Love Addiction: Craving Infatuation, Limerence
Love addiction is a complex and relatively new topic in psychopathology, characterized by an individual’s maladaptive and pervasive interest in romantic partners, often leading to a lack of control and negative consequences. Love addicts often fall in love with fantasies or complete strangers, and their addiction leads to extreme emotional dysregulation and unboundaried behavior. The role of fantasy in love addiction is significant, and it is closely related to codependency and other issues. Treatment for love addiction is still limited, but cognitive behavior therapy and support groups like Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous may help some individuals.
Myth of Fearless Psychopath
Psychopaths are often misunderstood due to the fact that they have different brain and physiological responses to fear and risk. They experience anxiety and fear, but their reactions are subdued or absent altogether. Psychopaths misinterpret internal and external cues and often mislabel and misattribute their emotions. They are impulsive, reckless, and often paranoid, but they perceive their behavior as cautious and informed. Psychopaths are often charming and witty, but they are dead inside and out, treating their bodies and lives as if they were decomposing trash.
Psychopath or Trauma Victim? Autistic or Schizoid? Borderline Anyone?
Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the difficulty in distinguishing between psychopathy, autism, schizoid personality, and PTSD or complex PTSD during intake interviews. All four conditions present similarly, with reduced affect display, reticent self-disclosure, and idiosyncratic use of language. However, there are some differential diagnostic signs, such as attitude to sex and intimacy, deceitfulness, and devaluation of others. It is crucial for clinicians to apply these differential diagnostic criteria to avoid misdiagnosis and potential harm to patients.
Men, We Miss You, Please Come Back! Signed: Your Women
Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the current state of men and how it has driven women to behave dysfunctionally. He highlights that men are underachievers, underemployed, and overrepresented in menial jobs, leading to resentment and withdrawal from relationships and commitment. This has forced women to take on both traditional male and female roles, leading to a “unigender” society with blurred gender roles and increased competition between men and women. Vaknin expresses concern for the future of intimacy and relationships, as the younger generation becomes more narcissistic and disconnected from one another.
Narcissist’s Outsourced Existence, Trauma-Bonded Fantasy with YOU
Professor Sam Vaknin discusses three solutions narcissists use to cope with their empty schizoid core: outsourced existence, substitutive existence, and displaced existence. Outsourced existence involves collecting bits of existence from the environment and experiencing it as their own. Substitutive existence involves internalizing whole people and assimilating their existence. Displaced existence involves living vicariously through others, experiencing existence by proxy. These solutions are often hampered by narcissistic traits such as devaluation, paranoia, passive aggression, and entitlement.
Hijacked by Fantasies in Cluster B (Intl. Conference on Psychiatry and Mental Health, May 2021)
Fantasy is a powerful psychological defense mechanism that can lead to mental health issues when it becomes malignant and all-pervasive. In small doses, fantasies can be healthy and help individuals cope with frustrating or intimidating environments. However, when fantasies become entrenched and hijack an individual’s emotions, cognitions, memories, and identity, they can impair reality testing and lead to dysfunction. In extreme cases, individuals with Cluster B personality disorders, such as narcissistic and borderline personality disorders, may experience a confusion between internal and external objects, leading to a state that is close to psychosis.
OK, Boomer: Want to Be Young Again?
Professor Sam Vaknin argues that today’s youth are facing a dystopian world and have given up on life, intimacy, and relationships. He claims that young people today engage almost exclusively in casual, drunk sex with strangers, lack basic skills for intimacy and relationships, and are incapable of forming long-term attachments. Vaknin blames older generations for creating a world without meaning or a future for the youth, leading them to reject life and reality. He believes that hope lies in much younger generations, and that older generations must carry on until those younger generations are old enough to take the torch and continue the march of humanity.
Anxious Psychopath, Borderline Mask
Professor Sam Vaknin discusses the concept of the narcissistic masochist, a type of personality disorder characterized by seeking rejection, deriving pleasure from self-pity, having a harsh superego, experiencing envy, feeling wronged, and having a fluctuating self-esteem. He also mentions that the narcissistic masochistic position is not about pleasure in pain, but rather the position of submission, which provides a sense of safety and well-being. Lastly, he clarifies the difference between neuroticism and neurosis, with the former being a personality trait and the latter being an obsolete term for a group of disorders.
PTSD: Emotional Numbing, Reduced Affect Display (25th Intl. Conference Neurology & Neurophysiology)
Emotional numbing, a core feature of PTSD, is a phenomenon where trauma survivors experience restrictions in their emotional experiences. Recent developments in understanding trauma have led to the reconceptualization of personality disorders as post-traumatic conditions. There are two types of PTSD: externalizing, where trauma is projected, and internalizing, where trauma destroys the ability to emote, leading to emotional numbing. Emotional numbing can be a temporary defense mechanism against overwhelming anxiety, but if it becomes a permanent state, it can lead to psychiatric disorders and dissociation.
Staring Into Abyss: Failed Healer’s Confession
Therapists, psychologists, counselors, and coaches can be traumatized by their work, especially when they encounter patients who are beyond help. These patients have minds that are tangled messes, and therapists can be drawn inexorably deeper into their primordial jungle, knowing that it could spell their own doom. When a therapist comes across a patient like this, they are liable to lose their mind, and it is a terrifying experience. Therapists can burn out, melt down, act out, decompensate, and dysregulate, and they can react very badly.