Nine Features of the Narcissist / Borderline Couple | Romance & Personality Disorders

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel hello this is dr. Grande today's question asks I can discuss the romantic relationship between a person with MPD narcissistic personality and BPD borderline personality so in clinical practice we tend to see this manifest as a man with MPD and a woman with BPD and the number of the questions I received on this topic the question was really referring to this particular relationship structure so that's the example I'll be using in this video right so we see a man with MPD and a woman with BPD but of course it's not always this way in clinical practice this is just what we see much of the time so to answer this question I'm going to list the nine characteristics of an MPD BPD couple so it's not extremely common to see a couple where the man has NPD without significant comorbidity like another cluster B personality disorder or where there is a woman with BPD and again without significant comorbidity meaning that the man's primary diagnosis is MPD and the woman's primary diagnosis as BPD what's more common is to see narcissistic and borderline traits so a couple where a man has narcissistic traits and a woman has borderline traits but not necessarily the official mental disorder as listed in the DSM now this is important to keep in mind but just to keep things simple I'm going to use the terms mostly of NPD and BPD even though some of the time I'm really talking about narcissistic traits versus borderline trace again not necessarily rising to the level of pathology so with narcissistic personality disorder with NPD we see a number of symptoms and characteristics we see a grandiose sense of self-importance having fantasies of success in power a sense of entitlement requiring a lot admiration believing oneself to be special being jealous arrogant self-centered manipulative having a lack of empathy being resistant to criticism and this will play an important part when I get to the nine characteristics being extroverted disagreeable and having low neuroticism which is also important part so NPD is similar to the construct of grandiose narcissism moving over to borderline personality BPD we see frantic efforts to avoid abandonment we see a love-hate cycle this is the idealization devaluation cycle so specifically in a romantic relationship or at least typically in a romantic relationship we see that the individual BPD idealized as the romantic partner goes through a phase where they really express a lot of love and affection and then they move to a phase with a devalue right so we get the love-hate cycle we also see impulsivity self-harm anger affective instability so having difficulty regulating emotions problems with self-image a feeling of emptiness dissociation or paranoia and we see associated characteristics like personality traits like high in eroticism so BPD is somewhat similar to vulnerable narcissism which leads me to this list of characteristics so in talking about the BPD MPD couple I've noticed a few interesting characteristics over my years in clinical experience and we see some of these of course in the research literature as well so starting with number one the first characteristic many clinicians tend to think of these couples as simply a pairing of someone with grandiose narcissism and somebody with vulnerable narcissism which of course is easily understood MPD is like grandiose narcissism and BPD has some overlap with vulnerable narcissism but vulnerable narcissism is not the same thing as BPD again there's similar in a few ways but really they're actually quite different constructs vulnerable narcissism doesn't have as much anger and it doesn't typically have the love-hate cycle the impulsivity the frantic efforts to avoid abandonment the dissociation the and it doesn't necessarily have a market lack of insight BPD doesn't necessarily have hyper sensitivity to criticism antagonism self-centeredness and a need for admiration that we see in vulnerable narcissism so there is a course as I mentioned overlap between them most notably we see resentfulness shame and distrust so the reason that this first characteristic is a problem this misunderstanding of counselors is because they miss the BPD and then there's no treatment for the BPD so war line personality Souter is a serious mental disorder that does necessitate treatment so this overlooked and simply dismissed as vulnerable narcissism then important care is not being delivered so moving to the second item on this list when we talk about the love-hate cycle and these relationships sometimes the devaluation component that phase is actually shortened by quite a bit this is because of the reaction of the partner with NPD when they are devalued they tend to avoid like in approach avoidance right all relationships have an approach avoidance balance so as the person with BPD moves away they're not really feeding more emotions into the situation they're not engaging in the argument so if a couple is dating they won't go out if they're married they will go out the person with MPD will go out and leave the person with BPD at home so we see that they create distance and this is a powerful technique for getting somebody to like you again this is a powerful technique for getting the approach phase a positive approach phase to start again the devaluation cycle itself is an avoidance it's negative approach it requires a reaction to reach its strongest possible expression and again the person with MPD doesn't engage number three we see the person with MPD is typically no worse off from an emotional point of view when their partner has BPD so I'm really saying here is if a person with MPD has a romantic partner whether that person has BPD or not doesn't seem to make as big a difference for the emotional health of the person with MPD so this really runs against a popular idea we see in mental health the idea we see is that the more pathology that's added into a couple it's together a romantic couple the worse off things get this is not necessarily true because pathology comes with pros and cons although of course we usually think of pathology is primarily negative potentially positive features of MPD for this type of relationship would be that low neuroticism and that resistance to criticism I talked about before when the idealization phase is active the narcissus feeds on all that admiration they're the center of attention and that's very satisfying for grandiose narcissist when the devaluation phase is active I talked about this before the narcissist checks out so it's not necessarily the same thing as saying these relationships are emotionally healthy for someone with MPD they're just not as destructive as some of you would expect just looking at that emotional component on the NPD side now there is a physical risk component and there's some other risks that I'm not talking about here again just looking at the emotional side moving to number four infidelity is extremely common in these relationships and this is because you have high risks on both sides somebody with NPD would be at a substantial risk in any type of relationship that's a characteristic of narcissistic personality sorter and with BPD we see an elevated risk so with all this risks put together in the same couple the risk of infidelity is higher than we would expect and a couple where there was no pathology now infidelity is extremely destructive for relationships and you have a relationship here that's already starting with a lot of trust issues so Affairs only really aggravate this moving to number five the fifth characteristic of the NPDB PD couple we see that typically in these types of relationships there's a lot of sex on the NPD side this is a key feature of this person is order to focus on this to manipulate somebody to get sex on the BPD side it's used to try to strengthen through the a ship for the person with BPD to feel loved and connected sometimes counselors believe that all this sexual activity means that the relationship is strong and healthy but often it is not either there are a lot of important components to relationships emotional components and also just logistical components that are separate from this so we can't just look at one area and say because there's a lot of this activity that means the relationship is strong moving number six the anger in these relationships is usually one sided now Randi of narcissism does have reactive anger some of MPD will often react in an angry way when their ego is threatened so they have a fragile sense of self and if somebody criticizes them they tend to react now grandiose narcissism at the same time is characterized by a resistance to criticism so this seems like the two don't go along but what happens is with grandiose narcissism much of the time somebody moves into a vulnerable narcissistic phase temporarily so people tend to fluctuate they go back and forth although primarily they tend to be in one category or the other so this really explains how someone with grandiose narcissism can still have anger reactions but of course if they only have grandiose narcissistic traits they would typically not be very angry at all and typically not react when criticized now when we look over the BPD side BPD is much more strongly associated with anger so this is where we get a lot of the anger in these relationships typically the person with MPD is not angry or if they are it's not too often and the person with BPD has a continuous anger so we see a lot of anger and arguments in these relationships but again they tend to be one-sided more on the side of the person with BPD being aggressive and not as much on the side of the person with NPD being aggressive number seven personality disorders are characterized by a lack of insight this is all person a source including NPD and BPD so at the NPDB PD couple we see this lack of insight on both sides of the relationship so sometimes when working with NPD bepd couples what you hear a lot is parallel communication right somebody's saying something that's disconnected from the other person they're not really talking to each other they're talking in parallel with very little insight and depth they're seemingly disconnected but at the same time living together they understand each other exists they understand the other person actually is there but they're in their own worlds the narcissist is self-absorbed concerned with obtaining admiration and fantasizing about success while the person with BPD is coping with emotional dysregulation feelings of emptiness and paranoia so it sets up a challenging scenario from the counsellors point of view one thing I've noticed in these relationships is that each person wants the other person to make changes without making changes of their own because a lot of time they don't even recognize that they need to make changes or that they're contributing something negative to the relationship and again this all comes back to that lack of insight it's an important feature to recognize when trying to treat personal sorters and it creates an important dynamic when trying to treat a couple who both have personal sorters number 8 this one is fairly straightforward we see that comorbid substance use is a huge problem in these relationships so is comorbid depression anxiety and cluster B personality pathology so for example somebody with NPD who also has antisocial person I saw or somebody with BPD who also has histrionic Personality now specifically on the BPD side we also see high comorbidity with post-traumatic stress disorder we know that about 80% of individuals with BPD have a history of trauma now the last item here number 9 the list we see similar circumstances around why the couple connected in the first place so I get this question a lot why does somebody with NPD and somebody with BPD get together why do they form this relationship to start with well a person with NPD is attracted to someone who shows them intensive faction who appreciates that they are special who believes that they are great and they're looking for someone who's physically attractive now this isn't necessarily a characteristic of BPD of course but this is just something that some of MPD is looking for and this is of particular importance to someone who's narcissistic because they like the idea of being with a high status individual and that's how they interpret physical attractiveness now looking at the BPD side the individual borderline traits is attracted to the superficial charm of the narcissist the confidence and that low neuroticism it makes someone appear really quite stable and dependable right because with low neuroticism somebody isn't highly reactive to stimuli they don't have a strong reaction emotionally the things that happen in the environment so those are the nine characteristics of the MPD BPD couple there are definitely treatment challenges from a mental health treatment point of view from the clinicians point of view but there is hope it takes a lot of work by everybody involved but I have seen people with these circumstances these couples actually go on to have a good deal success it's not necessarily what a lot of counselors would expect but again it can happen I know whenever I talk about topics like NPD and BPD and relationships there gonna be a variety of opinions people who agree with me and disagree with me and who have other thoughts on the topic like examples perhaps from their own experiences please put these opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate a really interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this video on the nine characteristics of the MPD BPD couple to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 103,229

Keywords: Narcissism, narcissist, narcissistic personality disorder, grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism, borderline, borderline personality disorder, grandiosity, arrogance, jealousy, sense of entitlement, identity disturbance, emotional dysregulation, paranoia, dissociation, anger, frantic relationship, mental health, counseling

Id: YLluGFMe-HQ

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2019