Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
WATCH No "Wrong" Partner, Other Bad Relationship Advice youtube.com/watch?v=SuVAAiqvAw8
Summary vakninsummaries.com/when-stalkers-abusers-are-ideal-partners
Transcript vaknintranscripts.com/2026/02/18/when-stalkers-abusers-are-ideal-partners
People attract and are attracted to partners who satisfy deep emotional needs and restore their comfort zone. Even abusers and stalkers fulfill these two critical functions for their prey.
The need to be seen, noticed, and attended to is overwhelming even in healthy folks. Stalkers focus on their targets to the exclusion of all and everybody else. Being the aim of such inordinate attention is intoxicating. Some stalkers even take or leave trophies as signals of their omnipresence in their quarry's life and their micromanaged control.
Those who repeatedly pair up with stalkers actually dread loneliness because they maintain an impoverished inner environment: their introjects are sadistic and their internal objects are inaccessible because they are suffused with pain and other negative emotions
In other words: habitual intimate partners of abusers and stalkers cannot sustain an inner dialog with their depleted and wounded selves. The stalker's constant presence restores object constancy and permanence and fills the voided, howling, and all-consuming emptiness at his mate's missing core (first described by Kernberg).
According to Cavenar, Sullivan, and Maltbie ("A Clinical Note on Hysterical Psychosis", American Journal of Psychiatry, June 1979), some narcissistic and histrionic people - mostly women - react with a transient form of psychosis to unwanted sexual advances - but also when their fervent sexual interest is not reciprocated. In the footsteps of Martin (1971), the authors explicitly attribute such decompensation and acting out in some cases to "oral narcissistic" structures in the personality and immature object relations.
I would add to this list women who succeed to bed the men they desire, but are then abandoned or ignored emotionally, contrary to their wishes and fantasies.
The connection between brief, reactive psychotic episodes and symptomatic manifestations of dissociation, including amnesia and even Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), is well established (see the definitive work "Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond" edited by Dell and O'Neil, 2009, Routledge). So, when these women disintegrate under stress or trauma, the transition to dissociative psychosis is abrupt and shocking: it resembles switching from the core personality to an alter in DID. Patients describe it as "brain fog", though they may appear to be perfectly oriented and goal-focused.
On such occasions, behavior changes markedly, becomes disorganized, and then escalates to become aggressive, impulsive, dysempathic, reckless, promiscuous, and antisocial. Amnesia sets in to repress painful and acutely uncomfortable (ego dystonic) memories which, had they remained in conscious awareness, would have provoked extreme shame and guilt. Where amnesia is absent, the woman undergoes depersonalization and derealization: she feels that she were acting as an observer on "auto-pilot". Substance abuse - such as binge drinking or getting stoned - exacerbates all these mental health issues and defenses.
Find and Buy MOST of my BOOKS and eBOOKS in my Amazon Author Page: amazon.com/stores/Sam-Vaknin/author/B000APLOFK/allbooks
WATCH No "Wrong" Partner, Other Bad Relationship Advice youtube.com/watch?v=SuVAAiqvAw8
Summary vakninsummaries.com/when-stalkers-abusers-are-ideal-partners
Transcript vaknintranscripts.com/2026/02/18/when-stalkers-abusers-are-ideal-partners
People attract and are attracted to partners who satisfy deep emotional needs and restore their comfort zone. Even abusers and stalkers fulfill these two critical functions for their prey.
The need to be seen, noticed, and attended to is overwhelming even in healthy folks. Stalkers focus on their targets to the exclusion of all and everybody else. Being the aim of such inordinate attention is intoxicating. Some stalkers even take or leave trophies as signals of their omnipresence in their quarry's life and their micromanaged control.
Those who repeatedly pair up with stalkers actually dread loneliness because they maintain an impoverished inner environment: their introjects are sadistic and their internal objects are inaccessible because they are suffused with pain and other negative emotions
In other words: habitual intimate partners of abusers and stalkers cannot sustain an inner dialog with their depleted and wounded selves. The stalker's constant presence restores object constancy and permanence and fills the voided, howling, and all-consuming emptiness at his mate's missing core (first described by Kernberg).
According to Cavenar, Sullivan, and Maltbie ("A Clinical Note on Hysterical Psychosis", American Journal of Psychiatry, June 1979), some narcissistic and histrionic people - mostly women - react with a transient form of psychosis to unwanted sexual advances - but also when their fervent sexual interest is not reciprocated. In the footsteps of Martin (1971), the authors explicitly attribute such decompensation and acting out in some cases to "oral narcissistic" structures in the personality and immature object relations.
I would add to this list women who succeed to bed the men they desire, but are then abandoned or ignored emotionally, contrary to their wishes and fantasies.
The connection between brief, reactive psychotic episodes and symptomatic manifestations of dissociation, including amnesia and even Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), is well established (see the definitive work "Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond" edited by Dell and O'Neil, 2009, Routledge). So, when these women disintegrate under stress or trauma, the transition to dissociative psychosis is abrupt and shocking: it resembles switching from the core personality to an alter in DID. Patients describe it as "brain fog", though they may appear to be perfectly oriented and goal-focused.
On such occasions, behavior changes markedly, becomes disorganized, and then escalates to become aggressive, impulsive, dysempathic, reckless, promiscuous, and antisocial. Amnesia sets in to repress painful and acutely uncomfortable (ego dystonic) memories which, had they remained in conscious awareness, would have provoked extreme shame and guilt. Where amnesia is absent, the woman undergoes depersonalization and derealization: she feels that she were acting as an observer on "auto-pilot". Substance abuse - such as binge drinking or getting stoned - exacerbates all these mental health issues and defenses.
Find and Buy MOST of my BOOKS and eBOOKS in my Amazon Author Page: amazon.com/stores/Sam-Vaknin/author/B000APLOFK/allbooks
