|
WHEN ALARM BELLS SHOULD RING:
Recognizing Personality Disorders
By
Susan Schwartz Senstad, M.A., M.F.T., M.F.A.
What is ‘normal’?
Those of us who are psychologically healthy, who fall within the
bounds of what is considered more or less ‘normal,’
may take a whole range of psychological capacities for granted.
We might not realize that someone whom life has damaged at the outset
might lack capabilities we tend to think of as simply what it means
to be human:
The capacity to have empathy for another person is normal, for
example, to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and resonate
to the feelings we imagine we would feel were we in their position.
We can feel happy on other people’s behalf – even when
we wish we had what they have. And we can feel sad for them –
even when we’re the ones who made them feel bad. We can love
somebody for who he is and not just for what he gives us. It’s
normal to have the ability to see another person as being both fallible
and good, to see that the same person who blunders and hurts us
is the one who shines and makes us feel good – he or she is
just simply a whole human being, just like us, but separate from
us. We normal people are able to see ourselves, too, as that mix
of better and worse, as someone who could be better but on the whole
is good enough. Consequently, we can tolerate feeling ambivalent:
“on the one hand I feel so-and-so but on the other hand…”
– even when those feelings are intense and polarized, what
Hal and Sidra Stone call ‘containing the tension of opposites.’
The ability to feel appropriate guilt is a sign of normality, too,
being able to admit when we have behaved in some way that isn’t
in accordance with our own ethics and standards or beliefs. Then,
when we do something we consider wrong, we can feel regret, not
just because we got caught but because we have let ourselves down
and perhaps hurt another human being.
Our sense of who we are is more or less stable; though we can change
and grow, though we can access many different facets of our personality,
we remain pretty much who we are whatever environment we find ourselves
in. Our moods are more or less stable, too, and when they shift
there is usually a reason and we usually can and do control how
intensely those moods impact on our surroundings.
The dual capacity to gain insight and then to apply that insight
in practice is the crowning hallmark of our normality. We can look
at and into ourselves with some degree of objectivity, recognize
our actions and patterns, analyze their history, re-evaluate the
function they have served, learn from what we discover, and then
actually make changes when they are called for.
This capacity to choose is at the core of the consciousness process.
It is a precious gift belonging to the ‘normal.’
Many of us who have all these capacities to a greater or lesser
extent think of them simply as human nature. We may feel safest
when we expect everybody to have them and treat everybody as if
they did. When they prove not to, we feel more vulnerable. When
we ‘normal’ people send out signals expecting a ‘normal’
echo in return but what comes back is different, the first thing
we’re likely to doubt (especially if we’re female!)
is ourselves: self-doubt, after all, is another capacity normal
people have. (Some of us, in fact, have far too much of it; that
may create problems but those are usually within the bounds of what
is normal.) Facilitators committed to their own process of consciousness
may suspect themselves of projecting, of being in a Bonding Pattern,
experiencing ‘countertransference,’ and may ask themselves,
“What about me, and this interaction, makes me doubt this
person?” Our self-doubt helps us take our share of the responsibility
for how things go.
After all, since most of our interactions are with other normal
people, the responses we get that we didn’t expect are in
fact most often the result of some miscommunication, some way in
which the exchange was unclear. Family Therapy pioneer Virginia
Satir once said it well: “When somebody tells me I look like
a pig, the first thing I have to do is get a mirror. If I do indeed
look like a pig, I’ve learned something about myself. If I
don’t resemble a pig, then I have to go back and ask the other
person what is it about me or our relationship that makes him or
her think I do resemble a pig.” Normal people can, and with
encouragement often do, do this piece of self-awareness work. We
can grasp, when we think about it or are confronted with it, that
we’re in a Bonding Pattern with its comprehensible shape and
result. Once we figure that out, we can reel in the assumptions
we’ve projected onto the other person and see our own complicity
in the way things went wrong. Sure, we may do that work under protest,
kicking and screaming, resisting and blaming, fearing and running,
etc. Ultimately, however, once we have the information necessary
to make different choices, we usually do wise up.
We can become aware. The (blessed) capacity to develop an Aware
Ego is normal. For people with that capacity, Voice Dialogue is
the best consciousness approach I know of!
__________________
Table of Contents
Aims of this article
What is ‘normal’?
What is ‘abnormal’
Warning signs that a potential client/student
may suffer from a Personality Disorder
What to do – but first, what NOT to
do
Working with a client/student whose parent
and/or partner suffers from a Personality Disorder
Doing Bonding Pattern work with a client/student
with a Personality Disordered parent and/or partner
About the author
Appendix 1: References and Useful Books
& Websites
Appendix 2: DSM IV – Personality
Disorders
_____________________
|
