Borderline’s Mating Strategies, Aggression Mismanaged
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2022-03-02

The Borderline hooks up with potential partners using two self-defeating mating strategies : she either offers the full gamut of sex immediately - or she reveals her mental illness by disclosing her personal history, decompensating, and acting out in a dysregulated and unboundaried manner.

The first strategy appeals to predators and players. They use the Borderline sexually, usually only once, and then move on leaving her hurt and dumbfounded, having succumbed to all their kinky and even lurid fantasies on a first encounter.

The second strategy attracts masochistic or savior, fixer, and rescuer types (watch my video on the Karpman drama triangle). But, exposed to her trenchant aggression, approach-avoidance and promiscuity, even they ultimately give up on her.
Healthy aggression is externalized and sublimated: directed outward at people, institutions, and causes in socially accepted ways.

When aggression is internalized, it induces mental illness such as boredom, anhedonia, dysphoria, depression, and even suicidal ideation or suicide.

Infants internalize aggression when frustrated: it feels unsafe to aggress against mommy. When they separate-individuate, they also learn to externalize aggression appropriately and self-efficaciously (regulate their anger).

A failure in separation-individuation engenders fixated grandiosity and, in some cases, narcissism or codependency.

In these mental health disorders, aggression is both externalized inappropriately and internalized self-destructively.

This ambivalent duality is at the source of approach-avoidant behaviors and decompensatory acting out.

Cluster B patients first need to practice externalizing aggression with the aid of a transitory object (such as a punching bag) in a holding or containing environment (like therapy).

Gradually, they can move on to sublimating aggression, for example by becoming social justice activists, moral crusaders, soldiers, cops, surgeons, entrepreneurs, or other similar professionals.

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