Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Avoid Toxic Love of Toxic People

1. 00:01 It’s Paris. Church bells are ringing. I’m looking at the river. All kinds of boats are floating. Uh in the background, there are amazing architectural wonders and it’s a fascinating place to be. A bit noisy though. Today I’m going to discuss the toxic love of toxic people.
2. 00:28 My name is Sam Vaknin. I’m the author of Malignancy of Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology. We start with the concept of conditional love. Conditional love is the kind of love for love, imitated love, fake love, but it’s mispersceived by the recipients
3. 00:50 as love. The recipient could be a child. The recipient could be a love addict. The recipient could be a codependent or a borderline. But these recipients are conditioned to perceive the emanation, the effective emanation of conditional love as true
4. 01:12 love when it is not. Why is conditional love the poor cousin of true love? Why is it not true love? Because conditional love is on offer only when the love object takes certain actions or attains certain performance criteria. The love object has to be performative.
5. 01:35 The love object has to be obedient. The love object has to conform and collude and collaborate. The love object has to meet certain standards. And only then is the love object deserving of so-called love. And this is conditional love. And of course you can immediately see
6. 01:56 that conditional love is not real love because really true love is not conditioned on performance or on meeting standards or on being obedient or on anything actually. Real true love is the love of another person for who they are, not for what they do or how well they do it.
7. 02:20 In contrast, pericious or toxic love is a kind of love or so-called love that sends a mixed signal. only I love you and only I am capable of loving you because you are not lovable and because you are not lovable in my absence you are better off dead no one
8. 02:45 else is going to love you of course this triggers infantile anxiety because an infant that is who is unloved is a dead infant we intuitively preverbally connect being loved and being seen with being alive. If we are not seen as infants, we die.
9. 03:11 If we are not loved as infants, we die. The opposite of love, the opposite of attention is death, extinction. So we crave love and we crave the attention and of being seen. We crave to be apprehended. We crave to be in the field of vision of other people.
10. 03:37 And we crave all this because our survival depends on it. Conditioned love connects love to certain acts and minimum accomplishments. Toxic love links love to pain, to hurt, and to self- eradication. People exposed to intermittent love in early childhood, they bribe other people
11. 04:04 in order to secure caring and sakur and attention and compassion and empathy and affection. They bribe other people. They have learned early on this kind this kind of uh people early on they’ve learned that love is intermittent, unreliable, touch and go. Here today, gone tomorrow,
12. 04:27 fleeting, ephemereral. And they developed the conviction or the coping strategy that they have to secure love somehow. that love requires an investment or an effort and especially some kind of performance, some kind of trade, some kind of queer quo,
13. 04:47 some kind of bribe. It’s a corrupt, a corrupt perception of love. Love is a form of corruption. And so these people who have been exposed to the wrong kind of love in early childhood, they become people pleasers, codependents, histrionics or narcissist.
14. 05:09 People who grew up with dual signaling, I love you, but you’re unlovable. Kill yourself because you’re unlovable, but I still love you if you perform. If you gratify me, I will love you. If you don’t, I will I will ignore you and abandon you. This kind of dual messaging
15. 05:28 and dual signaling in early childhood can really f up your mind and people who grow up with it end up being internalizing border lines, schizoids, schizoiples or externalizing psychopaths. These kind of people, they learn that love is a battlefield
16. 05:52 and that they need to fight to fight in order to to be loved. And so they become aggressive. They trade they they they begin to they convince themselves that they have to coersse other people to love them. So if bribing doesn’t work, they become
17. 06:11 coercive and aggressive and violent. And so this can escalate very fast. Anyone who’s been exposed to conditional love as a child doesn’t have the the right lifestyle, doesn’t know how to love, and even much worse, doesn’t know how to be loved. And this sets the ground for toxic,
18. 06:34 penicious, insidious forms of love which involves power plays and mind games and bribing the corruption of love and finally coercion and aggression. All these intimacy challenged intimacy and erectic types they develop rejection sensitivity coupled with zero latency.
19. 07:00 No matter how emotionally invested they are in another human being, in another person, the minute they anticipate or they perceive rejection, they catastrophize. They go haywire and they instantly switch off any emotions they may have had. They do not mourn and do not grieve.
20. 07:20 They immediately transition to a new love interest, a new friend, sometimes within minutes from the breakup. And why do they do that? Because they can’t they can’t subsist. They can’t survive without love. As far as they’re concerned, the absence
21. 07:38 of love is death. As I’ve explained earlier, so they need love every or they need to be they need to perceive themselves as loved. They don’t really need love. They’re not looking for true love. True love is unrecognizable to them. True love is not something they
22. 07:57 can recognize, not something they not something they can react to, not something they can interact with, not something they respond to. True love. So what they’re looking for is conditional love, the corrupted kind, the toxic kind, and yet they misperceive it as love as
23. 08:15 I’ve explained earlier. And they’re very compulsive about it. And they can’t survive a minute without love. And the minute and the second the moment there is an indication that they are about to be abandoned or shamed or humiliated or rejected or criticized even they switch
24. 08:33 off. They terminate the relationship at least in their own minds and they go searching for a new love object, a new love interest instantaneously because they can’t survive without it. Codependent and borderline believe that in an intimate relationships both
25. 08:54 members of the couple need to change. Why do they need to change? Because they need to become one. They need to fuse. They need to merge into a single symbiotic interdependent psychonamic entity, a polyphalic bisellular organism. This misperception of love is vanishing.
26. 09:21 Like to love is to vanish into the loved one and the loved one should disappear into you. You should both vanish and reappear as a new entity, a new organism that comprises both of you. This is the perception of border lights. perception of many codependents
27. 09:43 and some and and this is the core engine of the narcissist’s shared fantasy. A narcissist wishes to merge and fuse with a maternal figure. In all these situations, there’s a belief that to sustain the fusion and the merger and the symbiotic bond to enact this mutual assimilation,
28. 10:08 this mutual digestion, both parties need to change. So toxic pernicious love, the wrong kind of love is about changing the partner. There is no actual love of the partner as the partner is. There’s no actual love of the partner because the partner exists. There’s no
29. 10:29 actual love of the partner because the partner’s traits and no, there’s a love of what the partner could become. There’s a love of what the partner should become. There’s a love of the bond. There’s a love of the shed fantasy, not of the partner. Actually,
30. 10:46 the partner is rejected. The message in toxic love is you are unlovable as you are or I cannot love you as as you are. You need to change. You need to become me. Only then am I capable of loving you. And so in this sense this is conditional love. But in a healthy relationship
31. 11:08 both parties remain as they are. They accept each other as two distinct separate and different people. They enrich each other because they are not one. They’re not the same. They’re not a single organism. They bring the world into each other because they go
32. 11:26 out to the world separately. They bring into the relationship experiences and other people from the outside. They do not feel threatened by p the other the partner’s personal autonomy. They do not feel threatened by their own personal autonomy. They they don’t feel
33. 11:43 threatened by independence, by agency. None of this threatens them because all these qualities enrich the bond. All these qualities make life worth living and all these qualities are the foundation and foundations and cornerstones of true love. The love of the other.
34. 12:04 It’s not the love of me, not the love of reflected me, the love of the other. Emphasis other. On the contrary, there is an embrace of otherness. Instead of abandonment anxiety in healthy relationships, the partners experience the anticipated joy of a functional togetherness
35. 12:27 which leaves place for personal space and personal time. They do not chain the partner. They do not constrict each other, but they liberate each other. True love is about letting go. As any good enough mother knows, narcissistic and borderline people, when they are confronted
36. 12:50 with true love, they interpret it as rejection and abandonment. When they team up with a partner who is mentally healthy and insists on having priv privacy and personal space and personal time, they they react very badly to this. And one of the main relationship
37. 13:12 management strategies of the borderline and to a lesser extent the codependent is triangulation. These people triangulate as a relationship management strategy. But the triangulation of border lines and codependencies highly unusual. They openly flirt with others in the
38. 13:31 presence of their primary partners and then in many cases ostentatiously proceed to full-fledged substance abuse and infidelity as their horrified, petrified and agonizing mates are left to ponder the wreckage. This is part of what is known as acting out in borderline.
39. 13:52 And then frequently they sadistically proceed to describe to their spouses or intimate partners their sexual exploits other forms of misconduct in excruciating detail as a form of coming clean or maintaining openness and honesty or expressing remorse, repentance and shame or
40. 14:15 expulating guilt or whatever the reason may be. So the triangulation of border lines and to a lesser extent codependence in relationships where there is true love and true intimacy but true love and true intimacy that the borderline cannot identify and cannot accept.
41. 14:39 At that point the borderline feels rejected and abandoned and he or she will proceed to triangulate. And it’s a two-step triangulation. Overtentious uh courting or flirting of a rescuer savior type in the Karpman drama triangle and then disclosure of everything that
42. 15:01 has happened in excruciating sadistic details. Why go into details and then why lie about many of these data or many of these details? Why assume the risk of a breakup? Why settle on such a course of action to start with? Is it an efficacious relationship management strategy?
43. 15:23 Because the idea is to get a rise out of the partner. Triangulation helps to raise the market value of the straying mate in an invisible auction among other potentials. You see other men want me. You see other women are after me. But totally accurate information would
44. 15:45 lead to a dissolution of the bond and to other adverse outcomes. And so the disclosure of details coming clean involves many prearications and confabulations. I was drunk. I can’t remember. He raped me. We only hugged or danced or kissed or whatever. He he fell asleep. We only
45. 16:06 had drinks together. He returned to his hotel and all kinds of other nonsense. The cluster B partner feels compelled to triangulate in this total conspicuous and extreme manner because he or she anticipates abandonment. Feels that she has nothing left to lose, having already
46. 16:25 tried every other method and failed. At best, the romantic jealousy and hurt caused by the indiscretion may motivate her rejecting an abusive companion or in her mind to reclaim her. At worst, it will just speed up the inevitable. And the irony is
47. 16:45 that the so-called rejection, so-called abuse, so-called abandonment is actually true love and real intimacy, which the borderline and the codependent and the narcissist are trained to perceive as abusive, as rejection, rejecting, as abandoning. Borderline and histrionic women
48. 17:09 are defined. They are competitive men as well. Of course, they convert every relationship into a power play, and they bear long-term grudges as they seek to settle sexual and romantic scores, old and new, both with their partners and with third parties, sometimes even with casual
49. 17:29 strangers who had injured or challenged them somehow. this irresistible competitive urge, the permanent power play. They need the need to prevail over a mate or over other people, the drive to restore justice and thereby self-esteem or the compulsion to
50. 17:46 consummate a flirtatious and seductive hunt, sexual conquest, or a chase successfully often resulting cheating, infidelity, cheating on the primary intimate part. Now cheating is one only one form of reckless behavior in borderline personality disorder
51. 18:06 and it’s a form of compensatory regulatory behavior in narcissistic personality disorder. It’s much less common than we are led to believe u especially by self-styled experts. But when it does happen it’s highly virulent virulent and highly injurious um to the other partner.
52. 18:29 the borderline or histrionic. They do not perceive their misconduct, however egregious and extreme, as cheating. They say, “I needed to get it out of my system. It had nothing to do with it. And I have no intention to hug, slow dance, kiss, make up, sleep with this
53. 18:45 man again or with this woman again. Now that I proved to myself that he desires me sexually, it’s over. I’m no longer attracted to him. In future, I will meet him just for coffees and chats, nothing more, even if he asks for it. Whatever happened there between us stays
54. 19:00 there. They protest indignantly. When the shattered significant other, when the intimate partner, when the spouse, when the boyfriend or the girlfriend protests, they are cast as crazy or or overly jealous. And of course, there’s immediately the
55. 19:17 aloplastic defenses that kick in. You made me do it. You rejected me. You abandoned me. You you you do the same. You communicate with other men, with other women. And you withheld sex when I wanted it. So you had it coming. You deserved it. But why? Why are you making
56. 19:33 such a big deal out of it? Was meaningless. Sex with nobody. I don’t even think about him anymore until you remind me. You’re so jealous and insecure. You suck. This is the endgame and the end point of conditional love. If conditional love is conditioned on
57. 19:53 performance and performance criteria are fluid and subjective, it would lead to adverse outcomes such as infidelity and such as triangulation. Inevitably, yes, inevitably, ineluctably, inexurably, these kind of relationships always end badly.