PERSONALITY DISORDERS

4 Reasons Why You Can’t Ever Fully Recover From a Personality Disorder

Challenges faced in the treatment of personality difficulties

Trauma in early childhood can leave long-lasting damage that cannot be fixed through any kind of treatment. This is because childhood is a crucial period where our brains are still developing and trauma can interfere with this.

Personality disorders are essentially arrested development. People with these disorders can improve the severity of their symptoms through introspection and behaviour modification, but there is no cure.

Here are four reasons why full recovery is impossible:

1) Lack of Empathy

This varies in severity but is very common among people with personality disorders. In my case, not only do I lack empathy, but I also used to believe empathy was a weakness people would try to use against me. As a result, I was actually proud of my lack of empathy.

What treatment does is explain to someone like me why they should try to see things from the other person’s perspective and how to do that.

I had to learn that empathising is to my benefit because it stops me from taking things personally and getting too angry with people even if they did something wrong. In other words, empathy prevents feeling resentful and vengeful rumination. It stops you from being hypersensitive and reactive to others’ behaviour. It is therefore an advantage and not a weakness.

To learn how to empathise, I had to find experiences I had in common with people I was angry at. For example, I carried a lot of hatred towards people who feared abandonment because since I was a kid, I’ve always felt trapped and restrained, and therefore believed that people who were afraid to lose me were always trying to control me.

My fear is being controlled in any way. In the past, this was so extreme that I would misinterpret innocuous things, such as a joke or a simple question, as a sign my partners were trying to control me and react angrily. Eventually, they would start walking around eggshells to ensure they didn’t set me off by accident.

To empathise with someone who fears abandonment, I had to think of their fear the same as my fear of being controlled. Just like how I overreacted to minor jokes because they triggered me, people who fear abandonment overreact to any sign that their partners may abandon them because that’s their trigger.

So what triggers us may be different, but our reactions are the same — they are disproportional. And I can understand this reaction because I can think back to when I was triggered and how this led to feelings of panic and fear of losing control, which was quickly followed by intense anger to help me defend myself.

Understanding this, allowed me to stop feeling resentment and anger towards past partners who were struggling with abandonment anxiety, forgive them for their triggers and move on with my life.

In comparison, healthy people do not need to be explained why or how they should empathise with others. Their brain does it automatically. They feel the emotion, which automatically pushes them to see things from the other person’s perspective. However, no matter how much I work on perspective-taking and mentalising, I will always lack the “emotion” of empathy.

In other words, if you lack empathy, you can learn to do it cognitively, and this gets easier over time, but no treatment will allow you to actually feel it.

2) Lack of Positive Emotions

A lot of people with personality disorders lack positive emotions such as happiness. Again, the severity depends on just how underdeveloped the brain is, but personally, I don’t recall the last time I felt happy. I can feel excited and even somewhat cheerful if I accomplish something, but it’s not genuine happiness. It’s a short-lived version of it, and it’s not very intense either.

Through treatment, I experienced a considerable reduction in my negative emotions, such as anxiety, but none of this led me to experience more positive emotions. This is the same as lacking empathy — if the brain is underdeveloped and the capacity to feel an emotion is not there, no treatment can make you feel it.

For instance, I can get into a relationship, but I won’t be getting the same experience as healthy people. Yes, a relationship can be a positive experience for me because I can learn to communicate better, understand people better, express myself better and form a close bond. However, I’m still lacking in happiness, joy, empathy, love and anything else that gives people a lot of pleasure in these relationships.

It’s not a case of I can’t get attached to people — I can — but this attachment is underdeveloped. You can’t truly love someone without the ability to feel empathy for them or experiencing all the warm and fuzzy emotions when around them. So my version of love is lacking. It’s not the same full-fledged emotion healthy people feel, and this diminishes the positive experiences of being in a relationship.

3) Lack of Identity

This is also very common in personality disorders. I wasn’t always conscious of this but I have always had identity disturbance. For example, while I do believe empathy is an advantage, at the same time there is also a side of me that thinks it’s a weakness. While I can look forward to seeing someone I’m in a relationship with, at the same time I can genuinely wish they would leave me the hell alone. While I can miss someone, at the same time I can also feel relieved that they are gone. Often, I feel like two different people — not that I have two completely separate people inside me but rather two contradictory sides that are both me.

I also feel like I am not very authentic. I’ve had friendships where I was told “I feel like we are exactly the same person” and this is because most of the time I’m just mirroring other people. I’ve been in relationships where if I saw the other person consistently enough, I would literally take on their accents and speech patterns. This is not even on purpose — it’s subconscious and automatic.

In general, I think I formed my personality by looking around and thinking “Oh I like that trait so I will take it.” I often feel like I’m playing a character or I’m just good at recognising and turning into what the other person wants or needs me to be.

I also have gender dysphoria — I am female and happy to be one, yet I feel my mind and thought processes are masculine as opposed to feminine. I feel like I don’t have a lot of feminine traits and I have no desire for things most women seem to want like getting married or having kids. Yet, I do not wish to be a man either.

Even my sexuality is messed up because I feel like I’m straight as I have only ever liked men but then I don’t find men sexually attractive. I find women sexually attractive. Yet I prefer having sex with men. Then again, I’m possibly asexual because even if I can feel attraction, my sex drive is nonexistent. And I realize none of this really makes sense — I literally have no idea how to define my sexuality.

Since I was a teenager I was always looking for labels to define who I was, but in the end, I realized there isn’t much to define. Or ‘personality disorder’ is the best way to describe it. My personality is not fully formed, and it will never be.

4) Feelings of Emptiness

People with personality disorders are often highly narcissistic. They feel superior and have a desire to be unique. For example, they may consider their lack of empathy an advantage that makes them superior to others. Or they may mistake their hypersensitivity (which is the result of lacking in empathy) with having a superhuman amount of empathy that makes them an “empath” or something equally nonexistent but unique and therefore superior.

The treatment essentially consists of holding a mirror in front of these people, so they can see themselves for who they really are. The aim is to show them this reflection repeatedly so they can begin to see their ego-syntonic maladaptive behaviours as ego-dystonic, which creates the desire to change.

When their narcissism is relinquished, however, the feelings of low self-esteem hidden from the self will surface. Personally, I wasn’t really aware that I had low-self esteem in the past because I was narcissistic and believed I was superior to others. I confused this belief with confidence.

However, later on, I realized the desire to be superior only arises from low self-esteem. If someone has high self-esteem, they do not care about being superior because they simply don’t feel the need to compare themselves to others.

While relinquishing my narcissism helped me stay motivated to get better, it also caused me to realize just how much I’m lacking compared to others. It made me realize not only am I not superior to others, but actually, in many ways, I’m inferior — I do not experience the pleasures of life the same way, I struggle a lot to maintain relationships of any kind and my quality of life is greatly diminished. This essentially resulted in feelings of emptiness I had managed to suppress in the past as I wasn’t paying attention to just how much I was lacking.

Conclusion:

For people with personality disorders, recovery and healing always lead to something better than not working on oneself. Still, in most cases, the damage is so deep that they can never get to a stage where they are fully functioning and healthy people.

I have grown to accept myself regardless, and I feel genuinely confident now instead of having a superiority complex. I enjoy my relationships with other people more, I have much better control of my anger and I’m more optimistic and positive in general. So there are a lot of benefits to getting better. Maybe feeling empty is something that will dissipate over time, and identity is something that can be formed later down the line so I just need to keep working on myself. But, regardless of any improvement, I do not believe there is a cure. Recovery from a personality disorder essentially consists of learning skills and techniques to compensate for what is lacking.

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