I've been taking care of so many other things that I never got around to announcing the release of this song, which has been out for almost three weeks already. This cover of Shania Twain's "From This Moment On" featuring the amazingly talented Laura Bretton and Matt Riese, is the second song that will be going on my upcoming EP of 1990s-era ballads.

I was hoping to have the EP out this past spring, but other priorities got in the way. As time permits, I will finish producing the third song for the EP and then decide if I am going to digitally distribute the EP with three songs, or keep the EP a work-in-progress and continue adding songs to it.

For more information, click on the link to the Music page.

Over the the past couple of years, I wrote a few articles about Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is characterized by the creation of a powerful, infallible ego which the narcissist brings into existence. They use this forced identity to act as a surrogate sense of security, allowing them to function in a world they're emotionally unequipped to handle.

In the same cluster of disorders as narcissism is borderline personality disorder. This disorder is behaviorally very similar to narcissism, but whereas narcissism is designed to mitigate shame and fear of judgment, BPD is built to mitigate fear of abandonment. Both disorders are distinct, yet both can very easily co-exist in the same person.

Dealing with someone afflicted by a comorbidity of these disorders is extremely challenging because their debilitating insecurity warps their perception of you, and there's nothing you can do about it. They live in a different reality where they have to keep protecting themselves from perceived threats. Their insecurity keeps getting triggered, resulting in emotional reactions that are unjustifiably dramatic and abnormal, yet seem perfectly logical in their own mind. Life for them is an uphill battle, and typically marked by loneliness and depression.

Insecurity does not require a personality disorder, but a Cluster B personality disorder does require insecurity. What exactly is insecurity? To define insecurity, it will help to first define security.

Security is a solid identity built on a foundation of self-validation. It is typically instilled in childhood through proper nurturing, forged over one's teenage and young adult years, and eventually solidified in adulthood. Once it's solidified, it is meant to be taken for granted, working in the background like a computer process. A self-validated person goes through life making friends, building a career, perhaps getting married and raising a family.

A person whose identity is underdeveloped and incomplete, most commonly as the result of childhood neglect, will grow up lacking the security needed to face adversity in the world. Instead of being able to take life's lumps the way a normal, emotionally healthy person would, their mind is preoccupied with protecting themselves from perceived harm, seeking self-worth through external validation, and trying to force a sense of a secure identity by publicly asserting a false strength of character.

Protecting Themselves from Perceived Harm:

Seeking External Validation:

Publicly Asserting a False Strength:

Even though Cluster B personality disorders are legitimate emotional disabilities, what can make people who possess them so intolerable (besides their lack of emotional regulation) is if they do not understand that their insecurity is causing them to mistrust and vilify harmless, innocent, benevolent people.

Some borderlines, especially those who have received a proper diagnosis and therapy, can be aware of how their disorder causes them to vilify and push away innocent people, but narcissists, most borderlines, and those with a comorbidity of both adopt the alternate reality where you are the bad person and they are an innocent victim of your malice. They believe they are defending themselves from your harm.

What's actually happening, however, is that the harm they're sensing and the pain they're feeling is not coming from you — it's coming entirely from within their own mind. They're dealing with insecurity caused by old emotional wounds, often from childhood. If you inadvertently trigger that insecurity, you open up those old wounds. They'll perceive the pain of those wounds as being a direct result of something you did or said, which is why their reaction is so sudden and surprisingly volatile. They'll instantly blame, hate, and split on you for hurting them.

When a person with a Cluster B personality disorder splits on you, it can leave your head spinning because their sudden flip-flop from friend to foe comes straight out of left field without provocation or warning. No matter how harmless and benevolent you are, when they split on you, they will suddenly hate you down to your very core and speak about you as if you were the worst person on earth. There is nothing you can do about it. There's no point in trying to defend yourself because there is no way you can unwarp their perception of you.

If you have any experience dealing with people afflicted with Cluster B personality disorders, you'll have a better chance of piecing together what happens during s split by understanding how their insecurity warps their perception. How you choose to handle a Cluster B splitting on you is up to you. If the person is debilitated by NPD, it is recommended that you permanently break off communication and get away because once a narcissist feels threatened by you and devalues you, they will forever hold you in contempt (and in their crosshairs.) There is nothing positive that can come from keeping yourself in the graces of a narcissist.

If the person is debilitated by BPD, at the very least you'll need to establish boundaries. If you don't have the time or patience to deal with a borderline's roller coaster rides of verbally abusive splits, you're not obligated to stick around. You're not less of a person for kicking a borderline out of your life. It is perfectly acceptable and healthy for you to set a permanent no-contact boundary with a borderline no differently than you would a narcissist. But ultimately you have to consider the kind of relationship you have with the borderline and their importance in your life, and set boundaries that are healthiest for your future peace of mind.

----- Addendum -----

My psychology-related articles tend to generate the most interest and feedback, so I'm going to follow up with some visuals to help explain the splitting process — why it happens, and why people who split don't know that they're splitting.

An emotionally secure person is built with the self-esteem to accept people as they are (imperfect, but generally good.) They're not afraid of other people negatively judging them or rejecting them, so they're not easily threatened. This allows them to go through life handling social interactions normally and getting along with most people, avoiding only the toxic ones. Their perception of the world is realistic and normal:

But an insecure person who lacks that self-esteem is going to be filled with self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy. These negative thoughts linger in their psyche, hidden like mines in a minefield. Picture each mine as an internally-generated, negative, emotionally painful feeling just waiting to be triggered. As long as you don't trigger any mines, which means as long as you walk on eggshells so that you don't inadvertently do or say anything that stirs up their negative thoughts, they'll perceive you as a good person.

But if you inadvertently trigger a mine, their other mines will start exploding in a massive chain reaction, flooding their mind with internally-generated negativity, causing intense, sudden emotional pain and distress.

Unfortunately, they won't understand the mechanics of what just happened. They'll only feel the emotionally painful effects of what happened, and they'll have only one explanation for it, which is that you hurt them. From their perspective, you did or said something so reprehensible to cause them to feel hurt, therefore you were never a true friend, but a horrible, self-absorbed, evil, malicious person in disguise all along! Their feelings for you instantly turn to hatred.

This is called splitting, where they're treating you as a friend one moment, then their minefield of negative emotions explodes, and suddenly they're assassinating your character as if you were the spawn of Satan.

Since an insecure person's minefield of negative emotions is so easily triggerable, it gets triggered often. And since they hold responsible the people who triggered their negative emotions, their perspective of the world becomes, "I keep getting mistreated by lots of people, but it's not my fault. It's their fault." This is how they perceive the world to be:

What's really happening, however, is that their insecurity is pumping self-deprecation into what they feel and self-generated hostility in to what they perceive. This perception of hostility causes them to distrust people and vet them by unrealistic standards, resulting in them feeling mistreated by so many people. They then hold those people in contempt, sabotaging and destroying what otherwise would have been normal friendships. This is what their insecurity actually does to their world:

A secure person doesn't have a minefield of triggers, so if a friend says something they misunderstand or don't agree with, that's as far as it goes — a benign misunderstanding or disagreement. It doesn't, however, affect the bond of the friendship. It doesn't change their overall perception of the friend. This is due to object constancy — the ability to take adversity in a relationship in stride and remain emotionally regulated — which is required for healthy friendships and relationships to endure.

But for an insecure person, their insecurity dictates their feelings and their feelings dictate their truth. If their truth says you did or said something to make them feel bad, then you're a bad person and that's all there is to it. You're either a friend or an enemy. Insecure people go through life thinking they're protecting themselves by eliminating toxic, malevolent enemies, but what they're actually doing is splitting on and pushing away ordinary, benevolent people.

A person who splits can revalue an enemy as a friend and a friend as an enemy, but due to lack of object constancy, there is no middle ground. Either you're a friend who doesn't trigger their minefield, or an enemy who does.

Insecure people, such as those with Cluster B personality disorders, have a history of splitting and ending friendships, and living in relative isolation. They tend to adopt a defensive and distrustful "either you're with me or against me" attitude toward society, also known as the concept of "ride or die."