Flat Attachment, Dreading Intimacy, and Defiant Promiscuity
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2019-10-18

Everyone has an attachment style. But some people have "flat attachment": they are incapable of any kind of bonding or relatedness at all.

Flat attachers regard other people as utterly interchangeable, replaceable, and dispensable objects or functions.

When a relationship is over, people go through a period of "latency": mourning the defunct bond and processing the grief and withdrawal symptoms associated with a breakup.

Not so the flat attacher: he or she transition instantaneously, smoothly, abruptly, and seamlessly from one (in)significant other to the next "target" and fully substitutes a newly found beau, lover, mate, or "intimate" partner for the discarded one whose usefulness has expired for whatever reason.

Many narcissists and almost all psychopaths are flat attachers. In 1995 I coined the phrase "idealize, devalue, and discard". I should have rather said: "idealize, devalue, discard - and replace".

To some people, intimacy is like Kryptonite, both sought after and feared. The result is an intricate and crazymaking dance dubbed "approach-avoidance repetition compulsion". Another aspect of this ambivalence in what I call the "menu-scraps dichotomy". Those who truly seek intimacy want the entire menu of interpersonal togetherness: from intensive talking to romanticized sex. The intimacy-challenged make do and are fully satisfied with scraps: they feel threatened and overwhelmed by the totality of the intimacy menu. They get by on occasional snippets of talk, rare sex, and swathes of personal space and time apart.

The two types are utterly incompatible and make each other profoundly unhappy. Yet, oddly, they are inexorably attracted to each other. The menu types are parental fixers by nature and the scraps persons crave the unbridled and unconditional intimacy proffered by their antitheses - dread it as they do.

Mixed couple invariably end up in a mushroom cloud of agonizing mayhem and unmitigated catastrophe. They may drive each other to insanity and suicide and, at the very least, subject one another to excruciating pain as the menu tries to alter and modify the scraps and the scraps withdraws further and farther and resorts to desperate measures such as cheating or reckless behaviors in order to undo the bond and revert to pristine loneliness.

When rejected or abused, women overeat or abuse substances. But a minority of them self-medicate with men: they hookup with friends, former flames, or even strangers for some good time and sex. It helps them to restore their self-esteem, regulate or dull their negative emotions, buttress their femininity, and stabilize their labile sense of self-worth. Intimacy, however transient and limited, even if merely physical, does wonders to their assertiveness and resilience. In some cases, such conduct involves defiant, "in your face", rage infused cheating on the intimate partner.

But such misconduct has three other goals:

1. To hurt, cause excruciating pain, and grievously and often publicly offend and humiliate the rejecting or abusive counterparty;

2. To elicit a reaction - any reaction! - from the indifferent and dismissive spouse or mate (via triangulation); 

3. To win points in a neverending power play of oneupmanship and brinkmanship between the misbehaving woman and her husband, date, or boyfriend.

The women who default to this kind of choice are able to engage in emotionless and casual sex and are often histrionic (the female variant of psychopathy, according to the latest thinking in the field). They lack impulse control and suffer from emotional dysregulation (common among Borderlines and trauma victims with PTSD or extreme CPTSD).

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