Object Constancy: the concept people with personality disorders ignore…
…Or can’t grasp, or miss out on entirely, however you wanna put it. They lack a fundamental understanding of it.
Let’s take a deep dive into why personality disorders play out the way they do.
This is, by the way, another thing to pay attention to when differentiating autistic from narcissistic people. Autism, in itself, does NOT cause problems with object constancy; Narcissism does.
Now, careful here: autistic people might display complete disinterest in something for a while; But this is not what I’m talking about. Disinterest is very different from “splitting it all-bad” or “all-gone”. A disinterested person might zone out, but won’t display animosity against what they’re ignoring. So, it’s different. I’m talking about, mainly, a problem Narcissistic and Borderline people have (although there might be other disorders sharing this trait too). So, don’t wear the shoe if it isn’t yours.
Peek-a-boo! Oh, look, I wasn’t REALLY gone…
Babies and very young toddlers lack an understanding of object constancy. That’s why you can play peekaboo with them. If you hide yourself, even with your own hands, they won’t register in their minds that you’re hidden. What they register, instead, is that you’re gone (for good, forever). Hence, they get very (pleasantly) surprised when you “appear again”. It’s like magic to them. But that’s ok, because healthy babies and toddlers grow up, develop correctly, and learn to understand object constancy.
Another population that misunderstands object constancy is dogs: when you walk out the door to work, they don’t understand you’re temporarily out of their field of vision but still “existing” in flesh-and-bone in the here-and-now. They think you’ve disappeared, disintegrated, left the material world. That’s why they’re so happy to greet you when you get back home. They might learn eventually to await you in case you always get home at the exact same time… But they’re still thinking you disappear and appear again by magic. The understanding that “places and objects that escape my field of vision exist even though I can’t personally go there and sniff them”, is totally beyond them. In a way, it’s connected to a difficulty with abstraction.
This is where, for a Narcissist or Borderline person, the assumption that “if I’m not experiencing the thing RIGHT NOW, it has stopped existing FOREVER” comes from. So, you see, it might look like hyperfocus, but it’s different. Instead of “I temporarily don’t care/can’t care/don’t have the bandwidth to care about anything outside of what I’m experiencing now” (which is what someone on the autistic spectrum would feel; but they don’t think it’s “forever”. They understand they’re capable, if they want, to focus on something else later), the assumption a person with defective object constancy makes is “I do not and cannot conceive of the EXISTENCE of anything outside what I’m experiencing here and now. Forever and ever”.
Another “okay” thing this can be mistaken as, is mindfulness. That’s because both mindfulness and lack of object constancy are about living in the here-and-now. The difference is, with mindfulness, you’re doing it deliberately to combat an excess of focus in the past or future… But you don’t forget past and future are “a thing”. With object constancy struggles, you do it automatically because, well, nothing else exists for you and nothing else COULD POSSIBLY exist for you. It’s a problem. It’s disordered. It’s not mindfulness. Stop mistaking the two and assuming narcissistic or borderline people are enlightened. That’s how predatory cult leaders are born, we mistake them for enlightened people when they’re anything but that. And they roll with it because they like the praise.
Object constancy, accountability, and the surprising connection with Schrodinger’s cat.
It might not look like it (especially if you have a personality disorder yourself — diagnosed or not) but I’m taking a compassionate look at the problem. I know it can hurt to acknowledge certain unhealthy mindsets and behaviours, but we’re worse off WITHOUT acknowledging them.
When I speak of accountability, I mean it both ways: people who have personality disorders struggle with accepting accountability for what they did wrong, but they also struggle with holding other people accountable. (Their idols, for example, even if they eventually end up suffering in the hands of said idols). That’s because when you don’t understand object constancy, accountability in and of itself becomes a struggle.
Think of a baby who frowns during a game of peekaboo: “oh no, mammy is gone! This is an all-bad scenario! She can’t exist (out there in the world) and not exist (in my field of vision; within what my brain can compute) at the same time!”
Each decision to “take in” and consider somebody’s actions (whether somebody else’s or your own) starts to look like it carries a world of responsibility and a risk that is sky-high, because it means either judging them all-good or all-bad (and the switch from all-good to all-bad, or vice-versa, is understandably difficult). But why is that so? Well, there is an easy answer to that question: object constancy is the main “ingredient” you need in order to deepen the mental picture you have of anyone or anything.
In other words: when you struggle with object constancy, you have a tendency to either idolise or demonise, and there’s no in-between. It makes you only capable of meeting someone else (or even yourself! You can split yourself all-bad. That’s what it means, in some people’s warped perception, to take accountability) on a shallow level. For example: an innocent child will look at a comic book, point to the hero and say “all-good”, then point to the villain and say “all-bad”, not because they’re dumb [or insert insult here], but because they’re innocent. They still need to grow up and learn more about object constancy. As this child grows up (assuming they’re a healthy child), they will learn that villains can have compelling origin stories, and heroes can have a shameful past. These background stories have been there all along — it’s not like the old comic book kept in the drawer magically acquired more pages or anything! — but they had been overlooked before. The object (the hero’s identity or villain’s identity construed by the story) remains there; it remains constant, albeit more complex and interesting. What changed (or, in other words, became a little deeper) was the “final judgement”, from automatic and simplistic (oh, that’s easy, this guy is good and that guy is bad) to slower and deeper (hm, uh, let’s see… Er… there’s this compelling story here. I guess he still caused harm so I’ll call him a villain, but yeah, it’s not so easy anymore to judge one way or another).
Faced with this second-hand realisation (assuming they could be reading this article), people with personality disorders might think I’m overcomplicating things or being “a weakling” afraid of making final decisions. In truth, that’s a warped perception of what I am really doing when I account for complexity: it’s not that I’m being too hard on the heroes or too forgiving of the villains. It might not look like it, but I agree that a hero is a hero and a villain is a villain. Complexity isn’t stopping me from judging; instead, it’s allowing me to hold space for future developments. I’m making constant not the judgement, but the full depth and breadth of the person judged. For example, a villain’s redemption arc or a hero’s downfall can still happen somewhere down the line. You don’t know which is going to happen, if any, until you arrive at the place where it does happen.
Whether someone who constantly exists does something good or something bad, they’re still “there” in all their human complexity and depth, and this complexity and depth, functioning like a paradox, can allow for both a sad and a happy ending to coexist inside one’s mind, until either option collapses into actuality and “you open Schrodinger’s box” so to speak.
With a personality disorder, on the other hand, you have the illusion of “opening Schrodinger’s box” inside your mind before actually going there and performing the act. That’s why you split things, people, and events all-good or all-bad: you’re pretending to know the contents of a non-transparent box before you gain access to its inside! Of course you will oversimplify what it holds and judge that content more strictly and more permanently than it needs to be judged.
Or, to simplify all of this even more: someone with a personality disorder is capable of understanding that “what they know that they know” exists, and “what they know that they don’t know” exists too. (Just like a dog might think, “oh no! He’s gone!” and “oh yay! He’s back” repeatedly, until arriving at “oh yay, he’s back by magic (because I know that I don’t know why it keeps happening)”. But they forget to notice that there is a much wider world out there, encompassing all the things “they’re unaware that they don’t know”. (Just like a dog will never be like, “oh, yes, he’s coming back as usual, maybe it’s by magic but maybe there’s a mundane explanation. Ya know what? I can’t know how many variables I don’t know in this scenario because I can reason and therefore I understand my field of vision has a limit” — that’d be a dog acquiring a human brain, lol).
Possibilities we don’t have imagination FOR can still exist, because the existence of things does not depend on our perception or non-perception of said things.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to feel surprised or discover anything new ever, would we?
In THESE PEOPLE’s eyes, WE have TOO MUCH object constancy… And it gets misunderstood as “ignorance” or “obsession”. It’s not spiritual enough to have a human brain, apparently.
That’s where the fake mindfulness, the gaslighting, and the advice to “stop overthinking” come from.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been accused by a Narcissistic or Borderline person of obsessing with them! It’s a pretty common experience, and it’s infuriating because it opens doors for invalidation.
In fact, no, having a healthy amount of object constancy is NOT the same as obsessing over the event/person you “can’t delete from your mind”. Instead, truth is, we have a memory and the capacity for abstraction for a good reason: it allows us to recognise and pinpoint where things went wrong, so that in the future, with a similar situation, we can have a bigger repertoire of information to help us handle it better.
It’s not mindfulness to stop holding people accountable (whether it’s other people or ourselves) for wrongdoings, because holding people accountable does not serve the purpose of “burning the witch”. Instead, it serves the purpose of encouraging future improvement. But as I already said, and will repeat, this can only make sense to you if you understand object constancy.
Otherwise, you’ll keep thinking that to ascertain something is to “impose” it, and to re-evalue something is “to condemn” it. (All-good, all-bad split).
People with personality disorders create a dangerous environment when they get into spiritual paths that study “the nature of the mind” (such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism)… Precisely because they lack an understanding of object constancy. And without this basic understanding, you CAN and WILL mistake things like mindfulness, detachment, non-doing, etc, for this knee-jerk reaction you have of erasing past and future inside your mind and only giving importance to your immediate “field of vision”.
These Eastern wisdom practices weren’t borne out of some Narcissist or Borderline monk in the mountain’s need to exert control and dominance. Quite on the contrary: all indicates that they began as a practice to help people come back to their emotional centre and find peace when struggling with TOO MUCH thinking and reasoning. But thinking and reasoning are an object we need to make constant! They have a good side. They can stay “there” and keep existing, ain’t nothing wrong with them. The only problem is the excess, not the thing (“object”) itself.
This is not the same as, like someone shared on a Buddhist humour page I follow, immediately excelling at meditation because you don’t know how to think (that’s the case with Beavis and Butthead in the cartoon).
In fact, one could even say, mindfulness is also about being present in your mental here-and-now: “oh, look, I’m ruminating over this problem. My mind cares about solving it. Can I meditate for now and come back to it later? Great”. No judgement, no dismissal, no shame. And later, you DO come back to it if you need to — with a renewed sense of peace, but no self-gaslighting. That’s very different from, say, “ah yes, there it is. The thinking again. I’ll let it go again and again until it stops coming back. Why care what’s behind it? All thoughts are bad (all-bad) and there’s no level at which they’re good. Only emptiness is good (all-good)”.
Sure, nobody uses that wording, but I’m bringing a subconscious personality disordered problem to light here.
In fact, I don’t care if you’re being dismissive of your own logical reasoning with the sweetest words and the most wholesome feelings. A dismissal is a dismissal is a dismissal. It doesn’t matter that it’s dressed-up in sparkles and unicorns. Let’s not pretend it’s a-okay.
Personality disordered morality is black-or-white even when they try to introduce nuance to it…
…Because the underlying problem isn’t the lack of nuance. That’s a consequence. The cause is poor object constancy. Until you address poor object constancy, you can’t solve any of these above-the-surface symptoms.
We discussed constancy for people and activities. Well, it can also help us with morals.
When you have personality disorders, your tendency is, as we saw, to make constant the judgement and not the object of said judgement. This also happens to morality. And I’m writing this article not only as a helping guide for my followers, but as a register for myself because it came from a breakthrough I recently had: all the people in my life, so far, who gave me well-meaning but destructive advice, were struggling with object constancy. 100% of them. I won’t armchair-diagnose anyone (I’m just saying the problem is common with personality disorders, and that might help you identify it in your own life), but I can, and will, give a name to the problem: poor object constancy.
This symptom is commonly seen in radicalism — although, beware, not all people who support radical ideologies struggle with object constancy. Some are just spiteful, some are just following the crowd, etc. So… You might have interacted with or seen people who fervorously defend one ideal “above all else” or even “above all nuance”. They might not say, outright, it’s above all nuance… But they’ll signal it to you indirectly.
For example: someone might tell you “competition is evil”. They’ll go on to say they “always support the losing team” when watching sports, because they’re very proud of themselves, right? They think they’re being smart, they went like: Capitalism is not being helpful (a plausible statement) -> Capitalism is based on competition (a less plausible, but still ok statement) -> therefore, competition is all-bad (a totally wacky generalisation) -> therefore, there can’t be good competition in any context ever (there ya go. That’s the split).
Do you see what I mean? It’s not “just any” kind of radicalist. It’s the over-the-top try-hard kind that tends to display object constancy difficulties.
Ironically, this always always always results in some level of hypocrisy. Because they’re hypocrites on purpose? No, not really. They’re just very lost. They think they can “hack” their way through a makeshift moral compass, without addressing their underlying problem with object constancy. And that, as we already saw, is not possible.
With the above example, the hypocrisy lies in “I’m condemning this thing but I’m displaying it at the same time”. Can you see it? Re-read it. I’ll give you a minute.
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Do you want the answer?
Okay, here we go: “I always cheer for the losing team” is an impressive, out-of-the-curve kind of statement, isn’t it? The person might not realise it, but this came from a need to (yes!) compete against others. “Look at me, I’m the MOST anti-competition person. Nobody can do better than that, try it, I dare you”.
But was it on purpose? Again, I’ll repeat, no. Hypocrisy in these cases tends to be innocent. It happens naturally because the person is oversimplifying something complex. When you oversimplify the complex, you ignore the nuance which can sometimes make or break your statement. (Again, Schrodinger’s cat).
So, what would good object constancy look like in the same case?
Let’s start by the obvious place: the object. So, let’s say you’re concerned with the problems competition can cause in the world. That’s valid. But instead of starting to theorise by the moral judgement (competition is bad), forget that for a second. Let’s look at “competition” itself and simply say “competition is”.
Yes, that’s a full sentence. Competition is.
We’re acknowledging it exists, and we’re lending it constancy.
The natural tendency, from there, is to wonder why. If competition “is”, why is that? Can you find it in nature?
Why, of course! In fact YOU don’t need to find it, Darwin has already found it. Hasn’t he? That’s super helpful.
At first impression, it may look like a cruel, cold-hearted thing: only the fittest survive in nature and go on to reproduce. Oh, no! What about the poor unfit babies? Do they deserve to die? What a cruel world!
Understandable. But there’s another side to that, isn’t there? That side is “we exist here and now, because our ancestors existed there and then”. If survival of the fittest wasn’t a thing, who knows, maybe we would be fragile as a feather by now and die of the mildest headcold. So, although empathy for the weak is understandable and makes us “feel the feels”, too much of that can ultimately lead to our demise because it will just become increasingly more and more difficult to keep our offspring alive without multiple aids and artifices. And, one could argue, there comes a point when death becomes the compassionate option. The lesser of two evils. Ask any parent of a child with microcephaly.
You can see exceptions in the man-made world, too (although I’m not a fan of this nature vs man-made dichotomy, but here we go…), such as competition in the market. Whether the system of Capitalism we’re in is good or bad, that’s for you to decide, but one thing is for sure: competition is better than monopolies. The only good monopolies are those owned and heavily regulated by the State (because we can vote for change if needs be. I’m not advocating for Communism, put down the torches and pitchforks, lol). It’d be game over in the free market. You can’t boycott a monopoly.
Would you consider ANY of that AT ALL if you just made a blanket statement and said “competition is evil”?
Perhaps a more correct (and more compassionate! Wisdom and love are intertwined) way to word it is “competition can be evil”. It makes room for all the exceptions, not out of fear of commitment to one decision, but because we know for sure that there are instances where exceptions become overwhelmingly important.
You see… when you overlook the possibility that exceptions CAN be overwhelmingly important, in a way, you’re being self-centered. You’re thinking only of the contexts you (or more precisely, your ego) can imagine and account for, matter. Maybe your neighbor, or a stranger passing you by, is living one of these exceptional cases. And maybe, even when they tell you so and remove all doubt, you will still find a way to diminish their perspective.
Because you already decided what was in the box before they opened it in front of your eyes.
Food for thought.
