Greetings and salutations to you, one and all. Your search for a deeper understanding into the world of personality disorders and those who live with them has reached its climax. Unless you were actually here because you wanted this blog name, were upset, and wanted to make sure the space was not just being occupied by some cretin who wrote a single post in the early 2000s and left it largely unused. If so, yeah. You are kind of out of luck. If the prior is your intention, then you are in substantially better standing. I digress, though. Sleepwalking.
I frequently pose the suggestion to myself, "Perhaps none of this is real. Perhaps I am merely sleepwalking," but, each time, I find myself unable to wake up. That haunting state of the conscious mind being in one realm while the unconscious self being on another plane in another reality is a tantalizing possibility, though entirely improbable. There is a sensation of euphoria elegantly prepared with increasingly paralyzing anxiety and rage. To put it mildly, it can be complicated for even one such as I, with a fractured personality, to explain the state I am in most of the time. Even as these words flow down my nerves and out of my fingertips through the clicking and clacking of keys, I feel my soul detaching from my body.
My consciousness is loosely attached to my flesh by invisible strings, swaying to and fro like a kite with every movement, never keeping in sync with my actions. The only places it feels truly connected are my hands and my chest, where it has burrowed deep under my skin, irritating me to the core, tempting me to claw through my skin and rip it loose. We can be engaged in an hour-long conversation, and yet, to my dismay, I will not have been there for much of it. For those fleeting moments where I drift into this fray of words, I will react in ways you may not be expecting. My tone can shift suddenly from inappropriately giddy to venomous and cold at a moment's notice. It is also fair to expect that while part of my speech is carefully calculated to elicit certain reactions from you, other times, there is little filter over my words, making my half of the conversation hardly G-rated.
In clinical terms, a personality disorder is an enduring pattern of dysfunctional thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that cause significant levels of distress in a person's lifetime. This problematic deviancy can manifest in four (but no less than two) major areas of a person's life: cognition, affectivity, interpersonal functioning, and impulse control. These areas being so crucial for day-to-day function, such a disorder can make work, education, love, and friendships an uphill battle in the rain. What makes personality disorders also particularly tricky is in how the individual views their own psychological state.
To put it another way, disorders like Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder are considered ego-dystonic, or the person recognizes they have a problem and are looking for treatment for the problematic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Personality Disorders, on the other hand, are ego-syntonic meaning that the person may not recognize those faulty patterns in their lives as the problem, but rather may view those in their life who attempt to block or interfere with those patterns as the real problem. For instance, a person with Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder may see a need for their time-consuming lists and excessive planning, despite the fact that everyone else around them views these methods as hindrances to the work process rather than boons.
To go a step further, personality disorders can be thought of existing in three "clusters," with each one having common traits shared by the personality disorders within it. For instance, Cluster A, the odd and eccentric disorders, consists of Paranoid Personality Disorder, Schizoid Personality Disorder, and Schizotypal Personality Disorder. Likewise, Cluster C, the anxious and fearful disorders, consists of Avoidant Personality Disorder, Dependent Personality Disorder, and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. The focus of my venture here, though, shall be Cluster B, the dramatic and erratic disorders, as this is where my own disorders lie. Cluster B consists of Antisocial Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
By their names alone, you may be developing some ideas about what the disorders entail while others you may need a moment to do a Google search for. Either way, stop. Skimming through a list of criteria on the internet no more gives you an understanding about personality disorders than taking a "personality disorder test" will tell you which fictional "psychopath" you are (What the actual, ever-loving fuck, Buzzfeed?). Likewise, even for a group of disorders labelled as "dramatic and erratic," they are still portrayed in outlandish and caricature-like fashion by films and television, often played off as marks of the devil and signs of a dangerous person. Let me assure you, having a personality disorder is no more likely to make you the next Eileen Wuornos than having depression is going to make you crash a plane into the Alps.
Inversely, it is important to realize, personality disorders are not the attractive and quirky disorders that Tumblr makes them out to be. Before you give any credence to the argument that people with these disorders are "precious cinnamon buns who are too pure for this world and need to be protected at any cost," let me put the brakes on that crazy train and tell you, we are human, and humans are neither good nor bad, but rather, the decisions they make are right or wrong, and every human is a sum of right and wrong actions, never being all of one or the other.
Still though, there is a dichotomy of infantilizing certain disorders such as depression and anxiety while others like personality disorders are demonized as being "evil." In truth, this lumps disordered persons together with worst case scenarios or with misinformation, maligning an entire group before they have a chance to make their case. This is a common practice with Narcissistic Personality Disorder wherein the sufferers of this disorder are thought to be innately sadistic because of society's fixation with using the term, "narcissist," as a synonym for "abuser."
Like anyone else, perhaps even more so, we with personality disorders have the capacity to be proper assholes. This does not mean you should ever put up with it, should you find yourself on the receiving end of our hordes of mismanaged emotions or venomous words. What I propose is simply the offer of a chance. In my time of getting to know myself and meeting others like myself, I have come across few, if any, who grew up with a happy childhood, let alone a sense of direction in adolescence. Quite often, in my own life, I dreamed of the sweet release of death far more than I ever considered a career in adulthood. Give us direction, give us patience, and give understanding as we struggle to be human, but never sacrifice your own sanity to do so.
A passing glance at the criteria of any particular personality disorder would lead the reader to determine the person carrying this affliction was no one to associate with, and that is fair. Any form of relationship with a person of a disordered personality has the potential to be intense and tiresome, but let me add this. While it can be exhausting to be around these individuals, imagine what it must be like to live with a disorder which disguises your troublesome behaviors seem like necessities. A lack of impulse control can wreak havoc on one's financial stability, and a fear of abandonment can diminish one's pool of friends and cut romantic endeavors short. Behind the masks of confidence, adventurousness, and careful consideration lay the battered faces of doubt, fear, and anxiety.
Now, while it is important to cover these disorders substantively, it is equally important to cover them phonetically, because while people may have an idea of what personality disorders are, that idea is usually either incomplete or completely wrong. For starters, and most obviously, having a personality disorder does not mean you have multiple personalities. Rather, this is descriptive of what is known as Dissociative Identity Disorder. A personality disorder on the other hand refers to having one personality, which acts like your lens for life, but in this case, that lens is cracked.
Individual personality disorders, too, have misconceptions within their names such as Borderline Personality Disorder which sound almost as though the individual is somewhere between mentally well and mentally unwell, when in actuality, the name is in reference to the individual's tendency for splitting, or their perception that life is constant dichotomy of all good or all bad. Likewise, Antisocial Personality Disorder is not a marker of a person who fears crowds or shies away from social interaction. Instead, individuals with this disorder have a disregard for the norms and rules of society.
Other times, we view the words associated with personality disorders through our cultural vernaculars rather than by closely examining the disorders themselves. The most common example in psychology is depression where the public treats the subject with a lack of enthusiasm, saying such things as, "Oh, come on. Everyone feels depressed sometimes." This statement and others like it show the ignorance of the speaker and how they refuse to look past a word to examine the symptoms of the disorder at hand. Everyone feels depressed sometimes, but not everyone develops a depressive disorder.
The very elaboration I have made on each of these points is my way of telling you that while certain psychological disorders have made progress in clearing the fog of stigma from around them, personality disorders are still very much shrouded from clarity and civil discussion. Many of these, especially those in Cluster B, evoke strong and often times unwarranted negative emotions from those who are prepared to argue against those with these afflictions. While there is much to be dispelled around this hotly contested realm of psychopathology, the focus of this blog shall deal with the three disorders in my own life.
The professional diagnosis given to me has been one of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and traits (an important distinction) of Borderline Personality Disorder. My aim is to educate those who are curious about the disorders as well as to hopefully provide some advice to those with the disorders on how to cope with some of the nastier aspects of their afflictions. Hopefully, this shall be as much a learning experience for myself as it will be for you, as we explore the depths of my experience, both positive and negative. I will be your personal guide into the darker reaches of the human psyche, but know this: I am just as much a passenger on this bizarre cruise as you are.
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