep. They want to reach the point of unconsciousness. They want to have a blackout. They don't want to experience the sex or to remember it in detail or the circumstances surrounding it. They want, even in the act of self-annihilation, to self-annihilate. They want, even as they vanish and disappear in the arms of the total stranger who is abusing their body and preying on them, even in this act of vanishing, they want to vanish.

They want to drink and they want to get stoned or high in order to not be even before the ultimate act of not being, which is sexual self-trashing.

Not being is a light motif. It's the main common denominator in connecting feature and thread in the personality of the self-trasher.

The self-trasher is actually an anti-narcissistic narcissist and there is a lot of grandiosity in this because the self-trasher says, "I control my destiny. I'm going to decide. I'm going to act. I'm going to defy society." It's a bit psychopathic. "I'm going to defy society, my parents, my upbringing, my values. I'm going to fly in everyone's face and I'm going to disappear and I'm going to vanish. I'm going to do whatever I want. Society tells me to succeed. I'm going to fail. Society tells me I'm a loser. I'm going to be a bigger loser."

It's a grandiose act. It's a defined act. And finally, promiscuity is ego-syntonic. Self-trashing is always ego-dystonic.

People who self-trash describe the sex as cursory or brief, disappointing, objectifying, disgusting, unpleasant, or uncomfortable. Many self-trashes report shame, regret, anger, disappointment, and guilt, emotional blunting, and an increase in anxiety and depression after the act.

So I gave you an example of the regular narcissist, the grandiose overt classic narcissist in action that would be promiscuity, especially if the narcissist is psychopathic.

And the anti-narcissistic covert masochistic narcissist, which would be the self-trashing narcissist in sex.

But this is part, of course, of a bigger picture.

The bigger picture is masochism.

Masochistic personality disorder made its last appearance, last appearance, last lamentable appearance, because I think it was a mistake to get rid of the sadistic and masochistic personality disorders.

And in this, I have bigger lives to support me, Theodore Miller.

Anyhow, masochistic personality disorder made its last appearance in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in addition to edition 3, text revision.

It was removed in the DSM 4 and 5.

So some scholars, as I mentioned, Theodore Miller, regard the removal of masochistic personality disorder as a mistake, and they had lobbied for many years to reinstate masochistic personality disorder in future editions of the DSM to no avail.

It didn't work.

So let's talk about masochism.

Masochism is a critical element in the grandiosity of the anti-narcissistic covert narcissist.

The masochist had been taught from an early age to hate herself, to consider herself unworthy of love and worthless as a person.

Consequently, he or she is prone to self-destructive, punishing and self-defeating behaviors.

Though capable of pleasure and possessed of social skills, the masochist avoids or undermines pleasurable experiences.

He also transforms them into unpleasurable experiences.

Example of self-freshing in sex.

The masochist does not admit to enjoying himself.

Seeks suffering, pain, defeat, failure, hurt in relationships, in situations.

The masochist rejects help.

He resents those who offer help.

She actively renders futile attempts to assist or ameliorate or mitigate or solve her problems and predicaments.

These self-penalizing behaviors are self-purging.

They intend to relieve the masochist of overwhelming pent-up anxiety.

The masochist's conduct is equally aimed at avoiding intimacy and the benefits of intimacy, companionship, support.

Masochists tend to choose people and they tend to select circumstances that inevitably and predictably lead to failure, to disillusionment, to disappointment, to mistreatment.

Conversely they tend to avoid relationships, interactions and circumstances that are likely to result in success or gratification.

They reject, disdain or even suspect people who consistently treat them well.

Masochist find caring, loving persons, sexually, unattractive.

Now of course you notice all these are elements of grandiosity.

These masochist hold other people in contempt.

They consider themselves somehow superior because they can tolerate pain and suffering.

They're strong people.

They consider their defeats and failures not as defeats and failures but as sublime choices.

They're above the maddying crowd.

They're not in the rat race.

And so the masochist typically adopts unrealistic goals and guarantees underachievement.

Masochist routinely fail at mundane tasks even when these are crucial to their own advancement and personal objectives.

Even when they adequately carry out similar assignments on behalf of other people.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual gives this example.

Masochist helps fellow students write papers but is unable to write his or her own paper.

When the masochist fails at these attempts at self-sabotage, he reacts with rage, depression and guilt.

The masochist is likely to compensate for her undesired accomplishments and happiness by having an accident or by engaging in behaviours that produce abandonment, frustration, hurt, illness or physical pain.

Some masochist make harmful self-sacrifices uncalled for by the situation and unwanted by the intended beneficiaries or recipients.

The Projective Identification Defence Mechanism is frequently at play.

The masochist deliberately provokes, solicits and incites angry, disparaging and rejecting responses from others in order to feel on familiar territory, humiliated, defeated, devastated and hurt.

So this is the core actually, the engine, the nuclear engine in the submarine of anti-narcissistic narcissists.

These are narcissists who are essentially masochistic.

And so the narcissist, even classic narcissists can sometimes revert to the masochistic variant.

As I said in my previous videos, in my lecture in McGill University, in similar international conferences, presentations are made to numerous international conferences.

By the way, there's a playlist here on this channel with 40-something presentations to international conferences.

You're well advised to have a look.

So I said in all these presentations and lectures and so on that the narcissist does not type constancy.

Every overt or grandiose narcissist can become covert and vice versa.

Now there's nothing new in this.

It's even included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

So there's nothing new in this.

But what I'm proposing is that the narcissist is also capable to transition to the anti-narcissist masochistic position.

When the narcissist is angered and stressed by a lack of narcissistic supply, some narcissists direct the fury inwards.

So when there is deficient narcissistic supply, when the narcissist transitions to a new pathological narcissistic space, when he loses his audience, his sources of supply, in all these situations where supply is lacking and he does not have a regulatory source of secondary narcissistic supply, also known as intimate partner, when all this is missing, narcissist is furious and he directs this fury, some narcissists, redirect this fury inwards.

This process is called internalization.

And when they direct it inwards, they are actually angry at themselves.

They feel that they had failed to secure a narcissistic supply.

They are failures.

They feel they had been defeated.

So they seek to punish themselves for this failure to obtain supply, for this defeat in the battle and the competition for supply.

And this masochistic behavior, this self punitive behavior has the added benefit of forcing the narcissist's closest, nearest and dearest to assume the roles of rescuers, saviors or dismayed spectators or the role of persecutors, whichever way to pay the narcissist the attention that it creates.

So masochistic behavior is very goal oriented by denigrating yourself, defeating yourself, punishing yourself, torturing yourself, self trashing, consuming drugs, all these behaviors which are self destructive.

By doing this ostentatiously for everyone to see, you attract natural rescuers, saviors, family members, loved ones, ex loved ones, friends.

And so you attract in other words, narcissistic supply.

You attract attention.

Masochism is a strategy to obtain supply.

Self administered punishment often manifests as self handicapping masochism.

Masochistic cop out by undermining his work, by destroying his relationships, by subverting his efforts, the increasingly fragile narcissist avoids additional criticism and censure negative supply.

Self inflicted failure, self inflicted wounds.

These are the narcissist's ways of broadcasting.

I'm wounded now.

Don't kill me.

Don't add to my predicament and my conundrum and my bad situation.

All the narcissist doing, he's the master of his own fate, even when he self destructs.

Everything to the narcissist is a strategy to all types of narcissist, including the anti-narcissistic narcissist.

Masochistic narcissist keep finding themselves in self defeating circumstances, which render success impossible.

And so as Millan says, they do this, they place themselves in situations where success is impossible in order to make an objective assessment of their performance improbable.

They act carelessly.

They withdraw in mid effort.

They're constantly fatigued, bored or disaffected.

And so they passively aggressively sabotage their own lives.

Their suffering is defined.

And by deciding to abort, they reassert their control and omnipotence.

The narcissist pronounce in public misery, the narcissist broadcast self-pity or stentatious, conspicuous self-pity, self-pity party.

These are compensatory.

And again, as Millan says, they serve to reinforce his self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness.

The narcissist tribulations and anguish render him in his eyes, unique, saintly, virtuous, sanctimonious, righteous, resilient, significant.

He has attained the upper higher moral ground.

These self-inflicted wounds, these defeats and failures are in other words, self-generated narcissistic supply, self-supply.

Watch the video I made about self-supply.

It's paradoxically the worstly anguished and unhappiness of the narcissist, the more relieved and elated and euphoric such a narcissist feels.

Because finally, he had come back to the womb.

He had ceased to exist.

And finally, he had found his perfect, ideal source of supply and audience.

Yes, the greatest fan of all himself.

Today your favorite topic, sex.

We're going to discuss sexual sadism, sexual masochism and the difference between these two and BDSM.

BDSM is a very confusing catch-all phrase because it includes SM.

SM means sadism and masochism or sadomasochism.

But actually BDSM is not the same as classic overt sexual sadism and classic overt sexual masochism.

And I will try to help you disambiguate a bit.

Both laymen and scholars confuse sexual submission and masochism.

They think that a sexually submissive person is a masochist.

Sexual submissive person is also known as a sub or a bottom in the parlance of this community of BDSM and assorted characters.

But sexual submission is not the same as masochism.

Sexual domination, dom or top, sexual domination is absolutely not the same as sexual sadism.

All four sexual submission, sexual masochism, sexual domination, sexual sadism, all four of them are consensual practices.

I'm not talking about sadistic rape, but I'm talking about consenting adults.

Responding adults who participate in these practices, enjoy them, get aroused by them and seek them actively.

But there are important differences.

Submission and domination are usually intra-diadic practices.

In other words, they take place in couples.

They involve intimate partners.

Submission and domination are rarely conducted in public.

In other words, they are not exhibitionistic.

Exhibitionism is a totally different behavior, totally different complex of traits and behaviors, which is not necessarily attached or attendant upon submission and domination, actually very rarely.

Submission and domination take place in couples among intimate partners, not in full view of others.

And they involve the ritualistic and rigidly boundarid exchange of pain and power between the parties.

That's very important because the parties are actually intimate partners.

There is a lot of compassion, a lot of affection, a lot of attachment, a lot of bonding between the partners.

Everything they do to each other, which actually involve an exchange of power, a power gradient, a power symmetry, involves an exchange of pain, a pain giver and a pain receiver, all this is highly ritualized.

They follow strict steps.

They have words which they can use to immediately seize everything they're doing.

These are red words.

They are rigidly boundarid.

They know each other.

They know what is acceptable, what is not acceptable, what they can do to each other and what they are not allowed to do to each other.

In these boundaries are strictly observed.

The dom and the sub collaborate as equals.

Actually many would tell you that it is the sub, the allegedly ostensibly submissive partner, who is in control of the whole interaction.

The sub dictates to the dom how to behave and what to do to her.

I'm saying her because the majority of submissive people are actually women, not all, but the majority.

Sexual arousal in BDSM is the outcome of the suspension of the bottom's autonomy.

The submissive person gives up on her agency, on her independence, on her free thinking, on her free will, on her judgment.

She submits.

It's very similar to hypnosis.

It's the same, more or less the same psychodynamic of hypnosis.

She becomes an extension of the dom.

She is a kind of outlier skin of the dom.

She and the dom merge and fuse in some ways.

There's an outsourcing of potentially self-harming decision-making to a loving, compassionate, or caring partner, the dominant partner, the dom.

So while theoretically and technically, especially if the dom is not experienced or a bit sadistic or dysregulated, there is risk.

Very badly.

Even harmless practices such as slapping and spanking sometimes end in bloodshed and bruising.

So the decision-making in BDSM is potentially self-harming.

It is this affinity to self-harm that is actually the cause of the arousal.

There is also an element of degradation and humiliation, self-dispoiling and self-trashing.

But overall, BDSM is a ritualized extended fantasy, a role play, nothing much more than that.

At the end, the two parties snap out of it and go back to being utterly normal people.

I mean, BDSM is normal, but I mean to being utterly conventional people.

BDSM is also frequently followed with vanilla sex, regular sex, missionary, otherwise sex.

So it spices up the sex life.

It's not the main dish.

It's a dessert.

Masochism is an entirely different thing. Several masochism revolves around self-objectification, sexual degradation, extreme sexual degradation, dehumanization, losing one's identity, sometimes faceless self-ponography, the infliction and reception of real pain, real, the kind that makes you scream and shriek in agony. It also, masochism also usually involves public exhibitionism because there is a strong element of shame, of egosyntony, of dissonance. There's a lot of ambivalence and this is exactly the foundation of the sexual arousal. The masochist needs to degrade herself, to humiliate herself, to debase, to self-objectify and to self-trash in front of an audience. So she is very likely to be also an exhibitionist. Masochism is sometimes embedded in a fantasy of intimacy with a partner and the partner can be real or the partner can be imaginary. So many masochists convert their masochistic experiences into a figment of some overriding, overarching fantasy which involves love or friendship or a relationship.

It's of course a fantasy and very often the partners in the fantasy are not aware that they are involved in the fantasy.

They just happen to be there and the masochist projects the fantasy onto them.

Physical pain and physical despoiling are the forms of arousal of the masochist and some masochists are into humiliation or transient choreographed helplessness but the majority of masochists are more body-oriented, they are more somatic.

So the locus of the arousal is in the physical pain.

Now this is not the case in BDSM.

In BDSM the emphasis is not about pain.

It's about the relegation and delegation of one's free will.

It's about submission.

It's about giving up control.

It's not about the pain itself.

The pain in BDSM is just an indicator and a reminder of this abrogation of self-discipline, self-control, autonomy and agency.

While in masochism sometimes there is full control.

Sometimes the masochist is fully in control of the situation but she just wants to get hurt.

She wants pain.

She seeks pain, physical pain and she couples it with exhibitionism in rare occasions with degradation and humiliation.

Usually sexual sadism is about being turned on by torturing a partner.

The emphasis is on the word torture.

Kraft Ebbing and others had described sadism and sadistic practices in sex in the 19th century.

So sadism is when the sadist is aroused by causing pain to another person, by inflicting pain on another person and that person could be, usually is an intimate partner but not always.

Observing the agony, observing the writhing, observing the physical changes, observing the uncontrolled dysregulated reactions to pain, observing the disintegration, the tears, all this turns on the sadist.

And never mind if the pain is actually egosyntonic.

In other words never mind if the victim, if the recipient of the pain likes the pain.

Never mind if the partner is a masochist and she actually climaxes, she has an orgasm when she is tortured. It doesn't matter.

It's the infliction of pain that matters and the inevitable, ineluctable, physical, physiological reactions to pain.

Even if the outcome, the final outcome is arousal and orgasm on the part of the recipient of the pain, on the part of the masochistic partner, the sadistic partner is still gratified.

Never mind how momentary and how fleeting the pain is still cause for extreme arousal.

The pain in sexual sadism need not involve humiliating the partner and does not usually involve public exposure.

But if the partner is averse to public exposure, is against exhibitionism, if the partner does not seek humiliation, then of course subjecting her to humiliation and to public shaming and to public degradation are forms of torture.

So paradoxically, normally a sexual sadist and a sexual masochist would engage in the exchange of pain.

But if the masochist is averse to public degradation and public humiliation, if she happens to be not exhibitionistic, the sadist will exhibit her.

He will degrade her publicly.

And if she is not into humiliation, the emphasis of the sexual sadist would be on humiliation.

The sexual sadist would go anywhere that inflicts discomfort and pain on his partner.

Now the partner doesn't always have to be a sexual masochist.

Many sexual sadists engage in their practices with totally normal non-masochistic partners.

And many sexual masochists have partners who are not sexual sadists.

But these kind of arrangements don't last long.

But ultimately, sexual sadists and sexual masochists gravitate towards each other.

There are even communities and underground communities with extreme practices like blood drinking and so on.

So they gravitate towards each other.

They find each other in special clubs, in special venues.

But though the BDSM community also has special venues and special implements and special practices and special rituals, BDSM is a much more benign form.

It involves sex tangentially.

It's not about sex.

It's about submission and domination in ways which do not bridge the boundaries of the intimate partners involved.

Not so sexual sadisms and sexual masochisms.

Here the breach of boundaries, physical boundaries, mental boundaries, emotional boundaries and behavioral boundaries, this breach of boundaries is actually at the core of the sexual practice and the reason what gives rise to the ultimate sexual arousal and orgasm.

Now don't try any of this at home.

You're not old enough.

People often confuse masochism with self destructiveness.

Masochism is not self destructiveness.

Masochism is opposite of self destructiveness.

Masochism is self love.

Masochism causes you pleasure because you love yourself.

You're masochistic.

It's the way to get pleasure.

So masochism is a form of self love.

Narcissists doesn't love himself because first of all there's no self and he had been taught from early age that he is not lovable. He doesn't deserve to be loved.

So he also doesn't love himself and therefore by definition the narcissus can never be a masochist.

Narcissists sadism and masochism appear from the outside are actually instrumental and functional.

One of them is to control people, motivate them, control them and so on.

It's nothing to do with classic sadism.

There's no joy from the pain. The pain doesn't give pleasure.

It's just a way of asserting control, establishing social order, obtaining results and in sexual settings the sadism is part of the power play that the narcissist plays in every field of his life.

And it's therefore not sadism.

Sadism must have a component of emotion. The sadist loves to hurt people. He loves to cause pain. Gives him pleasure to cause pain. That's not the case with narcissists.

Narciss doesn't derive pleasure from causing pain. He derives pleasure with what he can make people do using pain. Pain is an instrument. And he derives pleasure with what he can make people do with his money also. He doesn't love money. Narcissists don't love money. They love what money can allow them to do to people. And they don't love pain or enjoy pain or inflict pain. They love how they can use pain to motivate people.

It's about the narcissistic supply. These are tools. Sadism is a tool.

Money is a tool. Being famous is a tool. Beingtool.

Being feared is a tool.

So these are all tools to obtain narcissistic supply.

So he's not a sadist in any psychological definition.

And he's not a masochist.

But he's self-destructive.

Not all narcissists, but vast majority are self-destructive.

And it appears from outside like masochism.

When the narcissist will seek masochism in sex or in discipline or when the narcissist will seek pain or hurt, wherever it is, it has nothing to do with masochism.

It has to do again with obtaining goals or fulfilling functions.

So discipline will remind him of love and intimacy.

And if he's masochistic in a relationship with a woman, it will fulfill other functions.

Maybe the woman wants it.

It's always goal-oriented or functional or instrumental.

It's never pleasure for the sake of pleasure.

There's no such thing with a narcissist, by the way, in anything.

Not only sex.

So I think the correct terms for the narcissist are instrumental pain and self-destructiveness.

And they move between these now.

When are they this and when are they this?

They are self-destructive when they are collapsed.

When they cannot obtain narcissistic supply, they want to self-destruct.

And the main reason they want to self-destruct has to do something with punishment, of course, because it confirms that they are bad and unworthy and so on.

So they deserve to be destroyed.

But I think on a much deeper level, when the narcissist does not obtain supply, he feels that he does not exist.

And self-destructiveness is exactly like self-mutilation, like cutting.

That's a way to prove to himself that he's alive.

So if you do something really self-destructive and you end up in prison, trust me, you feel very alive in prison.

If you do something and you contract, if you have unprotected sex and you contract AIDS, from that moment you're very alive.

It's this threat, this challenge, this horror, this destruction that wakes you up.

Narcissists need to wake up when he doesn't have supply.

He is gradually, he is like the battery is running down.

He's gradually all the functions are, you know, like this.

And he's like these dolls that run out of battery.

And he needs to charge the battery.

And the way to charge the battery is self-destructiveness.

Because he failed, he cannot get supply.

There's only other way left.

He's self-destructiveness.

He self-destructs, he feels sufficiently animated and he feels again alive.

Ironically, after self-destruction is when the narcissist is most productive.

I wrote eight books in prison in 11 months.

First I went to prison.

When I felt dead, I needed prison to wake me up.

When I was in prison, I wrote eight books.

I wrote Maligna's Self-Love in prison, among other books.

This was my period of my maximal productivity never before, never after.

And it's very common with Narses.

I was very happy that his wife was the one who was the most dominant.

She was very happy.

And she was the one who was the most dominant in the world, in the artistic studies, in the artistic studies.

She was the one who was very happy.

or they don't have software, like a copy,shawness, or corleth, would be as it were, and they are quite powerful and so they've done everything and their research, they could've done everything they could, their math, their math, their math, their math, their physics, and their The whole thing is about the fact that you are not able to do anything, but you are able to do anything that you can do.

It's a, the narcissist's experience is a part of himself that he has no access to and that he denies and that represses via someone else in a safe environment, because ultimately it's safe by not existing, because in these settings the narcissist stops to exist.

Someone else has the will, someone else dictates, someone else decides, the narcissist finally can rest.

The narcissist is, to be a narcissist is very energy depleting, it's very energy consuming, and you need to control everything, especially yourself, but also the world and everyone around you, everything is a threat, everything is frightening, everything is very tiring.

At some point you want to rest, but to rest, to really rest, you need to have trust, and the narcissist is paranoid, he doesn't have trust.

So he needs a second in command, he needs a co-pilot, he needs to say, listen, I have to have a shot, I have to sleep for 20 minutes, in these 20 minutes would you mind to take control of the airplane?

So he transfers the control, he transfers the will, and he can now relax, he can rest, he can sleep in a way, mentally sleep for these 20 minutes, but if he doesn't transfer total control, then the whole exercise is undermined, sabotaged.

He needs to really sleep mentally, when we sleep we don't exist, we don't control the environment, we don't make decisions when we sleep. It's a state very similar to sleep, and in order to sleep he needs to transfer all functions and all decision making powers.

If he transfers only some functions and some decision making powers, then he needs to stay awake, to control the rest. It's a binary state, it's total, it's either or, or zero or hero, nothing in between.

And so when he finds someone he can trust, I mean not to exo anyone, that he can trust, he engineers the situation with zero risk in effect.

The situation is safe, it's a zero risk situation, but still allows him to go to sleep. He cannot go to sleep in the corporate headquarters, when he is with the board of directors, he cannot go to sleep. He cannot say for example in the board of directors, "John would you mind taking over, I want to sleep for 20 minutes, he cannot do this.

He cannot do this with his wife, he needs to control all the time, what she is doing, what she is not doing, because love is pain, pain is threat, threat is pagaloya.

So he needs all the time to be in control, all the time to be monitoring, all the time to be, is she cheating on me, is she stealing from me, is she, you know.

And then he needs to manipulate her, and then he needs to take supply from her, and then he needs to, you know, so he is, he cannot sleep. And indeed narcissists suffer, majority of them suffer from extreme insomnia and so on. They have sleep disorders, it's very well known.

So he cannot really sleep. So he needs a space where there will be an activity, life will go on, but in a totally safe, secure manner.

And something that doesn't matter to him really much. He is not going to lose a lot of money, like in the board of directors, he is not going to lose his wife. You know, what can he lose? Nothing.

So he comes to the domain of weeks and he says, I want to sleep. Now you take over. Take over the world for 20 minutes.

And he knows that when he wakes up after 20 minutes, nothing has been. There is no damage, no race, no cost. It's cost free, except a few euros.

It's cost free. It's a cost free situation that allows him to, so he creates this haven, this enclave.

Now, many people do that, not only narcissists, healthy people.

So you have, for example, in very busy cities, people who suddenly go tofew euros.

It's cost free, except a few euros.

It's cost free, except amother or someone's boss.

These often entail abrupt breaks with the past, and some self-defeating behaviors are intended to preserve the past, to restore it, to protect it from the winds of change, to self-defying skirt promising opportunities while seeming to embrace them.

Narcissists do this a lot.

Finally, there are the frustrating, relativistic and passive-aggressive behaviors which are discussed in another video. I recommend that you watch it.

I've received a letter from a narcissist a few years ago.

This letter encapsulates, summarizes wonderfully, the state of sabotaging oneself constantly, the state of being your worst enemy.

I've seen the enemy, and it is I.

The letter says, "I find it difficult to accept that I am irredeemably evil, that I ecstatically, almost orgasmically, enjoy hurting people, and that I actively seek to inflict pain on others.

It runs so contrary to my long-cultivated, internally nurtured self-image as a benefactor, sensitive intellectual, and harmless hermit.

In truth, my sadism meshes well and synergetically with two other behavior patterns, my relentless pursuit of narcissistic supply, and my self-destructive, self-defeating, and therefore masochistic streak.

The process of torturing, humiliating, and offending people provides proof of my omnipotence, nourishes my grandiose fantasies, and buttresses my false self.

The victims' distress and dismay constitute narcissistic supply of the purest grain.

It also alienates them, turns them into hostile witnesses, raven enemies, and stalkers.

Thus, through the agency of my helpless and hopeless victims, I bring upon my head recurrent torrents of wrath and banishment.

This animosity guarantees my unraveling and my failure, outcomes which I avidly seek in order to placate my inner chastising and castigating voices, what Freud called the "sadistic super-ego".

Similarly, I am a firstly independent person. This is known in psychological jargon as counterdependent.

But my independence is a pathological variant of personal autonomy. I want to be free to frustrate myself by inflicting mental havoc on my human environment, including, and especially, my nearest and dearest.

I want in this way to secure and incur their inevitable ire.

Getting attached to or becoming dependent on someone, in any way, emotionally, financially, hierarchically, politically, religiously, legally, or intellectually, means surrendering my ability to indulge my all-consuming urges, to torment, to feel like God, and to be ruined by the consequences of my own evil actions.

Enough said.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of "Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited".

Most narcissists enjoy an irrational and brief burst of relief after having suffered emotionally, after having endured an narcissistic injury, or after having sustained a loss.

It's a strange reaction. One doesn't usually react with relief, or with elation.

But narcissists do.

It is a sense of freedom which comes with being unshackled.

Having lost everything, the narcissist often feels that he has found himself, that he has been reborn, that he has been charged with natal energy, able to take on new challenges and to explore new territories.

This elation is so addictive that the narcissist often seeks pain, humiliation, punishment, scorn, and content, as long as they are public and involve the attention of peers and superiors.

Being punished accords with the tormenting inner voices of the narcissist, which keep telling him that he is bad, corrupt, and worthy of penalty.

And this is a masochistic trick in the narcissist.

But the narcissist, as we well know, is also a "saves", albeit a bit of an unusual "saves".

The narcissist inflicts pain and abuse on others. He devalues sources of supply, callously and offendedly. He abandons them, discards people, places, partnerships, and friendships, unhesitatingly.

Some narcissists, though by no means a majority, actually enjoy abusing, taunting, tormenting, and freakishly controlling others, a phenomenon known as "gaslighting".

But most of the narcissists, most of them, do these things absentmindedly, offhandedly, automatically, and often even without What is unusual about the narcissist's sadistic behaviors, premeditated acts of tormenting others while enjoying their anguished reactions, is that they are goal-oriented.

Pure sadists, non-narcissists, have no goal in mind except the pursuit of pleasure. Pain to them is an artful.

Remember the maquis de sal?

The narcissist, on the other hand, haunts and hunts his victims for a reason. He wants them to reflect his inner state. It is a part of a mechanism called "projective identifications".

Narcissists torture and torment in order to yield results. Once these results are secure, the narcissist usually sees us. Not so the classic sadist.

When the narcissist is angry, unhappy, disappointed, injured, or hurt, he feels unable to express his emotions sincerely, directly, and openly. Since to do so would be to admit his frailty, his neediness, and his weakness, which he would never do.

He deplores, the narcissist deplores his own humanity. He hates the fact that he has emotions, that he has vulnerabilities, that he is susceptible, gullible. He resents and rejects his own inadequacies and failures.

So what he does, he makes use of other people to express his pain and his frustration, his pent-up anger, and his aggression. He achieves this by mentally torturing other people to the point of madness, by driving them to violence, by reducing them to scar tissue in search of outlet, closure, and sometimes revenge.

He forces people to lose their own character traits and adopt his own instead. In reaction to his constant, well-targeted abuse, his victims become abusive, vengeful, ruthless, lacking in empathy, obsessed, and aggressive.

They, in other words, mirror the narcissist faithfully and thus relieve him of the need to express himself directly.

Having constructed this writhing hole of human mirrors, the narcissist withdraws. The goal achieved, he lets go.

As opposed to the classical sadist, the narcissist is not in it indefinitely for the pleasure of it. He abuses and traumatizes, humiliates and abandons, discards and ignores, insults and provokes only for the purpose of purging his inner demons.

By possessing others, the narcissist purifies himself cathartically and exercises his demented self.

Yet, when this is accomplished, the narcissist acts almost with remorse.

An episode of "Extreme Abuse" is usually followed by an act of great care and by malefilous apologies.

The narcissist's pendulum swings between the extremes of torturing others and then empathically soothing the resulting pain.

This incongruous behavior, these sudden shifts between sadism and altruism, abuse and love, ignoring and caring, abandoning and clinging, viciousness and remorse, the harsh and the tender, these are perhaps the most difficult to comprehend and to accept.

These swings producing people around the narcissist emotional insecurity, an eroded sense of self-worth, fear, stress and anxiety, this is called "walking on eggshells".

You never know when the next eruption will occur.

Gradually, emotional paralysis ensues and the narcissist's victims come to occupy the same emotional wasteland inhabited by the narcissist himself. They become his prisoners and hostages in more than one way, and even when he is long, out of their lives.

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

The masochist has been taught from an early age to hate herself and to consider herself unworthy of love and worthless as a person. Consequently, she is prone to self-destructive, punishing and self-defeating behaviors.

Though capable of pleasure and possessed of social skills, the masochist avoids or undermines pleasurable experiences. She does not admit to enjoying herself. She seeks suffering, pain and hurt in relationships and situations. She rejects help and resists people who offer help. She actively renders futile attempts to assist or ameliorate or mitigate or even solve their problems and predicaments.

These self-penalizing behaviors are also self-purging. They tend to relieve the masochist of overwhelming pent-up anxiety. They are cathartic. Masochist conduct is equally aimed at avoiding intimacy in its benefits, companionship and support as it is at punishing herself.

Masochist tend to choose people and circumstances that inevitably and predictably lead to failure, disillusionment, disappointment and mistreatment.

Conversely, they tend to avoid relationships, interactions and circumstances and people that are likely to result in success or gratification.

They reject, disdain or even suspect people who consistently treat them well. Masochist find caring, loving people, loving persons sexually unattractive.

The masochist typically adopts unrealistic goals and this way she generates underachievements inevitably.

Masochist routinely fail at mundane tasks even when these tasks are crucial to their own advancement and personal objectives and even when they adequately carry out identical assignments on behalf of others.

The diagnostic and statistical manual gives this amusing example, helps fellow students write papers but is unable to write her own paper.

When the masochist fails at these attempts at self-sabotage, she reacts with rage, depression and guilt. She is likely to compensate for her undesired achievements and happiness by having an accident or by engaging in behaviours that produce abandonment, frustration, hurts, illness or even physical pain.

Some masochist make harmful self-sacrifices uncalled for by the situation and unwanted by the intended beneficiaries or recipients.

The projective identification defence mechanism is frequently explained with masochist.

The masochist deliberately provokes, solicits and incites, angry, disparaging and rejecting responses from others in order to feel unfamiliar territory in her comfort zone.

When she is humiliated, devastated, hurt and defeated, she feels good.

I am what is left of Sam Bapinin in this pandemic. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, I think, and also a professor of psychology in various countries around this ever-shrinking globe.

Today we are going to discuss a very interesting phenomenon, sexual masochism, especially among people with borderline personality disorder, but also in general.

Sexual masochism wears many very surprising disguises. It is difficult to spot, actually.

Many behaviours that appear to be psychopathic are actually masochistic.

I have dealt with masochism in my previous two videos. There is one video about a masochistic anti-narcissist and there is another video where I discuss borderline fantasies and so on and so forth.

There I expound on masochism, citing and quoting early literature because masochism is one of the most well-documented phenomena.

Kraft Ebbing, who was a very early scholar of human sexuality, in his famous book, Psychopatia Sexualis, described sexual masochism.

He was possibly the first one to describe sexual masochism in clinical terms. Ironically, he named his book Psychopatia Sexualis in order to deter prurient, porn-consuming people.

He wanted the book to be read only by the learned, by scholars, by academics, by clinicians. He thought if he gave this book a title in Latin, the Hoi Po Loi, the Great Unwashed Masses, will not bother to buy it.

Regrettably for him, and fortunately for us, it became a bestseller. People were buying thousands of copies and making good use of these copies during the night. It became the first pornographic hit literature.

Okay, anecdotes aside, let's delve straight into the subject.

But as usual, I'm going to take you on a circuitous route.

Before we get there, I would like to answer one of your questions.

People ask me about switching. I describe switching in borderline personality disorder.

When the borderline faces humiliation, rejection, abandonment, real or imagined or anticipated, she switches.

A self-state emerges. This is a psychopathic self-state. It is intended to protect the borderline from hurt and pain.

And the psychopathic self-state has all the hallmarks of a psychopath. It's dysempathic, it's defiant, it's impulsive, it's promiscuous, etc. It's reckless, etc.

But people ask me about switching in actual psychopaths.

Because you see, the borderline psychopath or borderline psychopathic self-state is actually a secondary psychopath.

It's a psychopath who may well behave as a psychopath, has psychopathic traits, makes psychopathic choices and decisions, but still maintains access to empathy, some sort of empathy, and to positive emotions.

Typical primary psychopaths have neither.

So what about switching in psychopaths?

People have written to me to describe situations where the musk dropped suddenly and they saw behind the musk into a hideous, obnoxious creature.

People have even described it in terms of demon possession, lacking better vocabulary, more appropriate vocabulary, having no access to clinical literature. They resorted to religion.

And so yes, in the case of narcissists and psychopaths, there is no switching. They don't switch.

The narcissist has self-states. But as opposed to the borderline personality disorder, the switching in the narcissist is much more gradual and incremental and basically imperceptible.

And sometimes the narcissist is overwhelmed by moods and by negative emotionality and then he, for example, rages. But the rage is directly attributable to the self-state then in action and possession.

So the switching in narcissist occurs, but it's subterranean, it's underground, it's subversive.

And then there's an eruption and a startling transition to another behavior or another mood.

Not so with the borderline. The borderline you see the switching happening.

Borderline one disappears and borderline two appears. The secondary psychopath takes over.

The secondary psychopath has a different body language. So the secondary psychopath that takes over the borderline has a different face actually.

The face changes. The face morphs. It's like morphing in computer software. The face changes dramatically sometimes to the point that some borderlines are not recognizable almost when they switch to the secondary psychopathy phase.

So the face changes, body language changes.

And the same happens with psychopaths, but in psychopaths there is no actual switching.

What happens in psychopathy is the psychopath as well as the grandiose narcissist, which today we think may be one and the same.

Both psychopaths and grandiose narcissists have a mask. They present to the world a dazzling array of masks.

And when the masks are rendered ineffective, inefficacious, they drop the mask. They don't bother to keep it on. They don't care enough about people to keep on the mask.

So they simply drop the mask. And then you see behind the mask, the person behind the mask is the real person.

So if you catch a psychopath in the act or if a psychopath unexpectedly displays some weakness, frailty, vulnerability, the psychopath then drops the mask.

You see, psychopaths are capable of shame, self-shame, self-directed shame. So when they're caught in the act red-handed or when others witness some kind of weakness or failure or vulnerability, they're very ashamed of themselves. At that point, they don't have the mental energy to maintain the mask and it drops.

Let me summarize it for you. The borderline switches visibly, perceptibly, discernibly, switches between two self-states.

Each of these self-states has a different body language, a different appearance, a different facial features. It's like using Photoshop. It's like it's a total change. And it's like a new person that emerged and usurped, hijacked and kidnapped the original borderline.

That is switching in borderline. Switching in narcissism happens. It takes time. It's incremental. It's subterranean. But then suddenly erupts. Narcissus rages or becomes insanely envious or acts out in some way.

So in narcissism, there is not visible discernible switching. And usually the narcissus maintains his body language and facial expressions throughout, even when he had actually switched to another self-state.

The narcissus has much, much more continuity, at least bodily continuity, than the borderline. Although some people describe that the narcissus becomes hideous and frightening and sinister when he transitions between self-states, it's still the narcissus, identifiable narcissus.

In the case of a borderline, sometimes you can't tell it's the same person.

Now psychopaths don't have switching. They don't switch. They have masks. And when they are exposed, when you see through them, when they are caught in the act, when their vulnerabilities and weak underbelly, weak parts are exposed, they feel ashamed and they drop the mask.

Similarly, the promiscuity of psychopaths is very different to the promiscuity of borderlines.

Psychopaths self-trash in the sense that they are promiscuous off-handedly. Their promiscuity is off-handed like absent-minded, a hazard, totally impulsive, utterly indiscriminate. It's like an afterthought.

Sex, the psychopath sex is like an afterthought. It just happens and then it's gone and then he has no memory of it or doesn't care to remember it. And it's like drinking a glass of water, not a memorable event.

Of course, there are no emotions, no empathy, no connection, no nothing. It's a form of self-trash. But because psychopaths do not perceive their promiscuity as negative, their promiscuity is egosyntonic. They actually love to be promiscuous. There is not much trauma involved and they don't perceive their promiscuity as self-trashing even when they self-trash extremely.

So even in situations where a lot of self-trashing is involved, the bottom of the barrel self-trashing, the psychopath would not perceive it as self-trashing. He would perceive it as agency.

The psychopath would say, "I wanted the sex. I initiated the sex. I controlled the situation. I selected the partner. It was good. I loved it. I was excited." So then the psychopath reframes his self-trashing or her self-trashing in a way that would be egosyntonic.

Okay, we'll come to all this a bit later.

This leads us, of course, to sexual masochism.

Sexual masochism, and by the way, also emotional masochism, all types of masochism, they're forms of self-trashing.

Now, self-trashing is very common with being borderline personality disorder.

Collectly, Harvey Collectly, in The Mask of Sanity, in 1942, described numerous incidents of self-trashing with what he called psychopaths, but today we know many of them were not psychopaths. They were actually grandiose narcissists or border lights, but he called them psychopaths. They didn't know any better in the '40s.

So in 1942, he describes women, for example, who pick up groups of strangers and have sex with them at the drop of a hat on a dime with no rhyme or reason. Even in a bit of a racist note, he says disapprovingly that many of these strangers were blacks.

So he's short, that the white woman could pick up a gang of black workers and have sex with all of them simultaneously.

And he describes another incident of a woman who had an uninterrupted, interminable series of one-night stands with total strangers. You would just pick them in a bar and go with them to a room and have sex with them.

And he attributes this kind of impulsive sexuality to psychopathy.

And he is the first to note, or among the first to note, that psychopaths actually don't care.

There's nothing invested in the sex. It's a totally physical right. It's a gratification of a physical impulse. It's released in a way, masturbating with others.

But the psychopaths choose to have sex in circumstances which involves essentially self-trashing.

So there is surprisingly sexual masochism in psychopathy.

Both borderlines and psychopaths actually feel bad when they feel good. And feel good when they feel bad.

What would make healthy people feel very bad? It makes the psychopath happy, elated, euphoric.

What would make normal people feel very bad when the borderline is in her secondary psychopathy state would make her feel very much in control, very much validated and empowered.

So situations, choices, decisions, events, sexual encounters that would make every healthy person feel seriously bad about herself or himself. These kind of situations or events or circumstances would make the psychopath and the borderline secondary psychopath feel very good.

They feel very good when they should have felt bad.

And yes, of course, this is inappropriate effect.

One of my previous videos I've dealt with reduced effect display and inappropriate effect.

I encourage you to watch it.

There is a disconnect between the borderline's emotions and her actual acting out decompensating behavior.

There's a disconnect between the psychopath and anything internal.

The psychopath is a total shell.

So these people engage in sexual masochism and sexual self-trashing.

But the psychopath and the borderline do not perceive it as such until possibly the morning later, the case of the borderline.

But during the act, they perceive the act as actually a form of agency, a form of control, of empowerment, of validation, of agency, of self-efficacy.

So they feel good about it. Feeling bad, being trashed leads them to sexual arousal.

They're sexually aroused by situations that would create deep shame and guilt in healthy people.

And so they find themselves in four types of sexual contexts. And all these four types lead to trashing and trashing leads to sexual arousal.

Sexual arousal leads to a sense of empowerment, validation, resilience, strength, euphoria and good feelings.

So these are the four situations.

Number one, despoiling.

It's when the borderline or the psychopath gives their bodies away. They simply give them away. They select random strangers, many of them sexual predators, and then they recklessly put themselves at the complete disposal of the predator.

And the predator can do with their bodies as he wishes. He can denigrate them. He can humiliate them. He can despoil them. He can beat them up. He can inflict sexual, physical damage. He can hurt them in a variety of ways, emotional and physical. He can rape them. He can sexually assault them. The more the merrier, the more egregious and extreme the despoiling, the more egregious and extreme the sexual sadism of the predator, the more the psychopath and borderlines are sexually aroused.

When they find themselves in very dangerous situations, for example, in uncontrollable group sex or subject to a clear, dangerous sadistic predator alone in a room drunk, unable to extricate herself.

At that point, the sexual arousal is maximal. It seems that sexual arousal in borderlines and psychopaths is intimately connected with a sense of pending doom, imminent annihilation, self elimination, self eradication.

The borderline and the psychopath are therefore sexually aroused by the presence or potential presence of death. They are, as Freud used to call it, fanatic. They have a death wish. They are motivated by the death drive, not by the life force, not by Eros or Limido, but by Motido and Estudo, the opposite, the mirror image.

So borderlines and psychopaths, when they engage in sex, they engage in destructive sex, self destructive sex, sex that is guaranteed to annihilate them morally, to destroy them mentally, to inflict and afflict them psychologically, to cause pain, to cause hurt and sometimes to injure them bodily.

This is the type of sex that brings them to orgasm and to climax. It's of course a form of sexual masochism as described in the 19th century, mid 19th century actually, second third of the last third of the 19th century by Kraft Ebbing.

So it's a very well documented and very old phenomenon.

Klegli also describes despoiling in his masterpiece. So despoiling is the first situation that borderlines and psychopaths find themselves in.

Second, cheating. Both borderlines and psychopaths are notorious for cheating. They cheat a lot.

Now, cheating in some cases is compulsive. So it's a serial cheater who cannot control herself or himself and they cheat. But that is a totally different psychodynamic. It doesn't have to do anything with self trashing. It has to do with coupled dynamics and so on.

And I deal with these issues in other videos.

But there is a form of cheating that is intimately connected to sexual masochism. It's connected to sexual masochism because the cheating takes place in shameful, disgraceful circumstances.

The cheating takes place in a way that is socially frowned upon, socially unacceptable. The cheating negates and conflicts with social mores and values or even with the values of the individual.

So borderlines and psychopaths engage in the kind of cheating that confirms or supports the view that they are bad, immoral objects.

So in the morning after, the typical borderline would feel shame and guilt. The psychopath would not feel ashamed, would not feel guilty, but the psychopath would feel seriously bad. Like I'm a bad person. I'm an immoral person. I'm an evil person.

There would be no emotional resonance to these statements. The psychopath is not saying I'm an evil person and I'm ashamed to it. I want to change. No. The psychopath actually takes pride in being an evil and mean and nasty and immoral person.

But still, it's an egotistonic statement. I'm evil. I mean, it's an egotistonic statement in most cases.

So the cheating is a way to transition into dissonance. Cheating is a way to torture yourself, to denigrate yourself, to demean yourself.

In other words, cheating is another form of self-trashing. And so cheating leads to sexual arousal, the act of cheating, the very act of cheating, the forbidden fruit, breaking morality, negating the contract you have with your intimate partner for sexual exclusivity.

The very act is defiant. This very act is consummation in your face. I'm going to do whatever I want to do. I'm a free person. I have a free will and no one will tell me what to do. It's a defiant act.

So in this case, cheating is part of sexual masochism. This cheating leads to feelings of shame and guilt in the borderline or to affirmation that the psychopath is a bad and worthy object.

And that in itself arouses sexually, creates sexual excitation in the borderline and the psychopath.

And this is the second type of behavior that caused sexual arousal via masochism.

The next type of behavior is substance abuse. Substance abuse, of course, is a form of self-trashing. It's also a form of suicide, slow-mo suicide.

If you consume substances long enough, you die. It's very simple. And so, oh, you end up seriously incapacitated.

So substances, substance abuse, alcohol, drugs, pills, opioids, abuse of substances is a form of masochism. It's a form of masochism, but it creates sexual arousal because in borderlines and in psychopaths, self-trashing masochism causes sexual arousal.

So psychopaths and borderlines, when they consume substances, when they abuse substances, they are simultaneously sexually aroused.

That's why there is such an intimate, powerful, intense connection and correlation between substance abuse and promiscuous behavior in borderlines and psychopaths.

The chain is very simple. Self-trashing leads to sexual arousal. Abusing and consuming alcohol and drugs and pills is self-trashing. So it leads to sexual arousal and to sexual acting out. Sexual, reckless, acting out. Self-endangering, risky.

So in borderlines and psychopaths, they reach both borderlines and psychopaths, reach maximum sexual excitation, maximum sexual arousal when they consume alcohol and drugs.

This is not the case for the vast majority of the population. In healthy people, the consumption of alcohol and drugs actually suppresses the sex drive in the long term. Ironically, alcohol, for example, is a suppressant. It's not a stimulant. It's a depressant.

But in borderlines and psychopaths, alcohol and drugs have the exact opposite effect because they're intimately linked to psychological self-trashing.

Here I am, killing myself, damaging my body, destroying my mind, ruining my brain. How exciting, how sexually arousing, how wonderful. I want to have sex. Let me find anyone, eligible or not, appropriate or not. Let me just find anyone to despoil me, to abuse me, to demean me and humiliate me and sadistically torture me in sex.

And then heaven, I mean heaven, my beliefs is complete. That's a sequence.

Now very often, borderlines and psychopaths are in committed relationships and they may even have the best intentions in the world. They may even seriously, seriously vow and promise and pledge to themselves as well that they will never cheat or never find themselves in compromising situations with others.

But substance abuse is likely to drive them to do exactly this self-ego-distonic dissonant cheating and sexual self-trashing brought on by substance abuse.

Now, since majority of people with borderline personality disorder and majority of psychopaths abuse alcohol and drugs and pills and opioids on a regular basis, actually as a major clinical feature of these disorders, these people are very likely to cheat as a form of self-trashing.

And they are very likely to engage in very risky, reckless, sadistic, humiliating, demeaning, sadomaso sex to the point of physical risk practices such as choking, for example.

Okay, so this is the fourth way, the third pathway, I'm sorry, this is the third pathway to sexually arousing self-trashing, masochistic sexual arousal.

And there's a fourth way, choosing inappropriate mates.

Borderlines and psychopaths are notorious for this. Their mate selection is all awry, it's skewed. They consistently choose the wrong mates. But of course they choose the wrong mates because they're wrong.

Only the wrong mates are right for the borderline and the psychopath because wrong mates, inappropriate mates, are likely to cause strife, conflict, pain, hurt, abandonment.

When you choose an inappropriate mate, you are in for a ride, a ride into agony. In other words, choosing an inappropriate mate is a form of self-trashing. And because it is a form of self-trashing, initially when the psychopath and borderline choose the wrong mate, they are highly sexually aroused.

They realize unconsciously that they are choosing someone who will end up hurting them, will end up harming them, will end up causing them enormous pain, or will end up negating their defiance, will end up clashing with them.

If they are psychopaths, will end up confronting with them. In other words, if it's a borderline, she realizes that the inappropriate intimate partner will cause her a lot of pain via rejection, abandonment and humiliation.

If it's a psychopath, the psychopath chooses an inappropriate mate because he or she realizes that sooner or later, it's going to degenerate into an all-out war, into a conflict.

And psychopaths thrive in conflict because conflict involves inevitably damages, self-inflicted damages. Conflict involves in other words, self-trashing.

So to choose an inappropriate mate, an inappropriate intimate partner, is a surefire way, it's a guaranteed way to hell. And hell is where borderline narcissists thrive. It is there that maximum torment is assured. It is there that the ultimate forms of self-trashing are available.

So let me repeat the four techniques, the four strategies of self-trashing that cause sexual arousal in secondary psychopaths known as borderlines, any primary psychopaths.

So these are the four ways of self-annihilation, self-eradication, self-elimination, self-trashing, self-humiliation in psychopaths and narcissists. Number one, sexual despoiling, sexual torture, sexual torment, sexual sadism, sadho-mazzo, being humiliated in sex, being forced to do disgusting things or revolting things.

Participating in the kind of sex where one is totally objectified, like for example, gang rape or gang bang or group sex. And that starts very early on.

I've heard of instances of women aged 12 participating in gang bangs and so on. So it's not an adult thing.

So despoiling, despoiling can of course be also psychological, but in the borderline of the psychopath, they immediately transition from psychological despoiling to sexual despotic.

Sex is the lingua franca. Sex is the ultimate vocabulary of the borderline and the psychopath. They use sex as a language that communicate via various manifestations of sexuality.

So number one strategy leading to self-trashing, leading to sexual arousal is sexual sadism, despoiling and sadho-mazzo.

Number two strategy, second strategy, cheating. Cheating causes the borderline to feel shame and guilt. Cheating causes the psychopath to feel like a bed and worthy object. Both are dissonant. They create dissonances.

So they are a form of self-trashing, but both borderlines and psychopaths find cheating irresistible. It's very exciting and arousing sexually.

Number three strategy, third strategy, substance abuse, abuse of alcohol and drugs. It's the ultimate form of self-trashing because it leads to disability and death.

Consequently, because it is a form of self-trashing, because it's a masochistic act to drink, to excess, to inject drugs, to swallow, to gorge down on pills, to consume opioids to the point of overdose.

That's the ultimate act in self-trashing, this almost suicidal. So of course it's intimately linked in the mind of the borderline and the mind of the psychopath with sexual arousal.

Every time the borderline drinks heavily, every time the psychopath pops a few pills, they become sexually aroused. It's an atypical reaction actually. It doesn't happen with healthy people.

But with borderlines and psychopaths, the consumption of alcohol, the abuse of drugs and other substances leads inexorably to sex because they are aroused by the thought that they are destroying themselves.

And the fourth strategy is much more long term. It is selecting inappropriate partners, inappropriate mates. People who are incompatible with the borderline and the narcissist often get selected as spouses or intimate partners.

So the borderline and psychopath have a very bizarre form of mate selection. But they do it on purpose.

Because if you choose the wrong spouse or the wrong boyfriend or the wrong girlfriend, you are bound to end up in conflict. If you are borderline, you are bound, you are sure to experience abandonment, humiliation and rejection. If you are a psychopath, this is going to end badly in conflict, in war, in combat.

So by choosing an incompatible partner who cannot by definition, constitutionally cater to the needs, sexual needs, emotional needs of the borderline and cannot cater to the needs of the psychopath, by choosing such a partner, inadequate, wrong, the borderline of the psychopath guarantees self-trashing.

Self-trashing in the form of conflict in the case of the psychopath or self-trashing in the form of hurt and pain in the case of the borderline.

Of course, this will push them to sexual promiscuity and sexual acting out reckless and again, self-destructive.

Now, all these personality disorders are founded on narcissistic supply or forms of supply, not narcissistic, but forms of supply.

So, for example, in the case of borderline personality disorder, the borderline patient, her supply is to prevent abandonment. If she succeeds to keep her intimate partner, if she succeeds to preserve the relationship, to maintain object constancy, to keep his presence in her life, in extreme cases, if she is also codependent, to merge and to fuse with the intimate partner, that is her supply.

The intimate partner's presence, his availability and his obsecuous submissive agreement to partake in the fantasies and drama of the borderline.

And of course, the regulatory functions that he provides because he helps the borderline regulate her moods and emotions. All these are forms of supply to the borderline personality disordered person.

In the case of the narcissist, narcissistic supply or sadistic supply, in the case of the antisocial or the psychopath, money, sex, power, these are all forms of supply and all class to be personality disorder.

People are goal oriented. The goal is to secure the supply.

Histrionic personality disorders, disordered people derive their supply from their heightened sexuality, seductiveness, flirtatiousness, from serial romantic and sexual encounters, from teasing, physical exercises, shape and state of their body, etc.

This is their supply.

Narcissists derive their supply from garnering attention, both positive, adulation, admiration and negative, being feared, notoriety.

If they are sadistic, they also derive sadistic supply by humiliating, verbally abusing, sexually assaulting, etc.

Other people.

The borderline patient, woman or men, they derive their supply from the presence of other people. They suffer from separation anxiety. They are terrified of being abandoned.

So the very presence of other people is a form of supply.

And finally, the antisocial personality disorder, the psychopath, derives supply from accumulating money, power, control and having sometimes sadistic fun.

Borderline, borderlines, for instance, can be described as narcissists with an overwhelming fear of abandonment because they're grandiose. They are careful not to abuse people. They do care deeply about not hurting other people, but they care about not hurting other people for selfish motivation, for selfish reasons. They want to avoid rejection and abandonment.

Borderlines depend on other people for emotional sustenance, for emotional regulation, for mood regulation, reduction, amelioration of liability.

A drug addict is unlikely to pick up a fight with his pusher. And it's the same with borderlines.

Borderline is an addiction to the partner, addiction to an intimate partner. But borderlines also have deficient impulse control, exactly like psychopaths or antisocial.

And so their emotional dysregulation, moodlability, erratic behavior lead to abuse. They're very abusive towards the nearest and dearest. And then they regret it and they feel shame, which doesn't happen with the psychopath.

And finally, I would like to reiterate what's the difference between self-trushing and promiscuity, because many people had written comments and had written to me. And it's clear that I didn't get the point across.

Self-trushing has nothing to do with promiscuity.

From the outside, they look the same because there's a huge number of intimate, a huge number of sexual partners. And it's very, both behaviors involve impulse control or lack of impulse control.

And both behaviors are pretty much indiscriminate, but they're very different.

Self-trushing is always compulsive. Promiscuity is rarely compulsive. Promiscuity can be impulsive. Promiscuity is a reaction to a situation. For example, the promiscuous person would react to an opportunity to have sex. The promiscuous person reacts to availability cues. So a promiscuous person is likely to immediately seek to have sex with someone who signals interest or availability whenever. So promiscuous people are opportunistic. People who self-trash, like borderlines and psychopaths, they are compulsive. They can't help it. They need to self-trash because only when they self-trash, they feel alive. And only when they self-trash, they can regulate their sexual impulses and attend an emotional landscape.

So self-trashing in borderlines and psychopaths is regulatory and therefore it's compulsive. It's not a choice. It's not a reaction to circumstances like an opportunity. It's not even about availability of someone because very often psychopaths and borderlines initiate their self-trashing.

It's not reactive. It's proactive.

But self-trashing has many very critical functions in borderlines and psychopaths.

Promiscuity is an active role. The sex, promiscuous sex, is an active role. Promiscuous people report that they experience promiscuous sex as empowering, as a lifestyle choice, as a conquest. Engaging in promiscuous sex usually boosts the participant's self-esteem. It provides an inner locus of control. People emerge from promiscuous sex, gratified, elated, stronger, more resilient, happier, more egosyntonic.

That's promiscuous sex. Exactly the opposite happens in self-trashing.

Self-trashing is masochistic. It's self-punitive. It's self-degrading. It's self-dispoiling. It's demeaning. It's passive.

The main function of self-trashing is to experience finally sexual arousal, to experience emotions that are dysregulated and threatened to overwhelm the borderline, for example. To experience being alive in the case of the psychopath and to reduce anxiety.

You could say that borderlines and psychopaths self-medicate with self-trashing, especially sexual self-trashing. They reduce anxiety by having sex. They restore and revive their sexual drive by having sex, by having self-trashing sadistic sex, by subjecting themselves to sexual mistreatment and assault.

When they become objectified, when they are taunted and humiliated and tortured and made to do disgusting things and so on, when they find themselves in situations which involve fear and enormous risk, reckless situations, it is then that they feel alive and it is then that their sex drive is activated. Only then do they feel sexual.

And when they feel sexual, they feel in control. And at that moment, anxiety is reduced.

In other words, self-trashing sex is an axiolytic. It is the exact opposite of promiscuity. It is an axiolytic and antidepressant.

So the motivation of the promiscuous person is actually to feel better, to feel good, to feel empowered, to feel validated, to feel strong, to feel attractive, to feel desired, to feel accepted, to feel warm, to feel comfort, to feel compassion, to feel affection. It's all positive.

The emotional background of promiscuity is essentially positive.

We often confuse and conflate promiscuity with self trashing.

The emotional background of self trashing is 100% negative.

Mazoukism, anxiety, depression, self punishment, self defeat, self destruction, self humiliation, self annihilation, despoiling, degrading oneself, demeaning oneself, objectifying oneself.

It's only only negative.

It involves extreme self-loathing and an attempt for self-destruction via sex.

In self trashing therefore the process that leads to self trashing is very different from the process that leads to promiscuous sex.

Self trashing is actually an immediate impulsive act.

There are no preliminaries. There's no courting. There's no flirting. There's no dating. There's nothing.

The self trashing party just picks up a stranger and after one hour or two hours goes to bed with him. He describes the self trashing party, picks up a group of strangers and immediately proceeds to have sex with them after a few drinks.

So there are no preliminaries. There's no getting to know the other party. There's no intimacy. There's no acquaintance. There's no background.

If the sexually trashing party has a few drinks, if she talks a little with her potential sexual partner, it's perfectory. It's minimal or even non-existence.

Sex in the case of self trashing is not the last move. It's not the culmination of anything. It's the first move.

The self trasher, the person who self trashes actually ends up bedding strangers, most of them unattractive strangers. She doesn't want to have sex at all in most of these cases. But she ends up having sex because having sex with unattractive mates or even repulsive people is the ultimate in self trashing.

In other words, someone who self trashes would tend to have very bad sex with very disgusting people, very repulsive people.

The more repulsive, the better. The worse the sex, the better because it makes her feel bad about herself. It is self trashing.

So engaging in unwanted sex with repulsive people or with people she's not attracted to, it's a form of despoiling. It's a form of degrading herself.

And of course, gender pronouns are interchangeable. Same applies to men.

So the sexual trasher, the person who sexually trashes typically engages in kinky, reckless, or extreme sexual acts and degradation in the first few minutes with totally unknown strangers. She would do intimate things, super intimate things with these strangers as though they had been in a relationship for 10 years and there is deep love there. It's a form, it's a manifestation of self trashing.

Alcohol and drugs, as I've said, frequently precede both types of sex.

So the promiscuous use substances to disinhibit themselves. In other words, the promiscuous person first decides to have sex and then disinhibits herself by drinking.

The drinking doesn't provoke the wish to have sex. It's not the drinking that leads to sex. The drinking is just, the alcohol is just used to free, to disinhibit, to allow the promiscuous person to engage in sex.

In the case of self trashing, the person who self trashes, she drinks and she does drugs in order to numb herself, to bring herself to the brink of a blackout or to unconsciousness because she can't face, she can't face what's being done to her in sex. The sex is so bad, so ugly, so disgusting that she can't face it. She has to numb herself out of existence. She has to be so drunk or so dragged that she's essentially unconscious, essentially becomes, renders herself a total object.

The promiscuous person never does this. The promiscuous person drinks to excess and can do drugs. But she does this because she regards the sex as a wonderful thing, as a positive experience and she wants to have the sex and so she needs to remove inhibitions. She needs to disinhibit. She is egosyntonic. Self trashing is always ego-distonic. People who self trash describe the sex as cursory, disappointing, objectifying, disgusting, unpleasant or uncomfortable. Many of these people report, especially their borderline, report shame, regret, anger, disappointment and guilt, emotional blunting and an increase in anxiety and depression after the act.

So we've taken a grand tour of sexual masochism. In the case of borderlines and psychopaths, sexual masochism, self-inflicted sexual wounds, sexual sadism, self-demeaning, self-destruction, self-dispoiling, self-degrading is mediated via totally impulsive sex which is essentially allied and associated with negative emotions.

The sex makes the borderline and the psychopath feel bad. Psychopaths and borderlines have a negative valence of sex. They regard sex essentially as bad or even repulsive.

It's the same with histrionics by the way. Sex are actually hypo-sexual. They have a low sex drive.

That's the irony.

So all these groups have actually a low sex drive. But in order to feel sexually aroused and frankly in order to feel alive, they need to self-mutilate.

Now the typical borderline cuts or burns herself with cigarettes. Any borderline and all psychopaths, they self-mutilate via sex. It is when they are involved in extreme self-trashing that they feel ironically good where other people would have felt so bad that they would need medication or even commit suicide.

The psychopath and the borderline revel, flourish, thrive in this environment. The worse the situation, the more horrible the degradation and the sadism involved, the more extreme the self-trashing, the more negative emotions are evoked afterwards, the more the borderline and the psychopath find the experience irresistible and inexorably gravitate towards it from time to time. And they use the strategies that I've mentioned. So masochism, despoiling, degrading oneself, cheating, which involves egotisto-nance, substance abuse, which leads to sexual arousal but is in itself also a form of self-trashing and choosing inappropriate means, which guarantees unfavorable outcomes, which are painful and hurtful and conflict-ridden. And this bad atmosphere is actually extended, expanded self-trashing within which the borderline and the psychopath feel alive and sexually aroused. These people, if you observe them, the worse off the situation, the more they're happy. They feel good only when they feel seriously bad and on the brink of extinction, either by being objectified, by numbing themselves with substances, alcohol, or by destroying themselves completely.

Today we are going to have an admixture of novel concepts, controversial views, and plain old-fashioned in-your-face defiance by your favorite professor of psychology, Blue professor of psychology.

Sam Bakhny, the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism, revisited.

Today we start with a concept borrowed from neo-Marxist, no less, neo-Marxist socioeconomic theory.

The word is interpolation.

It is a process first described in socioeconomic settings by one Louis Althusser, a French, his name notwithstanding, a French psychologist and philosopher who ended up in a mental asylum as most psychologists and psychiatrists should.

Okay, so Shonim, interpolation in Althusser's work is a different thing.

And I recommend that you watch the video I've made about Althusser.

But interpolation the way I use it is when someone reacts to other people's wishes, other people's desires, other people's urges and expectations as if these were his own.

I'm going to repeat this.

When you react to other people's desires, wishes, hopes, dreams, demands, and especially expectations as if these were yours, not theirs, but your own, you are being interpolated.

So now you know what's happening to you.

You're being interpolated.

And then if you act accordingly, the interpolation is translated into action.

So for example, someone expects to have sex with you, and then you adopt this expectation.

This expectation becomes yours.

You experience the other person's expectation as if it were your own.

You experience the other person's desire, demands, urges, drives, wishes as if they were your own.

And you end up having sex with this person, even though you didn't want to, even though you don't even like that person.

So this is interpolation.

It's a form of mind control.

It's a very subtle state of hypnosis or trance or brainwashing, if you wish.

People pleasers are the reification of this process, the reification, the embodiment of interpolation.

But interpolation makes an appearance in many other mental health disorders, such as, for example, dependent personality disorders, aka codependency, or borderline personality disorder.

Interpolation appears also in psychotic disorders, anxiety disorders, and to cut a long story short, in many other mental health issues.

Interpolation is a way of taking over your mind by forcing you to adopt the expectations and wishes of another person when that other person renders you an extension of themselves.

Narcissists do it very often, and so do psychopaths, and to a lesser extent, borderlines.

Now masochists, the self-destructive, psychopathic narcissists, and people pleasers are different breeds.

They're different kinds of people.

Sometimes they behave in the same ways, so it's difficult to tell them apart.

I repeat, masochists, people who are self-destructive, psychopathic narcissists, and people pleasers behave in ways which resemble each other, and so they're difficult to tell apart, but they all interpolate other people and are interpolated by other people.

In other words, the dominant interactive process, the dominant interpersonal process, is interpolation, whether active or passive, is a recipient.

Start with masochists.

Masochists crave pain. They desire to be hurt. They want to be hurt.

The opposite of pain aversion, pain averse, the opposite of hurt averse, the pursue, the pursue agony, entombment, the engineer, the orchestrate, incremental situations whose outcomes are agonizing, mortifying, and humiliating, but never life-threatening.

Masochism is not about suicide. Masochism is about staying alive to experience the pain in a very perverted way, a very sick way, enjoyed.

Okay, so these are masochists.

What about self-defeating, self-loathing, self-destructive folk?

about these kind of people?

These kind of people act out recklessly, petulantly, and defiantly in order to sabotage their best interests and their well-being in a decisive, self-harming, self-trashing, and almost suicidal manner.

So one could say that self-sabotaging, self-defeating, self-harming, self-trashing, and self-destructive people are at the very end of the spectrum of masochism, the same way psychopaths are at the end of the spectrum of antisocial personality disorder.

These people are exaggerated masochists, whose pain is so extreme that it leads to life-threatening situations.

You could say that self-destructive and self-defeating and self-trashing and self-harming people are suicidal masochists.

On to the third kind, psychopathic narcissists. Psychopathic narcissists puppeteer others. They play with others. They brainwash others. They co-opt and manipulate others into goal-oriented scenarios that superficially appear to be masochistic. But in reality, these scenarios are actually sadistic or, in the best case, self-efficacious as far as a psychopathic narcissist is concerned. In other words, the psychopathic narcissist would engineer or orchestrate situations that would cause him pain. And so superficially on the surface, it would appear to be that he is a masochist, but actually he is not, nor is he self-destructive or self-defeating. These scenarios, these scripts, these theater plays organized by the psychopathic narcissists intend to fulfill some goal. They are self-efficacious. They are ends-oriented. The narcissist wants to accomplish something. And so he inflicts pain on himself because that's the inevitable cost of obtaining the goal.

Sometimes there's sadism involved. Psychopathic narcissists enjoy inflicting pain on other people, even if it means that they have to pay a price in terms of being hurt. That's how twisted the minds of psychopathic narcissists are.

And finally, people pleasers are conflict averse. They need to be, they need to be needed. They need to be accepted and to belong. They are self-sacrificial.

And so again, superficially on the surface, one could be excused if one were to confuse people pleasers with masochist. People pleasers are sacrificial, so they endure pain and suffering, exactly like masochist. But as distinct from masochist, they enjoy this role. They find it gratifying. They pursue it.

The masochist inflicts pain on himself and also enjoys it. But these are isolated occurrences, more like a life strategy. Whereas the people pleaser simply wants to fit in and to belong and to be accepted and to be loved and to be liked and to be cherished.

And so the way to do this is to sacrifice one's best interests and to have no boundaries.

You see the distinction. The people pleaser pursues his or her best interests. He's the opposite of a masochist. He loves himself or herself.

But the people pleaser engages in dysfunctional strategies to realize this self-love by giving up, by surrendering, by being submissive, by echoing other people, by oversharing, by succumbing, by being interpolated all the time, adopting other people's expectations as one's own.

Let's take an example which I think will disambiguate all this and make it very clear.

And again, I'm going to take a very extreme example.

A masochist would push his girlfriend to cheat on him in order to endure exquisite torment. The torture of witnessing his girlfriend with another man, if the masochist is a male, this torture is delectable, is desirable, is wonderful, is ambrosia, is nectar to the masochist's soul.

Yes, he wallows in excruciating pain, but this pain is a kind of delicacy that masochist pursues relentlessly, almost like an addiction.

So the masochist would send his girlfriend to another man to cheat on him if he is a cuckold, for example, because it gives him pleasure. Ultimately, he transitions through the pain into a state of elation.

Now, imagine the self-destructive sort.

The self-destructive sort will act the same way. He will push his girlfriend to cheat on him, but then he will proceed to break up with her or to divorce her if he is married.

In other words, the self-defeating, self-harming type would push his girlfriend to cheat on him in order to destroy his life, in order to devastate himself, in order to ruin the institutions to which he adheres, such as his marriage. He will shatter his life against the rock of pain and infidelity. He will leverage his partner's disloyalty in order to accomplish the goal of dismantling his own life.

The psychopathic narcissist will send his girlfriend to cheat on him, exactly like the masochist, exactly like the self-destructive sort.

All three will act in the same way.

So that's why when looking from the outside, it's very difficult to tell which is which and what is what.

But the psychopathic narcissist will send his girlfriend to cheat on him because he wants to make sure that he is cucked. He wants to make sure that he's cheated on, but he would do this in order to get rid of his intimate partner, to get rid of an unwanted and burdensome relationship.

The psychopathic narcissist will leverage the partner's shame and guilt to get rid of her.

So it's goal-oriented. The means justify the end and the cost of the inevitable pain of having to watch your girlfriend with another guy is acceptable.

This is the only way to ensure or to secure her future absence and without any stalking or demands or recriminations.

So this is an example of the psychopathic narcissist acting the same way as the masochist does in the same way as the people pleaser does, but for completely different reasons.

Very selfish, very interest-oriented.

And finally, the people pleaser will simply permit his intimate partner, permit his girlfriend to sleep with others just so as to make her happy.

The people pleaser would want to please her partner, please her partner or his partner by allowing him or her to sleep with other people.

Again, we have the same behavior. Honey, you can sleep with this guy, but the reason is, honey, I want you to be happy and I want you to stay with me. I want us to be together. If this is the price I have to pay, I will do it because I'm a people pleaser.

Same behavior, four different explanations.

Pushing your intimate partner to cheat on you, the masochist to enjoy the pain, the people pleaser to please the partner, the psychopathic narcissist to get rid of the partner and the self-destructive type to destroy his marriage or his relationship.

These are all, of course, mentally ill people.

What about respect? What about boundaries? What about rules of conduct? What about codes? Social and others? What about scripts? What happens to all these things? Don't expect the mentally ill to respect you. They don't know how. They have no self-respect, so how could they possibly respect other people?

Instead, the mentally ill veer, oscillate between object submission and contemptuous defiance.

And don't expect the mentally ill to not breach your boundaries. Of course, they will time and again. They are unbound. Mentally ill people have no boundaries or they have porous boundaries. Mentally ill people are hurtful. They cause pain. Hurt people hurt people because they fail to perceive the separateness of others.

Many mentally ill people do not possess a functioning self or an undisturbed identity. They don't exist, actually, except for the agency of other people. And existing through the agency of other people means you have no boundaries. You don't know where you stop and other people begin.

So do not expect the mentally ill to observe the rules, to obey some code of conduct, to be empathic. The mentally ill are too busy at survival. They are self-centered. They are entitled. Their mental illness is a get out of jail card, excuses every misbehavior. Everyone else is to blame for the egregious misconduct of the mentally ill. It's known as alloplastic defenses.

So I'll give you two tips from the art of psychotherapy. Number one, if a certain action or some inaction has outcomes, these consequences are intended, whether consciously or unconsciously. People are often only dimly aware of the full range of their motivations and usually they get it wrong. But when people make behavioral choices to act or to refrain from acting, they actually seek and they intend the most likely outcomes.

Even when and if they are not aware of the desired ends of the consequences of the outcomes, even when they vehemently deny any such intention and motivation, that's precisely what they want.

If someone acts in a certain way and there's a likely outcome, they want the outcome. If someone does not act and there's a likely consequence to not acting, they want this consequence. Don't listen to any denials, don't believe any disavows. If someone acts or does not act, they want the likely consequences of their choices. Example, if you act in a way that imperils and dangers a long-held relationship, it is because you want this relationship over. You wish to extricate yourself from this relationship. You want out. This is your way of sabotaging the relationship. If you don't act in a certain way and it would mean that the relationship is endangered, the same, you want it over.

The second tip I'm going to give you, what clients say in therapy matters far less than why they choose to say what they are saying. What content do the clients select? What do they elect to disclose? What do they omit and why? What words do they employ and why do they choose these words? Why do so? Disclose anything in a particular timing.

The subtext, the hidden occult text matters much more than the overt text. Speech acts need to be deconstructed to teach us anything meaningful about the client.

And one of the dominant features of deconstructing speech acts is isolating interpolations.

The way other people's expectations, wishes, dreams, hopes, demands, weigh on us, penetrate our minds, fashion our choices and decisions and actions, and ultimately become an integral part of our identity.

This by the way is Lakhan. Ok, Shvanpanim, look it up. Today we are going to discuss what else? Sex on a Saturday morning.

So my name is Samvatnin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Complete Dissentances, Narcissism Revisited and I'm a professor of psychology in a variety of universities in many, many countries, all of them touched by COVID. But it's not my fault, I swear it wasn't me. Ok, so today we are going to discuss auto-eroticism, exhibitionism, submissiveness in sex, especially BDSM and what's the difference between submission in BDSM and self-trashing, which is a behavior typical of borderline personality disorder and psychopathy, psychopaths and borderlines, self-trash, but self-trashing and submissiveness are not the same. Additionally there are issues of auto-eroticism, self-infatuation and exhibitionism, which brings into the picture narcissism.

Narcissism is about being watched, being observed. You see, it's an amazing complex. Mary go around.

Let us start. Auto-eroticism is when someone regards himself or herself as her own sex object, regarding oneself as one's self-sex object. Usually we direct our libido, our eros, our life force, our sex drive. We direct it at other people and this is called, this is a part of object relations. Our sexuality is other directed.

But when there are, shall we put it gently, disturbances in identity, problems with personality, moodlability, extreme emotional dysregulation, lack of core of identity. In other words, when the person is mentally disturbed, when there are serious mental health problems, usually instead of other directed libido, there is self-directed libido, self-directed sex drive.

The person perceives her body and even more so her mind as very sexual objects, the sexual objects, the primary sexual objects. And this is auto-eroticism.

Auto-eroticism is narcissistic of course, because it is self-referential. It is a redirection of life's energy. Inwards, it is interacting with internal objects, including many internal sexual objects.

So it is part and parcel of narcissism. All narcissists are auto-erotic. Even somatic narcissists are auto-erotic, as we will see a bit later.

And auto-eroticism often goes hand in hand with exhibitionism.

Exhibitionism is becoming sexually aroused by being observed or watched in the sex act.

So exhibitionists become sexually excited and aroused when they are observed by other people having sex.

Another person's objectifying gaze gives them the thrills, thrills them sexually, arouses them sexually.

This objectifying gaze of the other, the observer, the spectator, the audience, this objectifying gaze is at the core of narcissism actually.

Because what is narcissism? Narcissism is about being seen, being observed, being spectated.

And so exhibitionism is actually a form of narcissism. It is the exhibitionist sees himself or herself through another person's gaze, through another person's eyes. The exhibitionist objectifies herself by being observed, by being watched, by having an audience. And having objectified herself, she finds the resulting object extremely sexually arousing.

And of course, the more numerous the observers, the better. The more the merrier. The more the merrier. The more numerous the observers, the more intense the sexual excitatory state.

So one observer is good, four observers are much better.

This is why people with autoeroticism, the autoerotic, mainly narcissists and especially psychopaths, these people gravitate almost invariably and ineluctably gravitate to group sex, usually with total strangers. And they do so even in early adolescence. The earliest case I've heard of was 12 years old, a girl, 12 years old, who had group sex with a group of men she had met that day.

So autoeroticism leads to group sex via the pathway of exhibitionism.

The nascent psychopath, usually at this early age of adolescence, it's called conduct disorder. It's not called psychopathy, it's called contact disorder. So the adolescent with contact disorder, the sexuality of that adolescent is founded on autoeroticism and exhibitionism. And this adolescent needs to be watched, spectated and observed while having sex. This kind of adolescent and later adult, adult, pick up, picks up total strangers and has sex in front of them with one of them or all of them in succession. They take turns. The autoerotic objectify not only themselves, but they of course objectify also the partner. They use the partner, they use the partner's body as a sex toy to masturbate with. The partner is a masturbatory aid. The partner is therefore objectified and becomes anonymous, impersonal, commodified, commoditized, interchangeable, dispensable, disposable and replaceable. These are the words which describe the psychopaths or the narcissists, so-called intimate sexual partner.

There's no intimacy there. There's not even, there is no sex even. This is not a sexual activity. This is masturbation with another person's body and whose body is it is besides the point. And so the partner's identity is utterly, utterly incidental. The partner could be anonymous and anonymous stranger and counted only minutes or a few hours before the act. It doesn't matter who the partner is. The partner is a prop in a theater, autoerotic theater production. He's a prop like on a theater stage, a table, a chair, a lamp. So it doesn't matter if the partner is a long-term partner, an intimate partner so-called, or a total stranger that you've met in the bar minutes ago. The identity of the partner is besides the point.

Casual sex is the autoerotics staple day-to-day activity. And in his committed relationships, he is sometimes sexless. Sex with an autoerotic person is an eerie and creepy sensation. It is disembodied. It's mechanical, non-reciprocated, infantile. It's lonely. Usually the autoerotic person avoids eye contact and is so self-focused, so in himself and with himself that it's like he's absent. The autoerotic partner focus exclusively on their bodies and their self-gratification to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. It's like they're all alone in bed and you just happen to be there as an operation or as an animated dildo or animated sex doll.

The intimate partners of the autoerotic invariably develop sex aversion to the autoerotic partner because the sex sucks. The autoerotics solipsistic self-focus, defiance, and oblivion to the partner is also a form of narcissistic injury.

If the partner of the autoerotic person is a narcissist, if the partner of the autoerotic person is also a psychopath, in other words, if we have two narcissists or two psychopaths, both of them autoerotic, both of them grandiose, the autoeroticism of the partner triggers aggression because it's a narcissistic injury. It's like the autoerotic partner broadcasts you are not special, you're not unique, you are not who you think you are.

So autoeroticism deflates grandiosity, countervines grandiosity, it's a challenge.

In extreme cases, autoeroticism can modify the narcissist. It definitely provokes the psychopath into rage, extreme aggression, verbalized, or even physical.

Autoeroticism is a trigger to narcissists and psychopaths because it casts them as just one of many.

The autoerotic partner says you just happen to be there. It's a coincidence, it's an accident, you're not here because you were chosen especially, but you're here because I needed something, I needed someone, I needed a sex toy, you were just handy, you just happened to be there, I had a need, you just happened to be there.

Paradoxically, precisely because the partner of the autoerotic person is a mere generic undifferentiated prop, precisely because of this, as long as the autoerotic partner's needs are catered to within the relationship, the autoerotic rarely cheats on their mates.

I want to explain this. The autoerotic person doesn't care who is there to serve as the sex toy. The autoerotic person doesn't care who is the prop. The autoerotic person doesn't care who is the partner. He doesn't care about the identity of the partner. He is not emotionally attached to the partner. He doesn't care if the partner is a 10-year-old partner or if the partner is a 10-minute partner whom he just met.

So it doesn't matter who is the partner. The partner's identity, personality, preferences, wishes, character, all this is utterly irrelevant to the autoerotic sex act because the autoerotic sex act is making love to oneself, not to anyone else. It's a form of glorified masturbation with another person's body and precisely because the partner is a generic undifferentiated prop, as long as the autoerotic partner's needs are sexually catered to within the relationship, there's no reason for the autoerotic to cheat on his partner because what doesn't matter?

Any part, any sexual partner is as good as any other, so why bother to replace them?

The autoerotic person makes love to himself and because he makes love to himself, he doesn't truly care who is in bed with him, so he has no incentive to cheat. It's irrelevant who is in bed with him.

So cheating is actually low.

When the autoerotic person is in a committed relationship and when the sexual needs of the autoerotic person are met adequately, cheating is extremely rare.

Some autoerotic people are masochistic, so it's a rarer combination, more rare to have an autoerotic person who is also masochistic because autoerotic people are narcissists and psychopaths, but it is not as rare as you would think. I would guess that about one third of narcissists are actually masochists, definitely sexual masochists.

So if the autoerotic is, but it's a guess, they're not studies, that's from anecdotes and my database. If the autoerotic person is masochistic, his or her on-the-fly sex involves extreme self-trashing.

So the masochistic autoerotic person self-trashes sexually, despoils herself, degrades herself and she accomplishes this in a variety of ways. She may have sex with unwanted partners, sex she doesn't want to have with unwanted partners and it is precisely because they are unwanted that she enjoys the sex. This is the irony here.

Self-trashing is about feeling good when you're feeling bad.

Having unwanted sex with an unwanted partner, that's almost rape or self-rape. That's feeling really, really bad. That leaves a bad taste afterwards, if not regret and shame, which are rare among autoerotic people, but a bad taste definitely.

And it is this exactly which sexually arouses and excites the autoerotic masochistic person because it's a way of self-punishing, it's self-punitive, it's an infliction of some kind of damage or disgust on herself by sleeping with someone she doesn't want to sleep with.

Similarly, having sex with little-known people, people she doesn't know. Or having sex with inappropriate partners, way too old, for example. So all this selection of wrong partners, this is a form of self-trashing. Make selection that is compromised, make selection that wrongs to blatantly wrong partners is a form of self-trashing.

Similarly, the masochistic, self-trashing, autoerotic person would tend to pick up sex and to initiate sex or to be responsive to sex in degrading circumstances or in demeaning, debasing environments. She would go to places, dives, joints, where with a very bad reputation, where she's likely to be picked up by scum or lowlife people. The circumstances, the environment with its horrendous reputation that precedes it, this in itself is a form of self-trashing.

So you would find qualified professionals, pillars of the community, decent men and women, come night, go frequent and attend these haunts and joints just to pick up lowlife, scum, criminals, junkies, alcoholics, and then go immediately to bed with them in a sleazy, fleabag motel off the road, off the highway. Go to bed with them within a minute or within two hours after a glass of wine.

So this is a way to self-trash.

Less commonly, cheating, although rare among autoerotic people, when it does happen, it is a form of self-trashing. It's a form of self-trashing because when the autoerotic masochistic person cheats, she sustains, buttresses, enhances her self-perception as, "I'm a bad and worthy object here. I'm cheating. I'm really bad." And of course, feeling really bad makes her feel really good, or at least really sexually aroused.

Similarly, celibacy. Celibacy is a form of self-trashing, not acting on one's sex drive, suppressing it, repressing it, torturing oneself by not having sex. It's the same purpose. It's a self-destructive technique. It's a self-destructive strategy. Extreme celibacy and abstaining in the face of temptations and seductions and opportunities, this is a form of self-trashing, actually.

And again, the sentence is, "I'm a bad object, unworthy of sex. I should punish myself." So you see a variety of behaviors.

Sex with complete strangers, sex with unwanted partners, sex with inappropriate partners, sex with total strangers, sex in degrading circumstances, sex in disreputable environments, cheating when it's not called for, celibacy. All these are actually forms of self-trashing, and they characterize, they comprise the spectrum of self-trashing behaviors of the autorerotic person.

The self-trashing autorerotic person abuses substances and drinks becomes alcoholic or abuses alcohol, does drugs. The abuse of substances is with the aim of disinhibiting herself, removing social injunctions and social inhibitions which all of us internalize in the process of socialization during childhood, to remove these social inhibitions, to behave in socially inappropriate ways, shamefully, so to speak, disgracefully, degradingly, to despoil herself. She needs to remove these inhibitions, and she uses alcohol and drugs.

Similarly, some autorerotic people drink to excess to the point of unconsciousness or blackout because they want to numb themselves to their own socially unacceptable misconduct and some kind of unconscious egotistally discomfort with what they're doing. They don't want to experience discomfort and shame and social sanctioning and opprobrium, so they numb themselves, they simply anasthesize themselves with drugs and alcohol.

We said that all this, everything I've described until now, is characteristic of narcissists and psychopaths, not of course of the general population.

Narcissists and psychopaths are an imitative surface only. There's only the surface, there's only the shell, there is no depth, there's just an empty schizoid core where a person should have been.

You could say that narcissists and psychopaths are carbon-based artificial intelligence simulations, glitchy by the way, if I may add.

So it's surface only.

When you try to probe deeper into the narcissist and psychopath, when you try to talk about emotions, when you try to have them commit to you or promise something or you come across a brick wall, there's no need to have any meaningful conversational dialogue with a narcissist and psychopath except when it is imitative mimicry, a form of mimicry.

There's nothing there. It's not that the narcissist and psychopath are hiding their emotions. When they have negative emotions, they're very vulnerable about it. It's just something, nothing there.

As Harvey Cletley noted in his amazing masterpiece already in 1942, The Mask of Sanity, Harvey Cletley said that these mutations, these mutants prefer sexual self-trashing to normal sex. They even prefer sexual self-trashing to mainstream sexual trashing known as BDSM.

You see, there's a big difference between sexual self-trashing and self-trashing and BDSM or bondage, sadomaso practices.

In other words, there's a huge difference between being a self-trasher and being a sub, a sub or a bottom in BDSM relationships.

Sexual self-trashing. I mean, listen to the phrase self-trashing. In other words, self-trashing is defined. It's reckless. It is assertive. The self-trasher is in control. She does the thrashing. It involves self-efficacious agency, even when it is egotistonic.

The self-trasher is in control. She will never succumb or submit to anyone. On the very contrary, she is in all likelihood psychopathic and therefore defiant and would devalue anyone who attempts to take over her, to dictate to her, like a typical dom or dominant partner would do in BDSM.

By contrast, sexual trashing by other people, in other words, someone who is submissive, someone who is a bottom, and he wants or she wants other people to trash her. Trashing by other people. That's an entirely different animal.

Self-trashing by others, also known as being sub or being submissive or being bottom. It's a different issue because it's a self-annihilating role. It involves total objectification and ritualized helplessness.

The sub suspends her will. The will of the dom, her partner, the dominant partner, the will of the dom replaces her own will. She's immediately and totally obedient to all his wins, demands and commands.

No self-trashing, autoerotic person would accept the role of a submissive because they are in control. They are defiant. They are calling the shots. They are picking the partners. And in most cases, they even tell the partners what to do.

During the sex, they instruct the partners on how to trash them. They co-op to the partners. They collaborate with the partners. They collude with the partners in the act of self-degradation and self-dispoiling. They teach the partners how to humiliate them, how to torture them physically and mentally.

But they are the teachers. They are the ones with the agenda. They know what they want done and they insist on it. And they become aggressive and defiant when they are denied.

No submissive behaves this way. The sub is at total and immediate disposal of the dom anytime, day and night, sexually and otherwise, by the way, also psychologically. She becomes an extension of him, a tool, a mindless instrument. She becomes his "or", so to speak.

Self-trashers and subs are easily mistaken for each other. Narcissists and psychopaths comprise the majority of self-trashing people. They can never enjoy being submissive. Narcissists and psychopaths can never be subs. They can never be bottom. They can never be even a bottom masochistic sub. Narcissists and psychopaths need to control. They need to defy. They need to punish transgressions. Narcissists and psychopaths self-trash to gratify their masochism, but they self-trash. They own the process. They direct the process. Narcissists and psychopaths view the world sex included as a zero-sum game, winners and losers at any given moment. And to be submissive is to lose the game. No narcissist and psychopath will accept this.

That's why they self-trash rather than let others trash them submissively.

When narcissists and psychopaths regard themselves as inferior to someone, when they regard themselves as superior to a potential sex partner, they gravitate impulsively towards self-trashing casual sex.

When the possible mate is perceived as equal, an equal peer, narcissism psychopaths decline to have a one-night stand actually and instead insist on grooming, love bombing and the ensuing shared fantasy.

As narcissism and antisocial traits and behaviors become more normative, more widespread in the general population, sexual self-trashing is rendered a common practice, at least in the forms of meaningless and emotionless sex and flagrant serial cheating.

Yes, you heard me right. So-called meaningless emotionless sex is self-trashing.

Watch my video about the meaningfulness of casual sex. That's a form of self-trashing.

When you engage in meaningless emotionless sex with a total stranger or almost total relative stranger, you're self-trashing. And when you cheat flagrantly, ostentatiously, serially, you're self-trashing. You're upholding your view of yourself as a bad and worthy object. And all these actions, choices, preferences, sometimes intrusive dreams, definitely fantasy life, self-trashing, fantasy life, all these are common to narcissists and psychopaths.

They self-trash when they are masochistic, they ignore you when they're not masochistic. When they're not masochistic, they are totally autoerotic and you exist as a prop. When they are masochistic, you're a bit more than a prop, but not much because they tell you what to do in sex and they instruct you on how to despoil and humiliate and degrade them during the sex, if they're masochistic.

I hope I injected some clarity into this very misunderstood and fraught topic.

Self-destructive Narcissist = Masochist? (Compilation)

Masochistic Covert Antinarcissist

Narcissist's Victim: NO CONTACT Rules

Anxious Psychopath, Borderline Mask

Expose Narcissist’s Secret Speech

Coping Styles: Narcissist Abuses "Loved" Ones Despite Abandonment Anxiety

Abuser-Victim Bond: Emotional Processing and Object Inconstancy

How Narcissist Dupes, Lures YOU Into Shared Fantasy

Victim or Narcissist? Tell Them Apart!

Narcissist's Reactions to Abandonment, Separation, and Divorce

Narcissist’s Mixed Signals: You His Mother, He Your Father