Insecure Attachment Styles (YOU as Dead Mother) in Narcissists, Borderlines, Psychopaths

today we are going to discuss attachment styles attachment disorders and attachment dysfunctions in narcissists psychopaths borderlines and histrionics we are also going to study attachment styles and disorders in people diagnosed with cptsd complex trauma complex post-traumatic stress disorder and the reason is that people with cptsd often display psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors and traits reactively and temporarily so they also experience periods in which their attachment is disordered and dysfunctional and we're going to study this as well but we are going to go through a very peculiar path we're going to start with a dead mother and where then we're going to think about something we know but we can never think of et cetera et cetera so i promised you a fun ride in the sam wagner theme park don't sign off after 10 minutes you'll be missing all the fun and um at the end of this presentation i hope you will have a handle you'll get a grasp of how how we interact with each other how we relate to each other because attachment is not only about romantic relationships we get attached to workplaces we get attached to assignments we get attached to objects attachment is a general attitude towards the world a general emotional investment in something some people are very afraid to make this emotional investment some people make this investment and then run away and some people make this investment and um remain invested for life so um to understand how people interact with each other interpersonal relationships workplace relationships we need to understand what makes them tick in terms of the ability to attach my name is sam baknin and i'm the author of malignant self-love narcissism revisited i also wrote other books and ebooks about personality disorders i'm a professor of psychology in several universities and without further ado let's dive in but before we do that if you look at the upper part of your screen you will see a navigation bar i mean on youtube you go to my channel my youtube channel you look up there's a navigation bar to the right hand side of the navigation bar there is a word about next to about next to about there's a magnifying glass the magnifying glass is a search box all you have to do is type a few keywords in the search box and the ever obliging youtube will give you a series of recommended videos which include this keyword or relate to this keyword or however obliquely and tangentially refer to this keyword so i encourage you to use the search box in order to avoid my very blatant and rude responses to your questions okay babies and babettes i'm gonna use now my bedroom voice cue must exodus of screaming and puking ladies and the reason i'm gonna use my bedroom voice is the moment you've all been waiting for no no i'm gonna keep my clothes on and now cue collective sigh of relief few reckless women tiptoe wearily back i'm going to discuss today attachment styles attachment dysfunctions as i promised and there's an included bonus if you stay if you stay to listen long enough there's an attachment style which we've never heard of before and the reason you've never heard of before is because i invented it in my lectures in various universities when i teach attachment i teach it in a very peculiar way which i haven't seen elsewhere not online and not offline and so if you bear with me i will take you on a ride the likes of which you are unlikely to encounter anywhere else and of course it all starts with childhood children grow among adults this is a much neglected facts children grow among adults when they look around them they they see people who are not like them they see people who are chronologically advanced hopefully mentally advanced very different to them they have to emulate and imitate these people in order to carry favor in order to get food and shelter in order to secure love and safety they have to adhere to the tenants beliefs rules of conduct and demands of these adults and gradually they realize that they have to become adults and there's a process of becoming and this process of becoming is dialectical the child interacts with the adult and the adult interacts with the child that's another much neglected aspect of growing up it's not only children who have an impact it's not only adults sorry who have an impact on children children have an impact on adults it's a loop it's a self-modifying self-assembling look so children's thoughts about their caregivers together with their thoughts about themselves you know when you put these two together this is what we call the working model every child embarks on constructing a working model of the world very early on we believe perhaps at age six months and the working model that children construct includes elements which relate to their physical environment elements which relate to adults in the environment and elements which relate to themselves for example children often think about the question do i deserve to get good care do i deserve to be loved am i entitled to entitled and worthy of safety and support and comfort and affection and the answers to these questions are very very critical throughout life because the child has to develop a sense that he is a good worthy object in order to function properly later in adult life so working models of attachment are very critical in the best types of working models working models that work they are founded on something called the safe base the safe base is a parental figure usually but could be any caregiver a grandmother in case in case the parents are absent for some reason a grandmother a teacher an adult role model so but usually it's usually it's the mother so a safe base is simply a mother that allows her child to separate from her to individuate ironically a safe base is a mother who pushes her child away but pushes the child away compassionately lovingly empathically encouragingly she doesn't push the child away away out of spite out of insecurity out of narcissistic injury out of rage out of hatred she pushes pushes the child away because she loves the child the one she wants a child to become an autonomous independent entity it's very painful to the mother it's very painful to the mother because mother and baby live in a symbiosis they merge they fuse it's a co-dependent relationship which could last two years even but a mature mother pushes the child away and when she pushes a child away she constitutes a safe base exactly like a military base the child goes out explores the world with a knowledge that he can always return to mommy that mommy is there that mommy is safe that mommy is not going away anywhere that mommy is not going to abandon him not going to punish him not going to punish him for becoming his own person with boundaries with wishes with a will and with the grandiosity to explore the universe because it takes a lot of grandiosity to explore the universe it's a healthy kind of narcissism it's what we call primary narcissism it's a healthy type of grandiosity it's the grandiosity that allows the child to take the immeasurable uh terrifying risk of abandoning mother even if only for a second even if only for a minute and going out there there's an issue of object constancy when i look back will mother still be there when i want to return to her will she accepts will she accept me when i try to hug her leg will she reject me it's a lot it's a huge gamble to leave mommy to go away from mummy to in a way push mommy away to individuate to separate is a traumatic gamble and if the mother is the wrong kind this first attempt this first attempt at becoming you fails and so the international classification of disorders edition 10 and probably edition 11 is forthcoming and the diagnostic and statistical manual they discuss attachment in terms of situations where the child has attachment problems attachment dysfunctions either generally or to a specific attachment figure but this is very narrow it's also misleading as we will see when i continue it's also misleading but it's also very narrow and so there was a guy a scholar by the name of andre andre green in 1983 he published an essay and he used the evocative he was the evocative phrase dead mother complex he said that some mothers are dead they are not they are not dead in the sense that they are politically dead like no pulse no no brain activity although i know many mothers who are like that while alive but they are dead in the sense that they are very depressed they're depressed they're emotionally unavailable or they are narcissistic they're too grandiose to take care of a child they feel that the child had disrupted their lives prevented them from reaching the pinnacle of their profession ruined their lives in a way so there is narcissistic rejection there is depression there is emotional unavailability because the mother herself has attachment disorder or attachment dysfunction all these types of mothers they are dead mothers this is a contrast to donald winnicott's good enough mother these are not good mothers and they are not enough enough mothers they in the child the only model that the child has of attachment of emotions of love of relationship is a painful moral inordinately painful existentially threatening harrowing terrorizing horrifying model it's a destructive process of identifying with a dead body emotionally at least this kind of mother is there and not there and this mixed signal this dual signal is intolerable because we we do not tolerate human beings don't tolerate well ambiguity and uncertainty we try to disambiguate in a variety of ways much most of which are destructive and this kind of child exposed to a dead mother he is exposed to a mother who is the epitome and quintessence of ambiguity and she's depressed and she's unavailable she's rejecting she's hurtful and as andre wrote it's a mother who was initially initially emotionally engaged with her child but then switched off from emotional resonance to emotional detachment perhaps under the influence of loss and moaning in her own family of origin and when the child goes through this roller coaster idealization devaluation when the child is is unable to restore this warm empathic embracing accepting loving contact with the mother he then the child then internalizes a hard unresponsive emotional core and this of course is a prerequisite to narcissism because narcissism is a reaction to this internalization mother is hurtful mother used to love me now she doesn't love me i will never let anyone do this to me again i will never put myself at the mercy of anyone who could cause cause me such pain and really threaten my existence because when you're six months old or one-year-old or two-year-old and your mother is emotionally unavailable distant doesn't care about you neglects you you can die it's life-threatening and in this kind of people they become narcissistic later on in life and they are unable to form attachment and we see this for example even in settings where attachment is minimal like in therapy where they can't go through the phase known as transference they can't bond in some in some way with a therapist they can't even project their own emotions onto the therapist they can't regard the therapist as a parental figure so there's no transference in treating such people dead mother syndrome is the acute form of this and there are many dead mothers out there because we live in a narcissistic and psychopathic age more and more people are technically narcissists and psychopaths and these people for some reason procreate they irresponsibly have children and they raise these children as dead mothers and dead fathers the mistaken attachment theories is to say that when a child doesn't have a safe base when he has a dead mother he runs away he avoids he runs he develops avoidance strategies he he withdraws into internally he becomes narcissistic he and then he has like a an imaginary friend the false self or a godlike entity which is the false self or he he withdraws and becomes a codependent thereby suspending his own existence and merging with the mother figure or he withdraws and becomes psychopathic antisocial contact disorder it's known in children it's called contact disorder so the general the general thrust of current attachment theories starting with mary ainsworth and to these very daisy nine and others the the thought is that when children are raised by the wrong kind of parents by not good enough mothers by dead mothers they simply detach and because they detach they learn a coping strategy for life which is a coping strategy of detachment and this is the part where i think attachment theories get it very wrong they get it very wrong if you if you ever saw a baby crying inconsolably at the body of his dead mother really dead mother and if you ever watch the movie psycho hitchcock's movie psycho where the son who run who is running the motel base keeps his mother's body mummified and continues to interact with her as though she were alive if you've ever been exposed to these experiences however vicariously you would realize that the child does not run away from a dead mother but learns to love her children love their mothers whether they're alive whether they're dead whether they're good enough whether they are vicious and atrocious whether they're psychopathic whether they're narcissistic whether they're there whether they're not there emotionally available or not rejecting or accepting the child has no choice he has to love mother and he learns to love a dead mother and when you fall in love with him and he claims to have fallen in love with you he tries to convert you into a dead mother too he wants you to play the role of his dead mother he wants you to die and to be a mother and this is as good a description as good and concise as summation of relationships with narcissists that i've ever come across the narcissist tries to do two things with his romantic intimate partner he tries to kill her and he tries to convert her into a mother he tries to recreate reconstruct and re-experience and reenact the unresolved conflict with a dead mother and the dead mother role is all yours but of course being in love with a dead object loving something dead is unthinkable so people with cluster b personality disorders although they are capable of loving only dead people dead mothers dead mother substitutes that father substitutes still they don't dare to contemplate this they're not aware of this on the contrary they lie to themselves they're telling themselves i'm trying to make her come alive i'm reviving my intimate partner i'm infusing her with life i'm giving her thrills and adventures and color i'm i am the engine of excitement in her life when she's with me she's much more alive than when she's not with me so there is this self-delusional confabulation this self fallacious narrative that the narcissist and the psychopath and the borderline tell themselves i'm not doing anything wrong to my partner i'm not doing anything bad to my intimate partner on the contrary lazarus like raising him from the dead and it's of course projection this is what happens it's the intimate partner who raises the narcissist and the psychopath and the borderline from the dead because they are dead narcissists psychopaths and borderlines are dead at the core and they are dead at the core because they have internalized a dead mother a dead object but they don't dare to think about it and instead what they do is called emotional thinking they're not thinking with their heads they're not thinking cognitively but whenever they need to think about relationships they think emotionally they let their emotions control their cognitions not the other way and what they do narcissists psychopaths borderlines and victims of trauma by the way they correct death and they caffect aggression now what the hell is conflict you're asking caffect is emotionally invest cathexis is emotional investment so they invest emotionally in death because their first emotional investment as children was in a dead mother a dead object so they know only how to invest in death and in dead people and in dead others and in dead intimacy dead so they invest in death of course death is aggression aggression leads to death and death is aggressive by definition and this is called destrudo the opposite of libido libido is the force of life it comes from eros and destrudo is the force of death the force of destruction the force of aggression and it emanates from thanatos the force of of death and when we in our current culture in civilization we are emotionally invested in our smartphones in our beautiful luxury cars in our jobs we are invested in inanimate inanimate inert material goods materialism is the ultimate express consum consumerism is the ultimate expression of this trudeau of the force of death because objects are dead breaking news news alert all objects are dead i don't know if you realize that real objects physical objects the ones you can knock on they're dead and they are substitutes for the dead mother and so our culture and civilization encourage us to emotionally invest in dead things and these people narcissists borderlines psychopaths histrionics trauma victims how do they react to this emotional investment in a dead object that object cannot reciprocate refuses to reciprocate adamantly insist on rejection insist on humiliation insist on mortification injures you all the time warns you the archaic wanting in the words of freud so it's a wounding process it's death by a thousand cats so you withdraw you love and you withdraw and you identify love with withdrawal if love then away if love then push if love then withdraw if love then not be to love is to not be love is an absence in the minds of these very very sick individuals it's an absence not a presence and the minute it becomes a presence it's very threatening existentially threatening because this presence is bound to be withdrawn and they're bound to feel pain the pain of ultimate rejection they anticipate rejection borderlines for example anticipate abandonment rejection humiliation and react to this anticipation not to any real development so they reframe reality in these terms so these cluster b personalities they can't afford to love because their first experience with love has been an experience of annihilation annulment they were not seen it's critical to be seen when you're a child it is through the gaze of the meaningful other through the gaze of the primary object primary caregiver through the gaze of mother that you are defined it is mother's gaze that constitutes and constructs your boundaries it is through her that you realize that you are separate from her she is the one she is the agent the agent of society she's a socialization agent but she's also the agent of the physical universe and above all she is your agent she is the one who helps you become she is the primary agent of becoming and if you have a dead mother you become a corpse narcissists psychopaths borderlines other walking dead and so they in an attempt to avoid a repeat to avoid the repetition of the same type of painful relationship they never allow themselves to truly love to truly get emotionally invested and they're very self-sufficient they even self-parentify they act as their own parents and they're very autoerotic sexually speaking they gratify themselves sexually masturbation pornography and so to be able to love you these people have to kill you first it's like the famous joke if i tell you the truth i'll have to kill you if i fall in love with you i'll have to kill you they have to kill they have to kill the mother figure in order to love her they snapshot you they convert you into into an inert photograph they merge with you they fuse with you you disappear you're digested you're assimilated you become an extension these are various ways of killing you negating your existence annihilating you and then when you're dead when you're no more when you're when you become when you have become an absence then they can love you of course because they're experts at loving dead mothers and they identify love with absence um their introjects the introjects of their mother their father other figures the inner voices the representations the avatars of these crucial adults they are all non-interacting dead inert mute mute objects the narcissist in the psychopath and the borderline of the histrionic cluster b they're the only only people on earth whose introjects are essentially mute they can't talk they don't talk they don't interact they don't communicate they're there snapshot so they need to take away from you speech they need to deny you the speech act they need to prevent you from communicating because communication is pain they need to fend you off and to to fence you in and to startify you to ossify you and to mummify and to fossilize and this way to own you and to control you because if you own and control someone he cannot hurt you she cannot hurt you it's all about pain aversion and hurt aversion and of course this makes it impossible to distinguish internal objects from external objects if your loved ones are inside you because you need to control them micromanage them if they're inside you then they're internal but they're also external so internal is external external is internal the narcissist in the borderline to a lesser extent the psychopath make very little distinction between internal and external objects and in this particular sense otto kernberg was right these are people on the cusp on the verge of psychosis of a psychotic disorder there was a guy called christopher bolas b-o-l-l-a-s and in the miracle years of the 1980s which to my mind was the renaissance of psychology or at least the psychodynamic and psychoanalytic schools of psychology so in those miracles years he came up with a concept called the unfault the unthought known i'm thought no his work was based probably we don't know for sure because he doesn't mention it but probably on some comment that freud reported in one of his endless uh series of um monographs and books and articles before it was a machine so freud reported that he had a patient and this patient told him i've always known something but i never thought of it and freud was kind of thunderstruck he said wait a minute can you know something and not think of it ever is it possible to know but not cognitively is it possible to be fully aware of some fact some environment some other person in order to think of them and so christopher bolas coined the phrase unthought gnome in the 1980s and he said that these are experiences which in some way are known to the individual but about which the individual is unable to think i would add the individual is afraid to think it's it's inhibited it's an inhibition it's inhibitory an errolish for interpreting the object world that pre-consciously determine our subsequent life expectations are such are an example of the unthought norm so we're all born with schemata with a kind of arrangement of cognitions emotions beliefs and facts so this schemata allows us to interpret the world to interpret the object world and they are pre-conscious and they determine what we expect of life and they're an example of the unthought known so the unthought known is pre-verbal unschematized early experience and of course it can also be early trauma early trauma create fat trait it early trauma creates facts but these facts are so painful so frightening so devastating that we know them but we never think of them they are fenced off they are isolated they are removed from consciousness these unthought these unthought knowns they affect behavior they do it unconsciously and preconsciously but they affect behavior but even though they affect behavior they never never access consciousness conscious thought has no access to these knowns and yet they're known and in therapy very often when we introduce the patient to the unfortunate the patient says i've known this all along but i never thought about it and there's of course beyonce's idea of better elements beyond said that there are psychic experiences which people cannot process in any way by the mind they are psychic their experiences there's no denying them there is knowledge that they had happened but this knowledge is kept via a variety of defense mechanisms probably like repression maybe or denial this knowledge is kept under the radar the person cannot afford to think about this schemata or these experiences and these traumas because if he does he will disintegrate and bolas suggested that there are quite a few elements in the substance of the unfortunate he said that for example when you have persistent moods probably these moods preserve elementary but pre-schematized states of mind he said that the moons are kind of reflections or reservoirs of these unthought nouns and he said that very early in childhood when the self interacts with the primary object with the mother for example this interaction if it's very emotionally loaded for example if you have a very painful interaction with your mother if she's a dead mother you will relegate it to the unthought known similarly if this is something of great beauty when you're a child mainly pre-verbal you can't verbalize it you can't capture it with language so you you kind of store it it's a storage area it's a warehouse the unthought gnome is a warehouse of experiences and things and judgments and beliefs and values and cis and facts that you have no conscious access to because they were all pre-verbal and language is a barrier prevents you from going there these are all parts of the unfortunate narcissists and psychopaths and borderlines and histrionics they have a huge amount huge number of unthought norms if you healthy normal people empathic people if you have i don't know 10 unfortunates a psychopath or a narcissist would have a hundred now this means this this is massive implications it means that the narcissist interpersonal relationships they are recreations of his original relationship with a dead mother but because it's so devastating so painful so frightening so hurtful this whole thing the whole relationship will be processed through the unthought known let me try to explain it a bit the narcissist psychopaths borderline i mean they're born in a dysfunctional into into a dysfunctional family the primary caregiver mother in this case for example is one way or another abusive one way or another emotionally unavailable one way or another exploitative she parentifies the child she idolizes the child she instrumentalizes the child she abuses the child sexually or physically or verbally or psychologically whatever there's something wrong going on there she is dead to the child the child still loves his mother even when she's dead so he learns that love is painful and that you can love only dead things and so this thought this this realization is so mind-boggling that he knows it but never thinks about it it becomes an unthought gnome and then when he meets the love of his life when he meets an intimate partner when he tries to develop a relationship have a family whatever he interacts with his intimate partner via the unfort known in other words he interacts with his partner recreating the original pattern of interaction with his dead mother dysfunctional mother sick mother and he interacts with his intimate partner uh not thinking about it when you confront him and say do you know what just don't you see what you're doing he says no what am i doing he's utterly unaware it's not a pretension he's not faking it he really is not aware and it's also not a result of self delusions or reframing but a result of his inability he cannot afford he cannot allow himself to think of the known he knows but he doesn't dare go there he doesn't dare to think about it so in order not to create a dissonance not to create a conflict not to force him to think he kills you he simply kills you he renders you a dead mother the minute you're dead mother you conform to the earlier pattern and there's no conflict there's no dissonance and no risk that he will be forced to think about what he knows no risk of bringing the unthought the unthinkable from the unconscious to the conscience where it will create a massive conflict and may endanger the life of the cluster b personhood so this is the sequence bad early bad dysfunctional early relationship suppression of this information knowing it but not thinking about it then finding an intimate part forcing her to recreate the early pattern by becoming a dead mother so that what is known will not become thought what is known will not become a cognition will not generate overt life-threatening conflict bolas in his work also linked to the concept of the unthought known to donald winnicott's notion of the true self so there is direct connection between bolus's work winnicott's work and narcissism true self false self and so on these are not just wild speculations on my part but actually bonus almost almost touched upon it almost went there in terms of system-centered therapy in system center therapy they make a distinction between what they call apprehensive knowing and comprehensive knowing apprehensive knowing is knowing but not being able to verbalize what you know not being able to use language to communicate what you know to yourself and to others and then there's comprehensive knowing comprehensive knowing is knowledge that you can communicate to yourself and to others by language so we allow ourselves to formulate in words comprehensive knowledge or comprehensive knowing but we don't allow ourselves access to apprehensive knowing perhaps because it's apprehensive it's frightening it's it's threatening and in in therapy the unthought known can become the subtext of the therapeutic interchange the the therapist becomes kind of a parent figure and he he picks up the patient he contains the patient and the the patient allows himself or herself to think to think about the unknown via the therapist so maybe we'll talk about it some other time it's a process called projective identification back to attachment disorders three prominent three-point scholars of attachment disorders are zina liberman and boris and they suggested that attachment disorders start in childhood which i agree and they said the children um who don't have who did not have the opportunity to form an attachment or where children who had a distorted relationship with the parental figure or when an existing attachment was for some reason abruptly disrupted in these three cases there's an attachment disorder and they use the term disorder of attachment it's when a young child doesn't seem to bond with or attach to any particular adult caregiver and so this kind of children are indiscriminately sociable they approach all the adults and they sometimes approach total strangers and they're very cute and very sociable and they ask for love and they ask for compassion and affection and they ask to be comforted but they do this not with mother specifically not with father grandmother or grandfather but they approach any other wherever so there is a promiscuity it's a promiscuous sociability promiscuous behavior and it's a disorder of attachment and these as i said are children who didn't have the opportunity to form an attachment with a specific figure as the dsm says or whether the distorted relationship or existing attachment has been disrupted so some children react by becoming promiscuous they attach to any others and others react exactly the opposite they withdraw emotionally they fail to seek comfort from anyone any others and so very often we mistake these children for shy children say oh he's shy this is not shyness this is extreme pain aversion extreme aversion to earth the child totally identifies any attempt at an interaction with an adult with life-threatening pain and hurt and abandonment and neglect and rejection and humiliation total threat of disintegration so these children withdraw emotionally and fail to interact and this is this is reminiscent of reactive attachment disorder um because in reactive attachment disorder we have inhibited and disinhibited forms these inhibited forms are children who approach any adult for attachment and inhibited forms of children were approached no adult for attachment nobories and zina describe a condition that they call secure base distortion secure base distortion is when the child does have someone a mother a father a grandmother grandfather some caregiver teacher and he prefers this familiar figure but the relationship with this figure is such that actually the adult does not provide the child with safety when the child starts to explore the environment grandiosely this kind of adult does not encourage the exploration and does not provide a safe base does not broadcast to the child go ahead find yourself find the world i will be here when you return i'll be here when you need me on the contrary the broadcast or the transmission is is opposite is who do you think you are what are you doing you're hurting me um you don't love mommy anymore uh you are impudent insolent uh you are impertinent you you must be you're misbehaving you're impolite etc so these are all inhibitory messages messages that inhibit prevent the child from exploring the world and such children they don't know what to do and many of them are disinhibitory they they cling to any adult they endanger themselves they are excessively compliant submissive or they try to become a parent because they don't have a parent they try to become a parent and they try to parent themselves and even to parent the adult or even to punish the adult as a parent so that these children are in total mess total confusion as to roles roles who they can trust and how they should function once there is an interaction which implies directly or indirectly some type of attachment and boris and they not discuss a lot what they call disrupted attachment disrupted attachment is any abrupt separation or loss of a familiar figure a mother or father to to whom the child is attached so the child gets attached and then suddenly this figure is gone it's gone because it died it's gone because of a divorce it's gone because it's lost interest in the child it's gone because there's a new sibling a newborn and the the attention of the parent is totally diverted um to the newborn and the parent abandons and neglects the firstborn or the previous child and so whenever there's a process of devaluation after idealization or after idolizing as i mentioned sibling rivalry yes the child perceives such abrupt absence as rejection so even if the parent has to travel it's perceived by the child as abandonment abandonment and rejection essential rejection rejection of his essence of who he is the child a child decides that he is not worthy of love not worthy of object constancy not worthy of the parent being there for him not worthy of safety in other words a bad object as the child becomes an adult he will try to sustain this self-image because it's his comfort zone and a promiscuous child would become a promiscuous adult a inhibited child would become an inhibited adult and a child who had lost had lost an attachment figure for whatever reason a child who has been devalued a child who has been dumped a child who's been neglected and abundant and humiliated and rejected or just you know let go this kind of child would try to recreate this in his intimate relationships he'll try to force his intimate partner via projective identification to play this role of the dysfunctional not good enough dead mother the young child's reaction to such a losses is grief it's exactly grief exactly the same this five stages of grief is described by the swiss american psychologist elizabeth kubler-ross the child protests he cries he searches for the attachment figure then the child is depressed he is desperate he's sad he withdraws from communication and play he detaches from the original relationship and gradually very very gradually he accepts he accepts the attachment figure mother for example his gun and he resumes gradually slowly and usually dysfunctionally social and play activities scholars such as daniel schechter and erica wilheim they have shown a relationship between maternal ptsd and secure base distortion in other words um when the mother is violent physically abusive or even worse sexually abusive it creates a safe base distortion the child becomes reckless he develops separation anxiety hyper vigilance and role reversal and if this sounds familiar it's because these are elements of borderline personality disorder fraley and and shaver these are two scholars they describe the central propositions of attachment in adults they say they said that all attachment in adults recreates the behavioral dynamics of infant and caregiver in other words adult relationships are nothing but a repeat a replay a reenactment of childhood relationships when we observe individual differences in during childhood these differences will be preserved to adulthood actually we we have learned that attachment styles are pretty stable throughout the lifespan and only in 20 of cases attachment styles are mildly modified in 80 of cases attachment styles which are usually determined by age two to six the formative years attachment styles survive lifelong individual differences in in adult attachment behavior they are reflections of expectations and beliefs people have formed about themselves and about close relationships and these expectations have to do with attachment history the working models that we started with if you remember we all build working models about ourselves about other people and these working models are stable and they reflect early caregiving experiences so romantic love involves the interplay of attachment caregiving intimacy and the attachment part is actually unalterable immutable and rhodes and rhodes and simpson they they suggested that biology is involved somehow it's biology that that propels children to form attachment with caregivers and it's shaped by interpersonal experiences and they said that experiences in early relationships they create the internal working model and they create the attachment style and these systematically affect attachment relationships and the attachment orientations of adult caregivers influence the attachment bond of their children this is how crucial it is to be good parents working models and attachment orientations are relatively stable over time they're impervious to changes very dangerous some forms of psychological managers some clinical disorders including cluster b personality disorders they are attributable in big part to the effects of insecure working models insecure attachment styles so biology drives attachments but attachment is largely shaped by learning experiences and in it depends crucially on expectations and beliefs that people have about their relationships and these expectations and beliefs come from internal working models these internal working models they guide relationship behaviors they are relatively stable as we said and they hark back to childhood individual differences in attachment contribute positively or negatively to mental health so we have four main types of attachments in adults now it's very crucial because people make the most god-awful mess confusing childhood attachment styles with adult attachment styles they are not the same in adults we have secure anxious preoccupied dismissive avoidant and fearful avoidant attachment styles and to this i've added a fifth one my contribution my attempted contribution a flat attachment style so cindy hazen and philip shaver they observed that interactions between adults share similarities to interactions between children and caregivers as the issue of closeness comfort versus anxiety or loneliness and there's a even in adult relationships there's an issue of secure base secure base you want to know that you can trust your intimate partner that she will be there for you that you have somewhere to come back to perhaps you face the surprises the opportunities challenges it helps you face life everyone has an attachment style now i would like to talk a bit about my my contribution or attempted contribution to attachment theory i suggest to introduce a fifth a fifth style i'm going to discuss each of the other four later but i'm i try to i'm trying to introduce a fifth one called flat attachment these are people who are incapable of any kind of bonding and any kind of relatedness at all flat attaches regard other people as utterly interchangeable replaceable and dispensable objects or functions when a relationship is over people go through a period of latency they mourn the defunct bond they process the grief and there are withdrawal symptoms associated with a breakup they go call turkey if you wish flat attaches are different they react to the disintegration of even the most meaningful or primary relationships by becoming defiant and becoming mad rather than heartbroken and said they are mad not sad the flat attacher transition transitions instantaneously smoothly abruptly and seamlessly from one insignificant other to the next target she fully substitutes a newly found ball lover mate or intimate partner for the discarded one whose usefulness is expired for whatever reason many narcissists and almost all psychopaths are actually flat attachers in 1995 i coined the phrase idealize devalue and discard and i should have added idealize the value discard and replace flat attachment is often confused and conflated with commitment phobia the fear of committing to a joint future but it's different flat attaches are constitutionally incapable of bonding with other people commitment forbes anticipate with anxiety the expectations that their attachments to others and and gender so commitment forbes are terrified of of the expectations of their intimate partners and the emotional and pragmatic outcomes of of liaisons of intimate relationships they are simply in a state of anxiety flat attaches have no anxiety they simply don't bond they don't attach and they don't give a hoot about your expectations commitment forbes are avoidant they're not emotionally vacuous on the contrary they're very strong emotions flatter touches are emotionally not bare they're emotionally absent intimacy increases with time together but the more time you spend with the narcissist or with a flat attacher the less intimate you get i call this effect reversed intimacy it's the outcome of the fact that one is interacting with the narcissist's false self it's a piece of grandiose fiction a placeholder where an entire person should have been traumatized victims of narcissistic abuse have learned to emulate the narcissist himself in a post-traumatic state as you know they they try to slap a label on their tormentor and then to ignore him and relate only to the label total labeling where no intimacy is involved of course where no intimacy is possible stereotypes take over so this was this is my attempted contribution i suggested there is a fifth style because all the other four styles that we have for adult attachment they assume some kind of interplay they assume some kind of need for attachment that is either frustrated or avoided or but flat attaches don't ever need to bond or to attach nor do they have the capacity to be the secure attachment style in adults corresponds to the secure attachment style in children the anxious preoccupied attachment style in adults correspond to the anxious ambivalent attachments in children the dismissive avoidant attachment style and the fearful avoidant attachment style in adults are separate and distinct but in children they are one and it's called avoidant attachment style so children have a single avoidant attachment style while adults have dismissive avoidance or fearful avoid so there were two scholars but there are two scholars bartholomew and horowitz bathory and horowitz together with pierto monaco and barrett they created all kinds of tables and models of attachments and but thermal bartholomew and horowitz proposed that working models consist of two parts the first part of the working model deals with thoughts about oneself the other part of the model deals with thoughts about other people and they propose that the person's thoughts about the self are generally positive or generally negative and the same applies to person to people to someone's thoughts about others so you can be positive about yourself or negative about yourself you can be positive about other people or negative about other people and so what you do you can construct a table which is exactly what bartholomew and horwitz have done they created a table of relationship between attachment styles self-esteem and sociability and they said that if your sociability is positive and your self-esteem is positive you have a secure attachment style if your sociability is is uh positive and your self-esteem is negative you have an anxious preoccupied attachment style if your sociability is negative and your self-esteem is positive you would have a dismissive avoidant attachment style and if you if both are negative you will have a fearful avoidant attachment style and so the secure and dismissive attachment styles are associated with higher surface teeth compared with anxious and fearful attachment styles this corresponds to the distinction between positive and negative thoughts about the self in working models the secure and anxious attachment styles are associated with higher sociability dismissive and fearful attachment styles are less sociable people and this corresponds of course to the distinction between positive and negative thoughts about other people in working models but narcissists psychopaths borderlines victims of trauma complex trauma and histrionics they have only insecure attachment styles let's start with the first one anxious preoccupied the entrance preoccupied attachment style characterizes the compensatory narcissist the inverted narcissist other covert narcissists borderline personality disorder and dependent personality disorder colloquially known as codependent the anxious preoccupied attachment style is people who have a negative view of the self but they have a positive view of others if you think of the compensatory uh if you think of the borderline for example she has a negative view of herself usually but she has a positive view of her intimate partner she wants her intimate partner to help her to regulate her internal environment she believes in the intimate partners omnipotence that's why the borderline is a perfect match for the narcissist because she encourages his grandiosity she agrees with it she wants him to be grandiose she wants him to be godlike because she expects him to do miracles she expects him to give her inner peace she expects him to reduce the ability of her moods and to regulate her emotions so the borderline is a positive view of others similarly the covert the covert narcissist he has a very negative view of himself he is shy he's fragile he's vulnerable but he has a positive view of others in the case of an inverted narcissist he has a positive view of the overt narcissist she's with again there's a lot of magical thinking here because they expect their intimate partners to to me to to do miracles to to do the impossible to accomplish the impossible they expect their intimate partners to make life tolerable for them to regulate both their internal environment and their external environment the invented narcissist basks in the glory and accomplishments of her overt partner the covert narcissist undermines and manipulates his intimate partner in order to self-regulate and to obtain her his or her own goals and this kind of people say i want to be completely emotionally intimate with others but i often find that others are reluctant to get as close to me as i would like or they say i'm uncomfortable being without close relationships but i sometimes worry that others don't value me as much as i value them they this kind of attachment the unanxious preoccupied attachment they these people want intimacy they crave intimacy they seek high level of intimacy approval and responsiveness from their attachment figure they value intimacy to an extent that they become overly dependent on the attachment figure because they consider the attachment figure the only source of intimacy mini-break and these people feel a sense of anxiousness and this anxiety recedes only when they are in contact with the attachment figure in a way co-dependency can be easily reconceived as an anxiety disorder these people doubt their worth as people they blame themselves for the attachment figures lack of responsiveness they have autoplastic defenses they they feel guilt they feel shame they feel good ego dystonic they feel unease they feel discomfort they feel apprehension they feel anxiety these are neurotic defenses these people are essentially what used to be called neurotics and this dependence and idealization of the intimate partner they render the attachment figure the sole source of solace and comfort and support the dependencies is total upon the source of intimacy and this the intimate partner serves as an anxiolytic an anxiety-reducing medication they self-medicate these people borderlines coverts inverted nurses they self-codependence they self-medicate with an intimate partner and they exhibit high levels of emotional expressiveness emotional dysregulation worry impulsivity [Music] and it easily and seamlessly can glide into psychopathic or histrionic territory so there is a lot of back and forth and a lot of switching which is very reminiscent of multiple personality by the way they are like self states that they switch between so a borderline can easily become secondary psychopath and the change is so pronounced and so amazing and so startling that you feel that this person is possessed taken over by another entity unrelated to the original and so there's a lot of this switching going on and this switching is triggered by perceived perceived rejection humiliation neglect abandonment being ignored by the intimate part the second type of insecure attachment style is dismissive avoidant it characterizes the overt narcissist and the primary psychopath a dismissive avoidant attachment style is when you possess a positive view of yourself in a negative view of others when you for example hold other people in contempt when you devalue others when you consider them inferior to you and this kind of people say i'm comfortable without clothes emotional relationships it is important to me to feel independent and self-sufficient i prefer to not depend on others or to have others depend on me and these people desire a high level of independence they are fiercely independent independence is their autonomy self-autonomy self-agency self-efficacy is their religion their ideology and the desire to attain these goals of independence it's like it translates into avoidance of attachment they avoid all types of attachment whatsoever we are not talking only in romantic relationships but for example they can't hold a job they are itinerant they don't live in one place for long they move around they are ruthless worthless like root less they have no roots and they are ruthless in pursuit of ruthlessness they view themselves as self-sufficient invulnerable and this blends into sustains and buttresses their grandiosity their grandiosity is founded on self-containment self-sufficiency independence autonomy self-efficacy the ability to extract by force if needed beneficial outcomes from the environment including the human environment and they are invulnerable and and because they want to remain invulnerable they perceive attachment as a weakness as a vulnerability as a [ __ ] in the armor and they don't want to be closely associated with others they deny that they need close relationship and they view close relationship as unimportant in the best case if not you know outright weak and stupid and they seek less intimacy with attachments with attachment figures they often view their intimate partners less positively than they view themselves they tend much more to devalue others including their intimate partners and they have a defensive character it's it's actually a defense the irony is that these people are actually highly insecure that's why we call it an insecure attachment star the dismissive avoidant attachment style they they don't they're not really um heroic or victorious or impermeable or invulnerable they are suppressing and hiding their feelings remember the unthought none they they can't afford to get in touch with their emotions they can't afford to know what had really happened to them they tend to deal with rejection by distancing themselves from the sources of rejection and they tend to do this not only when actual rejection is happening but also when they predict or anticipate rejection when they misinterpret some behaviors as rejection and they tend to misinterpret most behaviors as rejection their attachments are very fragile and they are very fragile because they are fragile they are fearful they are unresolved and so this leads to the next to the next attachment style which is fearful fearful avoidant attachment style this characterizes some borderlines compensatory analysis and secondary psychopaths the fearful avoidant unresolved cannot classify attachment patterns they are people who have unstable fluctuating and of view of themselves an unstable fluctuating view of others so they tend to idealize idealize and devalue themselves as they idealize and devalue others by the way everything in the psychology of cluster b personality disorder has a self dimension in an other dimension narcissistic supply there is self provision of narcissistic supply nazis sometimes can provide himself with supply there is uh self-devaluation there is self-idealization i call this process corp idealization as the narcissist that realizes his partner is actually idealizing himself if he's deserving of such an ideal perfect brilliant most beautiful partner then he himself is perfect so everything has in these people with the fearful avoidant attachment style they fluctuate they're lay by they're not stable they're not regulated their view of themselves and view of others is is fluctuating and these are people usually with losses or massive traumas including for example sexual abuse in childhood and adolescent and these people say i'm somewhat uncomfortable getting close to others i want emotionally close relationships but i find it difficult to completely trust others or to depend on others i sometimes worry that i will be hurt if i allow myself to become too close to other people so they tend to feel uncomfortable with emotional closeness they they they feel it is when they're loved when someone tries to get intimate with them they become aggressive rejection rejecting and pushing away and these are mixed feelings mixed signals mixed messages it could drive you it's crazy making driving drive their intimate partners insane because they have unconscious negative views about themselves and about their attachments they view themselves as unworthy of responsiveness from their attachments they say i'm a bad object can't you see i'm unworthy why do you give me love if you give me love either you're blind and stupid or you are cunning and manipulative these are the only two reasons to give me love you can see that i'm damaged goods you can see i'm broken and defective and dysfunctional and yet you give me love something is wrong with you or you're doing this for a purpose there's some hidden agenda there's some ulterior motive they don't trust the intentions of their attachments and similar to the dismissive avoidant attachment style people with a fearful avoidment attachment style they seek less intimacy from attachments they suppress deny their feelings and they are much less comfortable expressing affection and love and finally baldwin and others they've applied the theory of relational schemas to working models of attachment this relations schema is a scheme which contains information about the way the attachment figure regularly interact with with each other so a relational schema is a schema which pertains to a relationship and for each pattern of interaction the schema contains information about the self information about the attachment and information about the way the interaction usually unfolds so the relational schema has a predictive value a prognosticating value in other words if you have a schema in your head as to how you're interacting with your intimate partner you this schema tells you something about yourself tells you something about the relationship tells you something about your partner and tells you a lot about how your partner is likely to react to your signals to your advances and to your attempts to be close relational schemas help us to guide behaviors and relationships because they allow people to anticipate to predict to plan for the responses of the intimate part relational schema is simply a lot of experience from which we derive heuristically a law a rule it is this is a rule-based system a rule of thumb if you wish heuristic rule based on experiences relational schemas are therefore in the in the shape of if then if i try to kiss her she will kiss me back if i try to hug her she will reject me if i try to have sex with her she will have sex with another man so you see i have a morbid mind so the relational schema kind of augments and improves the working mode because the working model is static working model says this is who you are this is who you think you are this is who you think other people are and the relational schema adds to this by saying this is who you think you are this is where you think other people are and this is what what you think will happen if you do this and this people with attachment styles were less less like likely to [Music] um people with various attachment sides were less likely to operate outside the relational schema in other relational schema exist in each and every one of us differences in attachment status actually reflect differences in relational schema when you have a relational schema it dictates your behaviors you you're trying to avoid rejection you're trying to avoid pain you're trying to avoid hurt there are some things you will not do you know that you will be reciprocated you know that you will receive pleasant experiences and pleasant feedback so you're drawn to those so it's positive and negative reinforcements to use behavior behaviorist theories relational schema incorporate information about positive and negative reinforcements you will try to avoid negative responses you will try to seek positive responses and gradually it will shape the way shape the way you attach to your intimate partner relational schemas involved in working models are organized into hierarchy i will quote baldwin baldwin said a person may have a general working model of relationships for instance to the effect that other people tend to be only partially and unpredictably responsive to his needs at a more specific level this expectation will take different forms when considering different role relationships for example we will not have the same relationship with a customer as we will with a romantic partner within romantic relationships expectations might then vary significantly depending on the specific attachment on the specific situation or the specific needs being expressed baldwin 1992 and so this hierarchy is three three apartheid there are three levels to this hierarchy the highest level contains very general relational schema schemas that apply to all relationships these are general expectations about relationships you know all relationships romantic business workplace with parents with children with neighbors with others with strangers and so on the next level of the hierarchy contains relational schemas that apply to particular kinds of relationships so you would have relational schemas that pertain to customers relational schemas that pertain to bosses relational schemas skimmers that pertain to your underlings and subordinates relational schemas pertaining to your parents to your intimate partners to your children to your neighbors to strangers you meet in a bar etc etc these are the second level in the hierarchy of relation schemas and it's a differentiated level depending on the specific type of relationship and the lowest level of a hierarchy contains relationship schemas that apply to specific relationships relationships with my this specific wife with this specific intimate partner with this specific boss in this specific purpose right right now these are time dependent relational schemas that are of course replaced if you divorce your wife and marry another wife you will have a totally different relational schema hopefully for you pietro monaco and barrett wrote the following from this perspective people do not hold do not hold a single set of working models of the self and of others rather people hold the family of models that include at higher levels abstract rules or assumptions about attachment relationships and at lower levels information about specific relationships and events within relationships these ideas also imply that working models are not a single entity but are multifaceted representations in which information at one level need not be consistent with information at another level in other words for example that's peter monaco and barrett 2000 um for example you can have on the second level you can have a general relational scheme schema with regarding to with regard which regards intimate relationship so you have a general relational schema regarding intimate relationships but on the third level you have a relationship schema that pertains to your marriage and the relational schema that pertains to your marriage could contradict completely the relational schema that that pertains to intimate relationships why because your marriage is not intimate is not functioning well so evidence that general working models and relationship specific working models are organized into hierarchy is abundant and for example i refer you to overall fletcher and friesen okay let's try to wrap it up when you're securely attached you look for support and looking for support is your most effective coping strategy you're not afraid of people you believe people can help you you believe they're good essentially good you believe they can provide you with what you need emotionally so you go you go looking out for them that is secure attachment when you have avoidant attachment you tend to devalue the relationship and you tend to withdraw when you have anxious attachments you use emotionally focused coping strategies you think emotionally and you pay more attention to experience distress pistole in 1996 studied anxious attachment in depth in 96 95 so securely attached individuals have less negative overall emotional experience than insecurely attached we said it before their early childhood was much happier and they had a safe base and there are many studies including recent studies for example fox in tuconaga that show that anxious and avoidant attachments predict predict behaviors such as talking when you're anxious when you're avoidant you tend to act anti-socially you become psychopathic and this is where we tie it in with victims of complex trauma victims of cptsd being exposed to multiple repetitive trauma can induce temporary anxious and avoidant attachment styles for example every trauma victim every victim of narcissistic abuse will tell you how difficult it is for her to trust again to date people again to go on dates she becomes avoidant she becomes um anxious and these attachment styles encourage encourage psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors and traits and for example there's a huge correlation between anxious and avoidant attachment style and behaviors such a stocking ironically stocking is about being committed the stocking means commitment the stalker is committed to you stalker is attached to you and the anxious person is committed to you he's anxious because he's committed he's afraid to be rejected and the avoidant person is negatively attached to you in a way he's attached via his avoidance he's attached to his avoidance so ironically these behaviors actually reflect commitment and variations of attachment and so attachment commitment trauma pain hurt they're all one complex you can organize them in a relational schema you can organize them in an internal working model it doesn't doesn't really matter what you call it it doesn't matter psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors are induced by distress and by pain and by hurting by trauma these are reactions these are defense mechanisms these are attempts to reassert control attempts to be seen to become visible attempts to diffuse or reduce and ameliorate anxiety self-medication sometimes with recklessness or with impulsivity or with anti-social conduct these are coping mechanisms and what people don't realize is that these coping mechanisms actually increase anxiety increased distress that's why we consider them dysfunctional in psychology there's no value judgment no morality we don't say to be psychopath is bad it's not okay it's even well youtubers do that but academics don't what we are concerned with is it working is it functional does it fulfill the role does it does it do things does it accomplish things and to become a psychopath in the narcissist because you had been traumatized or you had been hurt or you were anxious or you're avoidant this is dysfunctional because we have proven conclusively in many studies that psychopathic and narcissistic and borderline strategies coping strategies defiance impulsivity contumaciousness secondary psychopathy all these things they increase distress they enhance anxiety they're not they don't work there's a lot more to narcissists and psychopaths and borderlines than the disorders i started my work 25 years ago as a pioneer and and my work to some extent has been misunderstood because people tend to reduce reduce the narcissist to a figment to his pathology they ignore the person behind the persona they ignore the core of the narcissistic nuclear meltdown of attachment lack of self-pace lack of object constancy fear of being loved in fear of loving the need to love a dead mother because dead objects are fully controlled inanimate dead objects never betray you never abandon you never hurt you and this renders any type of meaningful communication with the narcissist all but impossible and unifications because the narcissist's main strategy is absence he upsets himself and he wants to upset you and he wants to have an intimate relationship between two absences a relationship between non-exi one non-existence and another between two voids between an emptiness and a void the borderline to a large extent is the same this borderline is a failed narcissist but still highly grandiose and has many many narcissistic features the same with the psychopath both primary and secondary variation is has to do with the existence of empathy and with the regulation of emotions or access to emotions but these are variations on the theme and the theme is that these people as children they were instructed told and encouraged to not exist they were not seen they were not allowed to become they were they were given permission to exist only as elements of the parent attributes of the parent dimensions of the parent and the instruments of the parent or not at all love was conditioned or not being it's a lesson that is impossible to eradicate because attachment styles are stable

Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin

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Keywords: narcissist, psychopath, borderline, cluster B, histrionic, cptsd, complex trauma, victim, attachment, insecure, secure, safe base, dead mother, unthought known, personal autonomy, self sufficiency, love, intimacy, style, disorder, aggression, destrudo, parentify, adult, child, abuse, withholding, emotions

Id: xzhgPdWOWL0

Length: 87min 15sec (5235 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020