TRAUMA IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

8 Signs You Might Have a Personality Disorder

Differentiating between disordered and adaptive personalities

There is a common misconception that personality disorders are extremely rare. It is true that people rarely get diagnosed with one, however, despite that, in the United Kingdom, 1 out of 20 people have a personality disorder. The chances are there are a lot of undiagnosed individuals out there and the prevalence is much higher than that.

Personality disorders go undetected most of the time. Most people never find out that they have a personality disorder until their late adult years. One major reason for this is that not everyone with a personality disorder is visibly dysfunctional. Some people can appear very functional on the surface. Most mental health professionals do not have experience with personality disorders as these are rarely diagnosed, so they often fail to identify people who are not as obvious at first glance.

Additionally, personality disorder is a controversial diagnosis. Most mental health professionals don’t want to diagnose people with one unless absolutely necessary, because they are worried about giving such a ‘bad’ label to someone.

Here are some common signs you can look for if you think you might have a personality disorder:

1. Insecure Attachment Style

Personality disorders are essentially attachment disorders. People with these disorders have major problems in interpersonal relationships, how they relate to people, their ability to communicate and how they interpret events. They present with fear of abandonment or fear of enmeshment, and more often than not, both.

You can take the quiz below to see whether you have an insecure attachment style and which one:

2. Chronic and Persistent Mood Lability

Have you had problems with emotional dysregulation from a young age?

While it’s normal to have experiences with anxiety and depression throughout life, it is not normal if these are chronic and experienced most of the time. This is especially true if you’ve had mental health problems since your teenage years, which is a strong indicator that they are rooted in your childhood. Most personality disorder symptoms emerge in early adolescence. For instance, if you have struggled with social anxiety for as long as you remember, this can be an indicator of something much deeper going on.

3. Black & White Thinking

Also known as all-or-nothing thinking. People with personality disorders see things in one extreme or the other. A few examples are;

• Idealisation and devaluation of people close to you based on their behaviours: Observe your thoughts and feelings towards a person. Do they suddenly change to extreme anger, distrust or hatred when they disappoint you? This is a black-and-white way of looking at things — because you can only see people as ‘all good’ or ‘all bad’, as soon as they do one bad thing that upsets you, you will start seeing them as all bad.
• High levels of perfectionism: This could be in the form of eating disorders, body dysmorphia, workaholism and excessive achievement orientation. In a black-and-white world, something can only be 100% perfect. If there is an imperfection and it’s 99% perfect, it will be considered bad as there is no grey area. This means people who have black-and-white thinking, can often develop high levels of perfectionism to try to cope with feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem. Although, since it’s impossible to be 100% perfect, regardless of their perfectionistic tendencies they are riddled with insecurities most of the time.

4. Having a diagnosis of other mental health disorders such as ADHD, eating disorders, and substance misuse disorders.

Mental health disorders are not separate entities as most people would like to believe. For instance, as mentioned before, people with personality disorders have splitting defences. This black-and-white thinking, however, is common to many mental health problems such as eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc. People rarely get a diagnosis of personality disorder on their own. They are often diagnosed with comorbid eating disorders, mood disorders, learning disabilities, substance misuse disorders and somatoform disorders.

5. External Locus of Control

Externalising means believing that your behaviour is caused by external forces beyond your control. These external forces can include other people’s behaviour, urges, circumstances and anything else you can attribute the blame to when things go wrong. In other words, if there is an argument, someone with a personality disorder is likely to find fault in the other person as opposed to accepting their contribution to the problem. If they feel anxious, they are likely to point out someone else’s behaviour as the cause of it. Because everything is externalised, people with personality disorders attempt to exert a high level of control over their environment as they believe the problem lies ‘outside’ of them.

6. Ego-syntonic Maladaptive Behaviours

Ego-syntonic behaviour refers to behaviour that is compatible with the ego and one’s conscious self-concept. People with personality disorders do not see a lot of their behaviours as maladaptive, even though these behaviours are perceived as such by people around them.

For instance, people with Antisocial Personality Disorder see themselves as strong, independent and self-sufficient. They also believe that empathy and being compassionate are weaknesses. When they use aggression to deal with problems, this conforms to and buttresses their self-image of being strong. In other words, their aggressive behaviour can be very ego-syntonic. This phenomenon is also known as identification with the aggressor.

Other maladaptive behaviours include passive aggression, avoidance, withdrawal, substance use, excessive daydreaming, sexual deviance and unnecessary and excessive risk-taking.

7. Pervasive and Inflexible

People with personality disorders have behaviours that are pervasive in all areas of life and are inflexible across contexts. In other words, they are highly resistant to change and their behaviour manifests in a number of environments such as intimate relationships, friendships, family and work.

8. Multiple Abusive Relationships

Have you ever wondered why there are some people who never get into an abusive relationship, yet many who end up in one after the other?

We attract people who are similar to us. Our intimate relationships will mimic what we had with our parents in our early childhood. The reason for this is because this was our first relationship and what we learnt to associate attachment and bonding with.

If we had healthy/secure parenting, we learn to expect that from other people and we become attracted to people who are also secure. If, on the other hand, we had an abusive and dysfunctional upbringing, we are attracted to people who give us similar experiences. It is very common for people with personality disorders to get involved with one another. (Co-dependency is also a personality disorder — Dependent Personality Disorder.)

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