Tag: Defense Mechanisms

Borderline Enchantress

Tips: Survive Your Borderline Enchantress

The lecture discussed coping strategies for living with individuals, particularly women, with borderline personality disorder (BPD), highlighting core issues such as abandonment anxiety, identity disturbance, emotional dysregulation, and transient paranoid ideation. It emphasized the importance of establishing stability, reality testing, communication protocols, emotional regulation techniques, and gradual transfer of personal responsibility to help manage symptoms and prevent harmful behaviors like self-mutilation and acting out. While acknowledging the challenges and emotional toll, the speaker also recognized the deep, unconditional love and unique gifts that come with relationships with borderline individuals for those dedicated to sustained effort. Tips: Survive Your Borderline Enchantress

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Narcissist’s Fantasy Not About YOU, Psychopath’s Is (Collateral Victimhood)

In this video, San Vaknin clarified the distinction between narcissistic and psychopathic fantasies, emphasizing that narcissistic fantasies revolve around the narcissist’s grandiose self-concept and needs, while psychopathic fantasies focus on fulfilling the victim’s desires. He explained that narcissists are impaired in reality testing due to their reliance on delusional fantasies that combine factual elements inaccurately, leading to dissociation and self-supply defenses. The discussion highlighted that narcissists genuinely believe their fantasies and seek to induct others into these self-centered realities, contrasting with psychopaths who manipulate victims to achieve pragmatic goals. Narcissist’s Fantasy Not About YOU, Psychopath’s Is (Collateral Victimhood)

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How to Hatch in Narcissist’s Mind: Internal to External Object

Sam Vaknin explained that narcissists perceive others not as separate external entities but as internal objects or avatars within their own minds, using primitive defenses such as projection and splitting internally on these representations rather than on the actual people. He emphasized that challenging a narcissist’s internal object through asserting personal autonomy, disagreeing, or maintaining external relationships can provoke aggression but is essential to affirm one’s separateness and reality. Ultimately, Vaknin advised that recognizing this dynamic helps in coping with narcissists, as attempts to assert external reality can disrupt the narcissist’s fantasy but may risk the relationship.

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