Why the Drama in Cluster B Personality Disorders

Constant state of artificial crisis, emotional dysregulation, switching, chaos, disruptive behaviors, identity diffusion/disturbance, mixed signals, inconstancy, indeterminacy, capriciousness, arbitrariness, and unpredictability

Dramatic-erratic cluster

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Dramatization

Drama enhances self-efficacy and is a form of external regulation

Drama is addictive (a form of risk-taking and also a challenge or mystery)

Drama is an element of grandiosity, helps to distort cognition

Drama is a narrative that resonates with our sense of childlike wonder and fosters dissociation (like a movie)

Drama imposes huge costs in terms of mental resources (depletes) and renders its recipients more malleable and amenable to manipulation (defenseless), it is Machiavellian.

Reenactment of early childhood conflicts

Approach-avoidance repetition compulsion and the dynamics of insecure attachment

Attempts to generate theories of mind and internal working models by probing, testing, and dismantling the world, others, and relationships - the way a child does with a toy

Intermittent reinforcement and trauma bonding

Monopolizing the presence and attention of others (ersatz object constancy)

Channeling and sublimating aggression, projecting punitive introjects and then projective identification

But not all drama is created equal. The specific content of the drama ties in with the self-concept and is a derivative of the psychodynamics and goals of the underlying disorder. It is a fantasy in a paracosm, except in the case of the psychopath.

Like in codependency, in some cases drama allows to control from the bottom through displays of feigned power asymmetry, helplessness, dependency, and neediness (it triggers the savior/rescuer complex and involves regressive infantilization of the drama-making individual)

Psychopath: control, manipulation (creates information asymmetry, disorientation, anxiety and thus induces dependency on the psychopath in others)

Borderline: drowning out internal drama, recruiting participants and sharing the burden (drama loves company), intensity to avoid intimacy

Histrionic: ostentatious display of hyperemotionality

Narcissist: attention-seeking, self-enhancement, substitute to narcissistic supply in protracted states of reduced narcissistic supply or collapse (hunting for morsels): distraction and self-supply (e.g. in paranoid drama)

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