Okay, hostility, an aspect of antagonism, persistent or frequent angry feelings, anger or irritability in response to minor slides and insults.

Now, some of these elements, some of these diagnostic elements exist in the covert borderline. Covert borderline is a hybrid between narcissist and borderline, but the covert borderline is substantially different to the classic borderline, to the shy borderline, substantially different. It’s substantially different because of the impacts of the narcissistic part. It’s a hybrid which essentially is a very high functioning type of borderline.

So let us delve right into the clinical picture of the covert borderline and how classical borderlines and shy, quiet borderlines affect the covert borderline with regards to each and every one of these.

First of all, the covert borderline is grandiose. The classical borderline is grandiose and this creates a lot of friction and antagonism and competition, competitive grandiosity.

The shy or quiet borderline, and again to remind you, that’s not a diagnosis, it’s a borderline who is introverted and would tend to self-aggress, who tend to act in rather than act out, but she also is capable of acting out.

There’s not pure shy or quiet borderline. That is the nonsense of the suggested diagnosis.

Okay, the shy or quiet borderline is very similar to the covert narcissist. She would suppress her grandiosity. It will not be overt. It would lead to a lot of seething envy, a feeling of having been discriminated against, injustice and so on, but she will not externalize the grandiose indefinitely. She will not compete head on with the covert borderline.

So the shy quiet borderline is a match for the covert borderline in this sense.

Now, the covert borderline is preoccupied with fantasies of outstanding ideal love. It is a love that is so special that it renders the covert borderline special.

The covert borderline’s sense of uniqueness relies on ideal love. The narcissist’s sense of uniqueness relies on narcissistic supply, on being recognized as special, as outstanding, as amazing and unprecedented, not so the covert borderline. The covert borderline sense of uniqueness is, for example, if he’s a good father or an amazing husband or both.

So ideal love is a foundation or the search for ideal love, which doesn’t exist, of course. It’s a fantasy defense. It’s the foundation of covert borderline. It makes him feel unique, makes him feel entitled, because if he’s such a great father and a good husband, he’s entitled to, for example, appreciation and admiration, and even facilitates his other plastic defenses because his preoccupation with ideal love, with the perfect family, with amazing children and his unbelievable parental functioning, this allows him alloplastic defenses. He can say, “I’m a good object. Look how good I am. So if something bad happens to me, it’s someone else’s fault. I’m a victim in short.”

So here, again, there’s a perfect match with both types of borderline. It’s the borderline initially, the first few hours, first few days, first few weeks, if she’s really high functioning, the first few months or the few years of the relationship will broadcast to the covert borderline.

Your search for ideal love is my search also. I’m also looking for a perfect family, and as you want, as you wish to be a perfect father, I wish to be a perfect mother or vice versa.

So she mirrors the covert borderline. She deceives the covert borderline effectively into believing that she shares this fantasy, that she is also fully dedicated and committed and addicted to the family as the ultimate environment. Love is the supreme ideal goal.

And then the covert borderline says, “Oh my God, I found my, I don’t know, soulmate, twin flame, whatever. I can’t let her go. I can’t let her go.” And the covert borderline becomes very controlling. It’s a reflection of separation insecurity or abandonment, anxiety, and it is the outcome of idealizing the borderline.

The covert borderline tells himself, “This is my perfect match. There’s only one in the whole world. If I let her go, I’m doomed to loneliness, and I will never realize my fantasy of an ideal love within a perfect family with the most loving children.”

So he becomes very controlling, micromanaging, super, super interested in critically and analytically decomposing, deconstructing, breaking apart the psychology of his partner.

You see, unconsciously perceives this as a guarantee or insurance policy against abandonment, separation, and rejection or being cheated on.

Which if I understand my part, the more I understand my partner, the better the match, the glue that holds us together, and the more exclusive I shall become.

The covert borderline is an internal locus of control. He is self-sufficient, so he is not needy, he is not clingy, but he is authoritative, controlling, hyper-analytical, and this triggers the engulfment anxiety of the borderline, the classic borderline.

And she runs away from him. She does exactly, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Covert borderline’s behavior pushes away the borderline until she bolts and vanishes into the horizon because she feels suffocated. She feels subsumed and consumed by the covert borderline, and she doesn’t want that.

And while with the narcissist it’s only imaginary, with the covert borderline it’s real.

And so the classic borderline will not survive. The shy or quiet borderline, on the other hand, is very similar to the narcissist in the sense that she doesn’t inhabit an external space.

In short, it’s like water off the back of a duck. She doesn’t pay attention to the to the covert borderline. She doesn’t really care what the covert borderline does or doesn’t do, his choices, decisions. She doesn’t even listen to the covert borderline in any meaningful way. She adopts herself, she shapeshifts, she’s like Zellig in a Woody Allen’s movie. She becomes what the covert borderline wants her to be. She’s malleable, she’s submissive.

One could say that a shy or quiet borderline also has strong components or elements of a codependent.

So she would play along. It’s a role play. She would fit into the theater production of the covert borderline, much better than the classical borderline. She would feel engulfed, but then she would act in. She would become morose, depressed. She would possibly self-mutilate, maybe try to commit suicide. She’ll be very sad all the time. Her energy levels will go down. She’ll begin to abuse substances and so on.

Still, the shy or quiet borderline is a much better match, much more stable match for the covert borderline.

Next, the covert borderline is also subject to mood lability, emotional dysregulation.

But what he does, the covert borderline, he imposes on this on this lability and this dysregulation, he imposes on it his intellect and his antisocial features.

Because the covert borderline is partly a narcissist, he has strong, kind of psychopathic self-state, antisocial traits. And these antisocial traits are defiance, recklessness, reactance in your face, contumaciousness, kind of posture, cage fighter posture.

And so this posture coupled with grandiosity and coupled with the covert borderline is typically sharp, overwhelming intellect. These are major defenses against dysregulation and against lability.

So when you observe the covert borderline, it’s very difficult to reach the conclusion that he’s labile or that he’s emotionally dysregulated, except after very extreme crisis, when it’s clear that he’s depressed.

But otherwise, he appears to be totally normal. And definitely a stark contrast to the classical borderline, or even the shy or quiet borderline.

And this is exactly what attracts borderline’s wall types to the covert borderline, this apparent ability to control lability and dysregulation.

Like he found the magic key, the magic formula, the spell, the solution to their internal turmoil and tumult and chaos. They hope to somehow that he somehow will be able to regulate them.

And this is called external regulation. They want him to regulate them. They want him to stabilize them, his borderline partners, the outsourced regulation to him, he becomes a rock, a secure base, a special friend, somewhere a refuge, a sanctuary. And this binds them and bonds them to the covert borderline. Incredibly, they’re very loathe to give up on it.

And so when they run away, they feel very guilty and very ashamed and very angry themselves, they become very self-destructive and self-defeating, and they come back, or they attempt to come back, they attempt to over the covert borderline very frequently.

Remember that the covert borderline, exactly like the psychopath, has a low boredom threshold, low tolerance for boredom. He needs intellectual stimulation, or other types of stimulation, sexual stimulation. He needs stimulation all the time, or he gets extremely bored, and then he gets frustrated, and then he externalizes aggression.

So the covert borderline is not self-mutilated, is not suicidal, he has no suicidal ideation, but he can and does become, very often, or sometimes depending on the character, aggressive, even violent.

Now this clashes head on with the classical borderlines acting out. This is exactly what happens to the classical borderline. She becomes aggressive and violent as well, sometimes.

And then there are god, god almighty battles and fights and conflicts, breaking objects, hurting each other, physically, beating, I mean, terrible. This never happens with the shine, or the quiet borderline. The shine quiet borderline provides the covert borderline with everything it needs, but without the costs associated with the classical borderline. The quiet or shy borderline, when exposed to the covert borderline’s aggression, would exerciseit would trigger in her, autoplastic defenses. She would say, “I provoked him. I did something wrong to him. I victimized him. I abused him.” And then she would punish herself. She’s very self-punitive. She would direct his aggression. She would absorb it, and her aggression as a bad object. She would self-direct it and become depressive or suicidal or something.

So on the one hand, exuberant hamster, Israeli fights are not likely between a covert borderline and a shy borderline. But on the other hand, the risk of suicide, self-mutilation, depression in the shy, quiet borderline is much higher.

And that surprised the covert borderline for being with her.

The quiet borderline cannot help himself. He doesn’t self-mutilate. He does engage in addictive behaviors.

So sometimes the covert borderline, the shy borderline, or even the covert borderline, the classical borderline, find common ground in abusing substances. It becomes a ritual. It structures their lives and give the common life meaning. It’s like they’ve established a diet or a partnership for abusing substances or for other types of addiction, like sex addiction.

And the addiction becomes an exoskeleton. The addiction structures the day, provides purpose and direction and meaning and so on. And the addiction becomes the shared fantasy of the covert borderline and the borderline or even the shy borderline. This often happens.

But apart from this, a borderline would react very badly to the covert borderline’s aggression. And the aggression doesn’t have to be physical, of course, could be verbal. Being over-critical is a form of aggression. Abounding, dark sense of humor is a form of aggression. Analyzing constantly the other parties’ deficiencies and shortcomings and defects and mental problems. It’s a form of aggression. Of course, it’s externalized aggression.

Now, both of them, the covert borderline and the borderline, classical or shy, all these types, narcissists as well, they all experience dissociative self-states.

In the case of the covert borderline, often selective attention, confabulation, repression, denial. There’s a primary psychopathic protector in the covert borderline, which comes out when the covert borderline dissociates. And it’s the same with the borderline, but the borderline dissociates differently. She experiences amnesia, derealization, deep personalization.

And this, of course, is a different type of dissociation. It’s much more visible and much more deep and profound.

So while the covert borderline’s dissociation is passing and transitory and not very serious, similar, let’s say, to the narcissist’s dissociation. And confabulation solves the problem. With a borderline, both classical and shy, the dissociation is much more extreme and severe.

So the borderline, intimate partner of the covert borderline, often uses dissociation as a defense against the overwhelming domineering, micromanaging, controlling presence of the covert borderline.

And the covert borderline perceives suicidal ideation, attempted suicide, self-ritual and dissociation. It perceives them as insults, as a form of criticism, as a narcissistic injury, even a mortification.

Because here is the ideal partner offering ideal love, unblemished and perfect love, trying to establish a family or a couple which is beyond reproach, and then creating together a life. Here he is offering this perfect package.

And the other party, the borderline, attempts to commit suicide. How humiliating this is. She mutilates, she’s not happy, she’s depressed.

So the covert borderline perceives the borderline’s mood lability and emotional dysregulation, of course, suicidal ideation, suicidal attempts, self-ritualization. It perceives them as criticism of his capacity to attain and to maintain ideal love and a perfect relationship.

And this is for him devastating. This is a destruction of the fantasy foundation of his existence.

When the covert borderline is exposed to the dynamics of the borderline, shy or not, he feels devastated. He feels that he would never be able to recover.

He challenges most profoundly his sense of self-worth, his sense of self-efficacy, his ability to trust himself, his optimism and hope about the future. It destroys everything.

And then he develops paranoid ideation. He begins to suspect the borderline partner in a variety of ways.

Primitive ways, like she’s cheating on me, and much more subtle ways she’s playing with my mind.

But there’s paranoid ideation there. He’s attempting to convert her into a persecutory object, into an enemy, which is what all borderlines do.

So the covert borderline is a borderline. It’s a typical borderline reaction.

And then having been broken and damaged by the borderline partner, usually the covert borderline will exit a long-term fantasy-based loving relationship with a borderline partner and would become essentially a psychopathic narcissist with promiscuous, shallow relationships, numerous relationships. It’s an interim phase until his need for ideal love will re-emerge and reassert himself.

And he would go on another route.

The borderline, the covert borderline, has an intense need to be loved by other people to the point that he becomes a people pleaser.

But he has a lack of real empathy, especially in the psychopathic phase. He values his children above his partner, which introduces extreme difficulties into a couple.

So the covert borderline is unable to maintain healthy long-term relationships unless and until he secures a totally submissive, codependent partner who is also a borderline, preferably a shy or quiet borderline.

So the ideal partner for covert borderline is someone who has dependent personality disorder, also known colloquially as codependency, coupled with borderline personality disorder of the shy or quiet variant, where mostly she acts in rather than acts out. She is able to accept that most of his love will be vested, his cathexis will be vested in his children rather than her.

All borderlines, including the covert borderline, can become passive aggressive, sullen, surly, self-denying. All of them are capable of cunning and premeditation.

There’s treatments. The classical borderline is capable of malevolence and malice. She is frequently vindictive and this is something the covert borderline never takes into account.

He’s always shocked when the secondary psychopathy of the classical borderline manifests itself. He’s devastated by her malice, by her ill intentions.

He says to himself, “I would have never believed it on her. I would have never expected it of her.”

And here she is, attempting to destroy him, to ruin him or his reputation, to take him down, to kill him in a variety of ways. I mean, it’s bad.

When a classical borderline is triggered, it could be bad. When a covert borderline is triggered, it’s never that bad, ever. It’s a passing phase, can get angry, can get dysregulated, can get aggressive or violent, but it gets it out of his system and he’s again his old self, not so the borderline.

She can remain fixated, for example, on a revenge fantasy. And this is a huge risk that the covert borderline is taking when he teams up with borderlines, even shy and quiet borderlines.