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WHEN ALARM BELLS SHOULD RING:
Recognizing Personality Disorders
By
Susan Schwartz Senstad, M.A., M.F.T., M.F.A.
Warning signs that a
potential client/student may suffer from a Personality Disorder
People suffering from a Personality Disorder will show SOME of the
following:
Deficits leading to feelings of emptiness,
narcissism, toxic envy:
• When a person is deeply wounded at a very early stage, genuine
developmental deficits may occur; he may grow up lacking some of
the basic, essential psychological structures and capacities. These
deficits may leave him incapable of gaining genuine insight or authentic,
complex, nuanced consciousness.
• The feelings a person who has such deficits experiences
may include a deep sense of emptiness and a pervasive feeling of
shame. This emptiness may feel like a terrifying void into which
he fears he could disappear at any moment and be annihilated.
• Since the sense of self of someone with a Personality Disorder
is without a solid foundation, he may be chameleon-like –
as if he were one person in one context and another somewhere else.
(The concept of ‘the false self’ has its roots in this
kind of pathology.) He may misuse the language of VD to rationalize
this by claiming, “I’m channeling other parts.”
• Without the capacity to be in an Aware Ego process, he may
simply move from part to part. His moods may swing erratically from
anger, to depression, to irritability, to rage, to anxiety –
and without his doing anything to limit the negative impact those
swings have on those around him.
• He may be negligent of everyone’s needs but his own,
offering only those expressions of consideration that fit his purposes.
• He may feel a strong need to be the one in control. His
strategies for gaining and maintaining power may involve emotional
manipulation so subtle, even cunning, that it is hard to pin down
or address directly. (This subtlety contributes to making these
disorders difficult to spot.) And/or, he may resort to outright
emotional abuse, suicide attempts, threats and/or violence.
• As he feels empty, he may use other people as a ‘mirror.’
He may not look at someone else in order to see that other person.
Instead, he may seek a reflection of himself to confirm his own
existence and that he is being seen in a positive light. (This ‘mirroring’
tendency is central to the pathology called ‘narcissism.’)
He may consequently have developed ways to be exceedingly charming
and engaging – and seductive.
• His sense of emptiness may cause him to feel deep anxiety
whenever he isn’t the center of attention. He may feel that
whatever love someone else receives is love taken away from him.
• Thus, he may resent those who receive attention. Under circumstances
he finds threatening, he may attack the person who ‘steals’
attention from him as well as the person who looks away from him.
He may go to surprisingly unkind and destructive lengths to blacken
the reputation of those whom he sees as ‘rivals.’
• He may appear retiring and shy – a bit like a lost
soul. He may attract well-meaning helpers and rescuers. These people
may then be shocked when the person ‘splits’ them from
being all good to all bad and then directs a seething aggression
at them if, for example, they disagree with him regarding even a
seemingly insignificant detail. Under the surface of that apparent
helplessness there may boil an intense envy of those whom he perceives
as having more social ease than he feels he has and/or as holding
authority and power that he feels are rightly his.
‘Splitting’:
• He may be unable to see someone else as a whole person;
he may idealize someone for a while and then suddenly demonize her.
This tendency to treat someone as all good only to flip and treat
her as all bad is a defense mechanism called ‘splitting.’
(To say that someone uses ‘splitting’ as a defense mechanism
is another way of saying that he has no tolerance for his own feelings
of ambivalence.) For a facilitator, it can be very seductive to
hear from a potential client, “You’re the very best
of all the VD practitioners /teachers,” or, “No one
but you has ever really understood me,” …etc. Whenever
anyone inflates or devalues your worth unrealistically, however,
your alarm bells should ring. He may have a tendency toward splitting.
• He may apply this splitting to himself as well so that he
is unable to see himself as a ‘good enough’ mix of good
and bad. Consequently, in order not to feel wholly, shamefully wrong,
he idealizes himself. If you ask him to describe himself, he may
report only good traits and examples of how he is a victim. Remember
a good Jungian phrase here: the brighter the light the darker the
shadow.
• As this kind of self-idealization is another form of splitting,
his own self-image may also flip so that at other times he feels
overwhelmed by self-hatred. A subtle but important distinction to
note is that this self-devaluation is not the same thing as self-criticism:
feeling only bad is different from having enough awareness to admit
to yourself that, sometimes, you’re wrong.
• In some more extreme cases, this self-hatred may lead him
to harm himself and/or to make suicide gestures/attempts. I can
not state this emphatically enough: Always take talk of suicide
seriously, even if the person says that it is just a figure of speech.
Seriously consider referring the person to a qualified psychologist
or psychiatrist – whether you think the person is suffering
from a Personality Disorder or not.
Inability to admit to being wrong, often
using denial, incapacity for insight:
• He may be unable to admit when he is wrong. Instead, he
finds elaborate and often convincing explanations that place all
blame consistently outside him. He may assert his ‘rightness’
with such certainty and so intense an energy that naïve listeners
are convinced. He may rally groups of people to fight in his support.
• He may defend himself using denial; for example, when confronted
with a problem he simply claims that it doesn’t exist and,
then, may add, “And what’s wrong with her that she thinks
it does?”
• Not being able to admit to being wrong stems from an inability
to tolerate the anxiety produced by self-doubt. Instead, and in
a way which may easily be mistaken for strength, determination and
commitment to principles, he sees issues as black and white. He
may even act in the world as a daring champion of the causes he
considers his own. Unfortunately, this can bring him into positions
of leadership and even great power. (History, including our own
era, is strewn with the damage done by Personality Disordered political
leaders.)
• ‘Feelings create facts.’ Most of us respond
to an event with a feeling. A person with a Personality Disorder
may, instead, re-write his version of an event creating ‘facts’
to justify some feeling that he already has. He may seem to be lying
or delusional because no confrontation with the actual facts alters
his distorted version of them. This can make people around him feel
desperate since he vehemently calls their vision of reality into
question. He may accuse the people around him of being crazy –
and they may even begin to wonder if they are. (Adapted from Mason
& Kreger, pp. 53-54, and Lawson, p. 6.)
• He may have ‘situational competence.’ That is,
he may appear as Dr. Jekyll: charming and competent while his fears
of shame and abandonment are not provoked, for example in more distant
and public relationships. However, he behaves as Mr. Hyde: nasty
in his more intimate relationships or when he has the power, for
example, as someone’s boss or teacher. The world around him
may think he’s wonderful and blame his family or his colleagues/students
for their complaints about him.
• He may lack the capacity for insight into his behaviors
and into their impact on others. In fact, his psychological stability
may depend on his rigid avoidance of insight. Were he to have too
great an understanding, the entire construction of his self-protection
could collapse. Consequently, standard confronting techniques for
taking responsibility and developing consciousness, Voice Dialogue
included, can be not only ineffective but also dangerous for him.
Equally afraid of closeness and abandonment:
• He may have a deep fear of abandonment, real or imagined.
He may, for example, accuse you of rejecting him when all you have
done is move your attention away from him. But, he may also have
an equally intense fear of engulfment. Consequently, if you are
distant he may try to pull you close and once you come closer, he
may push you away, sometimes quite cruelly. This reaction may be
extremely confusing for a VD practitioner who presumes that sharing
a deep moment will advance the work.
• Another way of putting this is that he has issues with boundaries
so that he bounces between total enmeshment and total isolation.
Lacking a capacity for empathy:
• A lack of empathy is a characteristic deficit among people
suffering from a variety of forms of Personality Disorders. Since
other people aren’t quite real to someone with these disturbances,
he doesn’t have the ability to grasp or feel bad about the
pain he causes them. Yet, he may be uncannily sensitive and have
an amazing ability to read people’s vulnerabilities. This
sharpness may make him appear to be a really good candidate for
VD training. It is important, however, to realize that this sensitivity
is not the same as a capacity for empathy.
• Lack of empathy means he can’t feel genuine sorrow
on someone else’s behalf. He may appear to do so when the
pain another feels reminds him of and reawakens his own. His pain
then is real but, rather than being empathic, it is narcissistic
as it is only on his own behalf.
• For some people with a Personality Disorder, someone else’s
pain may actually make him feel superior and/or give him sadistic
pleasure. He may speculatively exploit his knowledge of other people’s
soft spots to his own advantage.
• Lack of empathy also means he is unable to feel happy on
behalf of another person. He may appear to do so when he feels that
he receives reflected glory from the circumstances creating that
person's happiness. His happiness is real but, as above with his
pain, it is narcissistic rather than empathic, being only on his
own behalf.
• For someone with a Personality Disorder, other people’s
happiness, achievements and successes may provoke an intense and
toxic envy. That is, he might not feel that having such positive
experiences himself is enough; he may also yearn for the others
to lose their happiness and be miserable. He wants to be happy instead
of them, not in addition to them.
• He may be exceptionally good at using emotional language
and finding precisely the ‘right’ – apparently
empathic – thing to say, while actually seeking to fulfill
other needs. In a couple’s conflict resolution setting, for
example, he may speak as if he felt bad about causing his partner
pain but without actually feeling regret. His aim will not be to
learn about himself so that he can grow and change in order to avoid
causing someone he cares about further pain, as a healthy person
might aim to do. Instead, in his terror of being abandoned, the
genuine anguish which he calls “regret” is more likely
to be an expression of his desperation to repair the bond in order
to avoid loss. In these cases, such ‘apologies’ often
lack the ring of truth. Facilitators may well feel bad about not
believing someone who claims to be weeping in regret. It is good
to question one’s own disbelief, but, at the same time, do
let an alarm bell sound if something rings false.
• Precisely these kinds of subtleties, in which responses
appear normal and appropriate and yet turn out not to be so, are
part of what makes people with Personality Disorders very confusing
to be close to, and to diagnose.
Lacking a conscience, feelings of paranoia:
• He may well lack an authentic sense of ethics. In other
words, he may avoid doing something wrong because he’s afraid
to get caught rather than from a sense of the rightness/wrongness
of his own behavior. Consequently, if he feels he can get away with
it, he may lie, and/or revise history (speculatively or unconsciously)
to suit his purposes. He may skirt the law or even commit criminal
acts. (This trait is central in people who were earlier called ‘psychopaths’.
That term has been replaced by ‘Antisocial Personality Disorder’
but does seem to be making a comeback, including among professionals.)
• He may often show a striking and generalized distrust of
other people. (This tendency is central to the pathology called
‘paranoia.’). This may cause him to be continually in
one conflict after another. These conflicts are further fueled by
his inability to admit to being wrong.
Unconsciously inviting extreme bonding
patterns, both positive and negative.
• This may well be the most important source of alarm bells
warning you that you are in the presence of disturbance: how much
projecting the person does and how hard it is not to be ‘contaminated’
by his projections about you. He may, for example, have such a hard
time bearing his own, unconscious feelings of aggression that he
pushes them out onto the surroundings. Those who come near him pick
that up, energetically. They themselves become either oddly angry
or unaccountably afraid – and they can easily mistake these
for their own feelings!
This dynamic is called ‘projective identification.’
If you’re not familiar with the concept, I suggest you learn
more about it. As one writer about Borderlines put it: “[These
people] evoke a sense of ‘walking on eggshells,’ as
though our margin of error is very narrow indeed.”(Gabbard
& Wilkenson, p.2).
***
It is important to remember that a tendency is not the same thing
as a disorder. Obviously, most of us will recognize one or another
of the above traits as tendencies we sometimes see in ourselves.
(In fact, if you don’t recognize anything here, consider the
possibility you’re in denial, which is itself a symptom!)
To a certain degree and at certain times we all use defense mechanisms
like splitting and denial, strategies left over from when we were
little. Some of us do so more often than others. Learning to distinguish
those who use such defense mechanism frequently – who can
benefit from VD work – from those who actually suffer from
a disorder – who can not benefit from VD work – requires
both study and experience.
The difference here is that these traits in a person with a Personality
Disorder are highly stable personality characteristics; they persist
and are extremely resistant to change.
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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
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