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Narcissistic-Borderline Couples: Daddy Issues


Narcissistic-Borderline Couples: Daddy Issues


By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited"


Borderline women often end up with narcissistic men. But they feel overpowered and overwhelmed in these relationships as the narcissist leverages his cold empathy to push all their buttons cruelly and repeatedly until they are triggered badly, decompensate, and act out. The Borderline partner often claims that the narcissist “made her misbehave” in dramatic or histrionic ways, drove her crazy, and that his very presence bothered her, that “he was too much and everywhere”.

 

The narcissist’s strong and ubiquitous personality compels the Borderline to test boundaries and to mock or challenge his omniscient bloated self-importance.

 

The narcissist is perceived by the Borderline as a Father figure, or even, in moments of diffusion and dissociation, as an actual father. The narcissist wants to possess the Borderline, reduce her to a mute witness of his grandeur, and transform her into a mere function or extension. This extended mistreatment provokes in the Borderline (often a secondary psychopath herself) reactance and defiance, a re-enactment of a teenage rebellion.

 

With her egregious misconduct, she is communicating to the narcissist: “I am not your daughter or property, but an autonomous person, an emancipated, independent, and accomplished woman, desired by other men”. Cast as an immature and even infantile object by the narcissist, she just wants to “grow up and leave him behind”. Ironically, her misconduct amounts to a regression to adolescence, stripping away adulthood and its responsibilities

 

The Borderline is testing the Narcissist’s unconditional love for her, regardless of how extremely she misbehaves, in an attempt to make up for her emotionally distant biological original father. But she is unable to accept unconditional love owing to her dread of engulfment and enmeshment. She feels brainwashed and in the throes of vanishing via a vertiginous process of merger or fusion. What appears to be unconditional love elicits in her paranoid suspiciousness because she “smells a rat” as she misinterprets any solicitous empathy and verbalized positive emotions to be fake manipulative insincerity.

 

Consequently, when she is truly loved and despite her paralyzing abandonment or separation anxiety, the Borderline feels trapped, threatened, and immobilized. This leads to an inexorable approach-avoidance repetition compulsion: confronted with a strong, boundaried, and centered partner – she flees. If the partner is codependent and spineless, she sadistically torments and punishes him for failing to provide her with a stable core and to compensate for her diffuse and kaleidoscopic identity (which I dub “identity cloud”).

 

Unconditional love has the potential for infinite pain: the Borderline is aware that, with her lability, dysregulation, and hurtful acting out, she is bound to compromise, tamper, or lose her loved ones and it is going to kill her (she is catastrophizing). But she also feels inadequate, bad, unworthy, inefficacious, and defective and so unable to reciprocate the love given to her, a deficiency which guarantees eventual abandonment. So, she misbehaves in order to pre-empt and precipitate abandonment.

 

The Borderline ideal partner is someone who is strong enough to be weak and vulnerable at times.

 

Other motivations intermingle with the aforementioned dynamics and result in antisocial and dysempathic, hurtful, or even sadistic choices and beahviors:

 

Envy and Competition

 

The Borderline is grandiose, holds grudges, and is passive-aggressive (negativistic), so she is virulently envious of her partner’s superiority and ascendance, whether real or self-imputed. She competes with her partner and subtly undermines, or actively sabotages his efforts and accomplishments.

 

Punishment and Power Play

 

The Borderline’s splitting leads to a constant wish to punish the persecutory, evil, bad, frustrating, and punitive object that her partner is (in her mind) - thus restoring justice and a balance of power within the relationship.

 

Attention Seeking

 

The Borderline goes haywire conspicuously in order to secure attention and guarantee a monopoly on her partner’s emotional and other resources. The Borderline equates such ministrations to her tantrums and externalized aggression with vows of loyalty and faithfulness: as long as her partner cares about her, caters to her self-inflicted wounds, and is preoccupied with her antics, she has in him a safe and secure base, he is unlikely to abandon her.

 

Getting Rid of the Narcissist

 

The Narcissistic partner’s presence in the Borderline’s life involves rejection, abuse, and withholding and so becomes intolerable and painfully unbearable. Agony, anger, frustration, repressed aggression, heartrending disappointment, restrictions on freedom, and emotional blackmail overwhelm the Borderline’s fragile and dysfunctional self-regulation. Her antisocial and callous behavioral choices are then intended to lead to a dissolution of the hurtful bond.

 

Revenge

 

Finally, of course, there is avenging perceived wrongs, slights, and abuse, real or imagined by engaging in a tit-for-tat and escalating the confrontation.



===================================

Author Bio

Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com/mediakit.html ) is the author of Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited as well as many other books and ebooks about topics in psychology, relationships, philosophy, economics, international affairs, and award-winning short fiction.
He is Visiting Professor of Psychology, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia and Professor of Finance and Psychology in CIAPS (Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies).

He was the Editor-in-Chief of Global Politician and served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, eBookWeb , and Bellaonline, and as a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent. He was the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101. His YouTube channels garnered 20,000,000 views and 85,000 subscribers.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com

---
Encyclopedia of Narcissism and Psychopathy

http://samvak.tripod.com/siteindex.html

Buy 16 books and video lectures on 3 DVDs about narcissists, psychopaths, and abusive relationships

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/thebook.html
Apr/29/2020, 12:18 pm Link to this post  
 


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