Borderline Lies, Narcissism Myths

When someone with a Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) acts out and cheats on her partner (secondary psychopathy self-state), she feels guilty and ashamed in the aftermath.

But she also dreads her mate’s reaction (separation insecurity). So, to ease her conscience, she voluntarily confesses but she also lies about what had actually happened.

Typically, she minimizes the transgression: “We just danced, or hugged, or kissed, talked, or drank, or had coffee together for old times’ sake”.

Or she transposes the event to another place or time, usually conflating it with more innocuous but similar occurrences.

She feels justified to lie because she casts it in terms of self-defense against abusive reactions to her misconduct (interpersonal hypersensitivity).

Gradually, she starts to believe some of her own prevarications and protests vehemently against any attempt to refute them.

She feels exonerated and vindicated, empowered, morally upright, and entitled to repeat her misbehavior and to lie about it, cornered as she is in a dead relationship by her abusive and rejecting partner (alloplastic defenses coupled with an external locus of control).

And since Borderlines read rejection and abandonment into every act of their mate or spouse, recurrent misdeeds and then lying is baked into any relationship with them.

Psychopaths lie. Narcissists mostly confabulate: concoct self-aggrandizing narratives to bridge dissociative (memory gaps) with plausible scenarios.

Antisocial Personality Disorder Alternative Model (p. 764)

"Deceitfulness (an aspect of Antagonism): Dishonesty and fraudulence; misrepresentation of self; embellishment or fabrication when relating events."

Narcissists dissociate (erase memories) a lot (are amnesiac) because their contact with the world and with others is via a fictitious construct: the False Self.

In an attempt to compensate for the yawning gaps in memory, narcissists and psychopaths confabulate: they invent plausible "plug ins" and scenarios of how things might, could, or should have plausibly occurred. To outsiders, these fictional stopgaps appear as lies. But the narcissist fervently believes in their reality: he may not actually remember what had happened - but surely it could not have happened any other way!

These tenuous concocted fillers are subject to frequent revision as the narcissist's inner world and external circumstances evolve. This is why narcissists often contradict themselves. Tomorrow's confabulation often negates yesterday's. The narcissist does not remember their previous tales because they are not invested with the emotions and cognitions that are integral parts of real memories.

People with severe dissociation (memory lapses and "lost time") are often misunderstood and perceived as liars.

Debunking some narcissism myths:

1. Unambiguous physical or sexual abuse rarely results in adult (secondary) narcissism. To be afflicted with NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), one needs to be pedestalized, idolized, pampered, instrumentalized, or parentified as a child and then abruptly and cruelly discarded. The adult narcissist spends a lifetime trying to recapture those lost moments of parental idealization.

2. Narcissists do have emotions, but they have access to and experience only negative affectivity: rage, envy, hatred and the like.

3. Narcissists have a truncated form of empathy ("cold empathy") which allows them to spot and leverage the vulnerabilities of their targets.

4. Narcissists dread abandonment ("separation anxiety") and are often dysphoric ("depressed"), especially when they fail to secure narcissistic supply.

5. Grandiosity is about being unique, not about being the best or the greatest or the most. So, the narcissist can brag about being the perfect loser, failure, or victim. This is especially true of covert narcissists.

6. Some narcissists are prosocial and communal: morally upright, altruistic, and charitable. They are ostentatious and grandiose about it all, though.

8. Narcissists cheat less often than psychopaths because they are prone to abandonment anxiety and are terrified of losing their partners. They are less faithful during the bargaining and devaluation phases of the shared fantasy.

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