[here today]

Another article

The Secret to Avoiding Arguments with Difficult People | Psychology Today

about how difficult people with personality disorders are. This one described personality disorders relatively objectively, I thought, but once again the focus is on advice to people who have to interact with these difficult people, and no understanding about how is to LIVE with one of these disorders.

I have sought information and insight about my (at first just suspected) personality disorder for years. As I said, I thought the author's description was pretty good.

But what is a person who has a personality disorder, who is aware that they have a personality disorder, to do?

Therapy, for me, just perpetuated the patterns and generated other dysfunctional ones.

I still f**k up, a lot, but I'm better able to observe the f**k-ups and not totally die in shame so much as years ago. It's still pretty painful, and I'm pretty lonely and clueless.

I consider the following statement from the article

The takeaway message: Difficult people are very good at what they do—ruffling the proverbial feathers of others.

extremely pejorative. Why, dear, if you perceive that I am ruffling your feathers, can't you find a way of giving me that information in a way I can understand since, as you point out, I probably am unaware that I'm doing that? If we lack empathy -- can't you expert psychologists find a way of telling us what we can't (yet) feel? And then maybe we can catch on. But, no. . .pejorative social judgments and social avoidance of us -- well, why be concerned about how that affects us? We don't count -- we have a personality disorder, so its not like we're not real people, right?

[Fuzzybear]

I haven’t read the article..

I just wanted to say I haven’t found you to be “lacking in empathy” on here

[here today]

Thanks, Fuzzy. Maybe I don't have that much trouble empathizing with people with personality disorders. Wonder why that might be? And why therapists (the ones I've seen, at least) DO seem to have a lot of trouble with it.

[Atypical_Disaster]

I got to the part about all of us lacking self-awareness and I fell out laughing.