Masochism: Borderlines, Psychopaths Self-trash

Uploaded 4/15/2021, approx. 30 minute read

Summary

Professor Sam Vaknin discusses sexual masochism among people with borderline personality disorder and psychopathy. He explains that sexual masochism is a form of self-trashing and describes four types of sexual contexts that lead to trashing and sexual arousal. Borderlines and psychopaths engage in cheating, substance abuse, and choosing inappropriate mates as ways of self-trashing that cause sexual arousal. Self-trashing is compulsive and masochistic, while promiscuity is impulsive and empowering.

Second, cheating. Both borderlines and psychopaths are notorious for cheating. They cheat a lot.

Now, cheating in some cases, in some cases, is compulsive. So it’s a serial cheater who cannot control herself or himself. And they cheat.

But that is a totally different psychodynamic. It doesn’t have to do anything with self thrashing. It has to do with couple dynamics and so on. And I deal with these issues in other videos.

But there is a form of cheating that is intimately connected to sexual masochism. It’s connected to sexual masochism because the cheating takes place in shameful, disgraceful circumstances. The cheating takes place in a way that is socially frowned upon, socially unacceptable. The cheating negates and conflicts with social mores and values, or even with the values of the individual.

So borderlines and psychopaths engage in the kind of cheating that confirms or supports the view that they are bad, immoral objects.

So in the morning after, the typical borderline would feel shame and guilt. The psychopath would not feel ashamed, would not feel guilty, but the psychopath would feel seriously bad. Like I’m a bad person. I’m an immoral person. I’m an evil person. There would be no emotional resonance to these statements.

The psychopath is not saying I’m an evil person and I’m ashamed of it. I want to change. No. The psychopath actually takes pride in being an evil and mean and nasty and immoral person. But still, it’s an egodystonic statement. I’m evil, I’m mean, that’s an egodystonic statement in most cases.

So the cheating is a way to transition into dissonance. Cheating is a way to torture yourself, to denigrate yourself, to demean yourself. In other words, cheating is another form of self-trashing.

And so cheating leads to sexual arousal, the act of cheating, the very act of cheating, the forbidden fruit, breaking morality, negating the contract you have with your intimate partner for sexual exclusivity.

The very act is defiant. This very act is contumacious in your face. I’m going to do whatever I want to do. I’m a free person. I have a free will and no one will tell me what to do. It’s a defiant act.

So in this case, cheating is a part of sexual masochism. The cheating leads to feelings of shame and guilt in the borderline or to affirmation that the psychopath is a bad unworthy object and that in itself arouses sexually, creates sexual excitation in the borderline and the psychopath.

And this is the second type of behavior that caused sexual arousal by masochism.

The next type of behavior is substance abuse. Substance abuse, of course, is a form of self-trashing. It’s also a form of suicide, slow-mo suicide. If you consume substances long enough, you die. It’s very simple. You end up seriously incapacitated.

So substances, substance abuse, alcohol, drugs, pills, opioids, abuse of substances is a form of masochism. It’s a form of masochism, but it creates sexual arousal because in borderlines and in psychopaths, self-trashing, masochism causes sexual arousal.

So psychopaths and borderlines, when they consume substances, when they abuse substances, they are simultaneously sexually aroused. That’s why there is such an intimate, powerful, intense connection and correlation between substance abuse and promiscuous behavior in borderlines and psychopaths.

The chain is very simple. Self-trashing leads to sexual arousal. Abusing and consuming alcohol and drugs and pills is self-trashing. So it leads to sexual arousal and to sexual acting out. Sexual reckless acting out, self-endangering, risky.

So in both borderlines and psychopaths they reach maximum sexual excitation, maximum sexual arousal when they consume alcohol and drugs.

This is not the case for the vast majority of the population. In healthy people, the consumption of alcohol and drugs actually suppresses the sex drive in the long term. Ironically, alcohol, for example, is a suppressant. It’s not a stimulant. It’s a depressant.

But in borderlines and psychopaths, alcohol and drugs have the exact opposite effect because they’re intimately linked to psychological self-trashing.

Here I am, killing myself, damaging my body, destroying my mind, ruining my brain. How exciting, how sexually arousing, how wonderful. I want to have sex. Let me find anyone, eligible or not, appropriate or not. Let me just find anyone to despoil me, to abuse me, to demean me and humiliate me and sadistically torture me in sex. And then, I’m in heaven, my bliss is complete. That’s the sequence.

Now, very often, borderlines and psychopaths are in committed relationships and they may even have the best intentions in the world. They may even seriously vow and promise and pledge to themselves as well that they will never cheat or never find themselves in compromising situations with others.

But substance abuse is likely to drive them to do exactly this, egodystonic, dissonant cheating and self-trashing, sexual self-trashing brought on by substance abuse.

Now, since the majority of people with borderline personality disorder and majority of psychopaths abuse alcohol and drugs and pills and opioids on a regular basis, actually as a major clinical feature of these disorders, these people are very likely to cheat as a form of self-trashing and they are very likely to engage in very risky, reckless, sadistic, humiliating, demeaning, sadomasochistic sex to the point of physical risk practices such as choking, for example.

Okay, so this is the third pathway to self-trashing, sexually arousing self-trashing, masochistic sexual arousal.

And there’s a fourth way, choosing inappropriate mates.

Borderlines and psychopaths are notorious for this. Their mate selection is all awry, it’s skewed, they consistently choose the wrong mates.

But of course they choose the wrong mates because they’re wrong. Only the wrong mates are right for the borderline and the psychopath because wrong mates, inappropriate mates are likely to cause strife, conflict, pain, hurt, abandonment.

When you choose an inappropriate mate, you are in for a ride, a ride into agony.

In other words, choosing an inappropriate mate is a form of self-trashing. And because it is a form of self-trashing, initially when the psychopath and borderline choose the wrong mate, they are highly sexually aroused. They realize unconsciously that they are choosing someone who will end up hurting them, will end up harming them, will end up causing them enormous pain, or will end up negating their defiance, will end up clashing with them, if they’re psychopaths, will end up confronting with them.

In other words, if it’s a borderline, she realizes that the inappropriate intimate partner will cause her a lot of pain via rejection, abandonment and humiliation. If it’s a psychopath, the psychopath chooses an inappropriate mate because he or she realizes that sooner or later it’s going to degenerate into an all-out war, into a conflict.

And psychopaths thrive in conflict because conflict involves, inevitably, damages, self-inflicted damages. Conflict involves, in other words, self-trashing.

So to choose an inappropriate mate, an inappropriate intimate partner, is a surefire way, it’s a guaranteed way to hell. And hell is where borderline narcissists thrive. It is there that maximum torment is assured. It is there that the ultimate forms of self-trashing are available.

So let me repeat the four techniques, the four strategies of self-trashing that cause sexual arousal in secondary psychopaths known as borderlines, any primary psychopaths.

So these are the four ways of self-annihilation, self-eradication, self-elimination, self-trashing, self-humiliation in psychopaths and narcissists.

Number one, sexual despoiling, sexual torture, sexual torment, sexual sadism, sado/maso, being humiliated in sex, being forced to do disgusting things or revolting things, participating in the kind of sex where one is totally objectified, like, for example, gang rape or gang bang or group sex.

And that starts very early on. I’ve heard of instances of women aged 12 participating in gang bangs and so it’s not an adult thing.

Despoiling can, of course, be also psychological, but in the borderline in the psychopath, they immediately transition from psychological despoiling to sexual despoiling. Sex is the lingua franca. Sex is the ultimate vocabulary of the borderline and the psychopath. They use sex as a language. They communicate via various manifestations of sexuality.

So number one strategy leading to self-trashing, leading to sexual arousal is sexual sadism, despoiling and sado/maso.

Number two strategy, second strategy, cheating. Cheating causes the borderline to feel shame and guilt. Cheating causes the psychopath to feel like a bad, unworthy object. Both are dissonant. They create dissonances. So they are a form of self-trashing, but both borderlines and psychopaths find cheating irresistible. It’s very exciting and arousing, sexually.

Number three strategy, third strategy, substance abuse, abuse of alcohol and drugs. It’s the ultimate form of self-trashing because it leads to disability and death. Consequently, because it is a form of self-trashing, because it’s a masochistic act to drink to excess, to inject drugs, to swallow, to gorge down on pills, to consume opioids to the point of overdose. That’s the ultimate act in self-trashing, that’s almost suicidal.

So of course, it’s intimately linked in the mind of the borderline and the mind of the psychopath with sexual arousal. Every time the borderline drinks heavily, every time the psychopath pops a few pills, they become sexually aroused. It’s an atypical reaction actually.

It doesn’t happen with healthy people, but with borderlines and psychopaths, the consumption of alcohol, the abuse of drugs and other substances leads inexorably to sex because they are aroused by the thought that they are destroying themselves.

And the fourth strategy is much more long-term.

It is selecting inappropriate partners, inappropriate mates. People who are incompatible with the borderline and the narcissist often get selected as spouses or intimate partners.

So the borderline and psychopath have a very bizarre form of mate selection, but they do it on purpose because if you choose the wrong spouse or the wrong boyfriend or the wrong girlfriend, you’re bound to end up in conflict. If you’re a borderline, you’re bound, you’re sure to experience abandonment, humiliation and rejection. If you’re a psychopath, this is going to end badly in conflict, in war, in combat.

So by choosing an incompatible partner who cannot, by definition, constitutionally cater to the needs, sexual needs, emotional needs of the borderline and cannot cater to the needs of the psychopath, by choosing such a partner, inadequate, wrong, the borderline and the psychopath guarantees self-trashing. Self-trashing in the form of conflict in the case of the psychopath or self-trashing in the form of hurt and pain in the case of the borderline.

Of course, this will push them to sexual promiscuity and sexual acting out reckless and again self-destructive.

Now, all these personality disorders are founded on forms of supply, not narcissistic, but forms of supply.

So for example, in the case of borderline personality disorder, the borderline patient, her supply is to prevent abandonment. If she succeeds to keep her intimate partner, if she succeeds to preserve the relationship, to maintain object constancy, to keep his presence in her life in extreme cases, if she is also codependent, to merge and to fuse with the intimate partner, that is her supply.

The intimate partner’s presence, his availability and his obsequious submissive agreement to partake in the fantasies and drama of the borderline. And of course, the regulatory functions that he provides because he helps the borderline regulate her moods and emotions. All these are forms of supply to the borderline personality disordered person.

In the case of the narcissist, narcissistic supply or sadistic supply. In the case of the antisocial or the psychopath, money, sex, power. These are all forms of supply. And Cluster B personality disordered people are goal-oriented. The goal is to secure the supply.

Histrionic personality disordered people derive their supply from their heightened sexuality, seductiveness, flirtatiousness, from serial romantic and sexual encounters, from teasing, physical exercises, shape and state of their body, etc. This is their supply.

Narcissists derive their supply from garnering attention, both positive, adulation, admiration, and negative, being feared, notoriety. If they are sadistic, they also derive sadistic supply by humiliating, verbally abusing, sexually assaulting, etc., other people.

The borderline patient, woman or men, they derive their supply from the presence of other people. They suffer from separation anxiety and they are terrified of being abandoned. So the very presence of other people is a form of supply.

And finally, the antisocial personality disorder, the psychopath, derives supply from accumulating money, power, control, and having sometimes sadistic fun.

Borderlines, for instance, can be described as narcissists with an overwhelming fear of abandonment because they’re grandiose. They are careful not to abuse people. They do care deeply about not hurting other people, but they care about not hurting other people for selfish motivation, for selfish reasons. They want to avoid rejection and abandonment.

Borderlines depend on other people for emotional sustenance, for emotional regulation, for mood regulation, reduction, amelioration of lability. A drug addict is unlikely to pick up a fight with his pusher. And it’s the same with borderlines. Borderline is an addiction to the partner, addiction to an intimate partner.