PERSONALITY DISORDERS

6 Signs You Have Identity Disturbance and What to Do About It

How identity diffusion manifests in personality disorders

Identity diffusion is distinct from an adolescent identity crisis and indicates severe character pathology (personality disorder).

It is present in borderline, narcissistic, schizoid, schizotypal and antisocial personality disorders, but not in obsessive-compulsive, histrionic and avoidant personality disorders (Akhtar, 1984). The reason for this is possibly because the latter are more developmentally mature.

Here are six ways that the syndrome of identity diffusion can manifest itself:

1) Contradictory Character Traits

People with identity diffusion have an impaired integrated self-concept and concept of significant others due to lacking empathy, which renders them unable to relate to others. As a result, they focus excessively on the immediate behaviour of other people in order to “read” them.

Here are some examples of these traits:

naive and suspicious
helpless and self-reliant
independent and conforming
greed and self-denial
arrogant and timid
tenderness towards others coexisting with extreme indifference
multiple vocational goals

Awareness of these contradictions causes one to experience themselves as a chronic misfit.

2) Temporal Discontinuity in the Self

Most people recognize that their identity, including their personality, interests, values, goals, and beliefs, changes over time. The hallmark of sound identity is when this change is marginal, and there is a connection to the future self.

People with identity diffusion experience dramatic changes in their identities over time. They do not have the same sense of connection to their future self. This means they are much less willing to delay gratification and consider future consequences.

With these people, time acquires a fragmented quality. In some disorders like Narcissistic Personality Disorder, dissociative amnesia is very common — they do not remember a lot of their memories.

3) Lack of Authenticity

People with identity diffusion can come across as inauthentic. They are like actors. They mirror other people. They also tend to form their personalities by looking around and mimicking the traits of others.

This can manifest as the following:

caricature-like display of feelings, emotions, beliefs and actions
acquiring gestures, phrases, ideologies and lifestyles from others (susceptibility to external influence)
as-if personality (behaving as if well adjusted but is only doing what is expected and unable to behave in a genuine or spontaneous manner)
in any given situation acting as someone else they know would act, not in a way that is genuinely their own
having a false (ideal) self and behaving as such rather than as themselves

4) Feelings of Emptiness

People with identity diffusion are prone to experiencing a sense of inner emptiness when alone. They may feel as if they are hollow, empty or just a shell. They also may feel a numbing of inner emotional experiences.

They may engage in the following to ward off feelings of emptiness:

engaging in compulsive socializing
drinking
drug use
impulsive sexual encounters
self-harm
provocative and controversial behaviours

Emptiness needs to be differentiated from loneliness. The latter involves the painful longing for a fantasized object or situation and therefore emotions, whereas the former does not include any longing or emotions. It is when people are experienced as “out of sight, out of mind”.

5) Gender Dysphoria

Gender identity manifests in healthy individuals in the following ways:

core gender identity (an awareness of belonging to one sex and not other)
gender role (one’s overt behaviour in relationship to other people with respect to their gender)
sexual partner orientation (one’s preferred sex of the love object)
gender identity concordant with biological sex
overall gender-appropriate demeanour including attire, gestures, roles, social priorities, sexual behaviour and interpersonal relationships

Weakness of gender identity, on the other hand, can manifest through the following:

display of overt behaviours more appropriate for the opposite sex
confusion about sexual orientation/lack of sexual identity
gender confusion and seeking sex-reassignment surgery

6) Inordinate Ethnic and Moral Relativism

This can manifest as the following:

Lack of ethnic component, which is normally gained through exposure to the family’s cultural mores
Contradictions in value systems and even the absence of any genuine inner value altogether.
Ideas and convictions that are another person’s view of good or bad, such as overenthusiastic adherence to a specific moral principle replaced by a contradictory one when friend group changes

What can you do about it?

While I suffer from identity diffusion, I have definitely improved during the past two years. Here is what can help:

Find out who you truly are

Getting an accurate diagnosis of a personality disorder and understanding what it means was the best thing that happened to me. Personally, when reading up on these disorders, I prefer psychoanalytic literature instead of anything written by psychologists.

Psychoanalysis explores the unconscious and how childhood experiences affect us powerfully. I believe this is extremely important in order to understand our current problems.

A lot of our insecurities, paranoias and fears that affect our daily lives and ruin our relationships are rooted in our early childhood experiences. Attachment theory helped me understand a lot about myself and my relational issues, for example.

Fix your black-and-white thinking

All-or-nothing thinking is the tendency to see things in one extreme or the other. It means people, situations and the self are perceived as either good or bad with nothing in between.

Having such a primitive way of looking at the world is the result of lacking empathy — when we can’t empathise with people properly, we can’t relate to the reasons behind their actions, and we are more likely to interpret their intentions as bad.

When I started the process of self-introspection and mentalisation, I began to understand people more and gradually became less and less black and white.

Black-and-white thinking means the self is fragmented — it’s like having two versions of you. In the past, something would set me off, I’d get angry and react, but once I calmed down, I would wonder what came onto me.

It would feel as if I was not myself whilst having that reaction because when you are triggered, you essentially switch to the ‘black’ side, which distorts your thinking. This shadow side that I would switch to was extremely angry, resentful and hostile. It would overreact to everything.

Slowly, through the process of becoming self-aware and analysing situations, I became more integrated, which resulted in less extreme switches.

Figure out all the “narratives” you have created about yourself and dissolve them

I created a narrative of who I was when I was a teenager. I saw myself as a “bad girl”. I identified strongly with my promiscuity, I worked as a stripper because it fit my image, and I refused to get into committed relationships.

If I dated anyone, I only agreed to be non-monogamous because, according to the narrative, I would only have open relationships as I wasn’t supposed to care for anyone enough to commit.

When I got to know myself, I realised this was total rubbish. I wasn’t “bad” because no one is 100% bad. All humans have a bad side and a good side.

My insistence on being non-monogamous and refusal to get into a relationship was due to past trauma. I saw relationships as something dangerous, and I saw love, caring for others and trusting anyone as a weakness.

Yet these were not “who I was” — they were not my identity. They were just trauma responses.

When I started figuring out all these narratives I had created, I noticed a reduction in certain behaviours such as compulsive promiscuity. In the past would sleep with people just to live up to the “bad girl” identity I had created, whereas now, while I’m happy to be promiscuous, I also realise that I actually have a low sex drive, so there is no need whatsoever for me to be “compulsively” promiscuous.

So people with identity diffusion will tend to have narratives like this that they live as, instead of doing what they want. In other words, they have an ideal image of themselves (a false self), and they try to present themselves to others as this image, not who they really are.

I still do this to a point but recognising all this allowed me to tone it down and be more authentic.

Change dysfunctional beliefs about the world

In the past, I believed badness meant strength. In other words, in order to be strong and resilient, I believed I must be a bad person who lacked empathy, didn’t care for anyone, didn’t have any prosocial emotions and did not adhere to morals.

I believed anger was a superpower and the more angry someone was, the stronger they were. I also believed in an eye for an eye and getting even if someone did me wrong.

When I started learning more about human nature, I realized these beliefs were wrong.

For example, lack of empathy actually renders someone hypersensitive and insecure because when we can’t empathise with people we are more likely to take their behaviours personally and attribute hostile intentions to them.

Lack of empathy also renders someone more fearful and anxious as it prevents them from being able to see others as human.

Anger is rooted in fear and the more angry someone is the more out of control they feel internally.

Learning how to mentalize made me more confident and got rid of my emotional dysregulation because it made me less black-and-white. It also reduced anger.

I stopped seeing reacting to anger as the strong thing to do and realized being too reactive and giving in to emotions is actually the weak thing to do.

I also stopped seeing getting even as a sign of strength as I realised getting offended easily and trying to punish people for every minor thing is being sensitive.

Stop identifying with a mental health disorder or any other “label”

This behaviour is well-known amongst people who have anorexia nervosa — they take pride in their disorder and often wonder whether they are sick enough to have it. So the label is like a qualification to them, which is why labels can actually be very dangerous for someone with identity disturbance.

It is common for people with identity diffusion to always look for labels to define themselves because they are confused about who they are. When I was diagnosed with the appropriate “label”, I realised I began to see this as my identity.

In a way, it was true because “personality disorder” can explain a lot about someone’s character, but then I realised I was starting to use the label as a guideline on how I should behave.

When I noticed this, I decided to stop letting the disorder define me and instead tried to see myself as defining the disorder.

I stopped wondering:

“Can I do this because I’m not sure if someone with this disorder would do it?”

“If I do this, does that mean I’m deviating from the disorder because it is unlikely that someone with this disorder will do it?”

and replaced that with:

“I’m doing this, and therefore it is someone with this disorder potentially would do because I have the disorder.”

So I stopped myself every time I had self-limiting thoughts like “I should do this/I shouldn’t do this”, and started asking, “What do I want to do?” instead.

Now, I prefer broader labels like “personality disorder” instead of a specific disorder as I find narrow labels restrictive.

References:

Akhtar S. (1984). The syndrome of identity diffusion. The American journal of psychiatry, 141(11), 1381–1385. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.141.11.1381

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