[Onward2wards]

Something suddenly hit me today, something huge. There seemed to be an underlying thread I could feel, rather than express, which underlies every personality disorder I have ever read about. To the best of my understanding, for example:
The Avoidant fears rejection, ostracism and criticism...
The Histrionic fears being ignored...
The Borderline fears abandonment...
The Dependent fears being unable to take care of themselves...

So many socially related needs going unmet, all of these chronic expectations of different forms of social attack due to some hidden "badness" or incompetence. WHY do we all fear this one thing, only in different specific forms, triggered by specific different traumas in each personality? I can only think of one reason, as earth shattering to me as it is ...

Personality Disorders form because we have at the time of their full expression already rejected ourselves!

Think about it .. why does an Avoidant continue to expect ostracism and ridicule even when accepted? Why would a Borderline continue to expect abandonment even when their friends stick to them like glue? Why do we have such powerful triggers??? Something must be interfering with our capacity to challenge these terrifying negative expectations, no?

We ALL have, in essence, disorders of self-concept, likely involving deep inner conflicts and psychological splitting in different ways. We believe or at least suspect, not only that we will be, but that we deserve to be abandoned, ignored, attacked, ridiculed, cheated on, proven to be incompetent or otherwise socially rejected (invalidated and denied respectability) - the details differ depending on the originating traumas. Who wants to live as that sort of person? Yet live we must, so we do our best to soldier on with a chronically negative, distorted sense of who we are and what sort of things are likely to happen to that person we see in the mirror every morning.

I think we are all trying our best to explain why these original traumas happened to us, and coming up with a very dark and dismal image of ourselves as incapable, unlovable human beings, which leads in consequence to a terror that our individual deepest emotional needs are not going to be met! Not because we simply lack the ability, but we act as if we even lack the fundamental right. I suspect we believe not so much that there is something wrong with what we do, but something wrong with who we are. In that context, our natural drive to climb Maslow's hierarchy of needs (or similar motivational constructs) suddenly becomes both intensely desirable and yet feels impossible. Houston, we now have a very big problem. (Which I believe CAN ultimately be fixed, with the right approach and an understanding of the originating issues.)

Comments...?Have you suspected the same?

[Rapunzel]

Yes, that makes so much sense. Personality disorders are related to learned patterns originating from when we were first learning about ourselves and how we relate to others. Also, the mind keeps repeating and reenacting things until it can make sense of it, which keeps us in those patterns or schemas. It is possible to change, but not easy. What it takes is becoming aware of the patterns and why we do, think, and feel what we do so that we can understand it and catch ourselves doing the same things and develop new patterns that work out more successfully.

[summeryoga]

Oh Onward, you have so beautifully and clearly cut to the heart of the matter. This is precisely my deepest conflict right now! I want so much to re-create my self-concept, to get to a place of, 1) loving myself; 2) feeling worthy; 3) being free from the great PD fear you so eloquently describe above (which, as a histrionic, is the fear of not being seen). The conflict is, I want so much to achieve those things, but that damn nagging self-concept of being worthless haunts me. I'd like to think that you're right, that this conflict is solveable. I'm now finally at a place of understanding the originating cause/s of my PD, but I'm stuck at the belief that I do not have the right to be seen/heard/noticed, so the HPD traits persist.

But, effing A, I am SO more than willing to do whatever I need to do to inch closer to an honest belief in my own right and worthiness. So ... on I go.

[Fuzzybear]