[AzulOscuro]

I’ve been searching for years about abuse and all kids of it.
One of the reason for this post is to stress that human relations are sometimes too much complicate and of course when abuse takes the leads over respect and communication, this relationship is toxic and unbalance and pretty much close to end up bad.
What I notice is that we are prone to rush a psychological label to the abuser, we often tend to call him/her a narcissist.
Most of the time the abuse comes from people who are not very different to us but that have issues to fix, from their past childhood with relationship with his/her caretakers, soon experiences, educational roles, the environment they have been developed themselves.
It doesn’t mind they have a Narcissist Personality Disorder. Having a Personality Disorder and the subsequent bad prognosis is rare. And it has to do with a moment in which the individual, for some reason, being very little and just at the moment in which (s)he has to manage the first separations moments with the caretaker. Some kids (few, as I said before) use a maladaptive defence mechanism in which they split themselves from any other human being. Resulting in consider the others as objects (that explains the lack ability to develop empathy). Again, it’s a defence mechanism. Somehow, they are unable to see what’s good in others. They only consider that the caretaker had to separate from them (as it’s normal- to do some stuff they need to do). They are unable to see that this caretaker comes back to attend them. They can only see how bad they felt when being separate for a relative short period of time. That moment, they split their mind, something gets broke and left behind any positive and begin to develop the mask of selfishness. Their mask is real for them. It’s ingrain in their personality.
As you can notice, most of kids are able to consider the person in a whole, with flaws and also very good points.
That’s why develop a narcissist personality or any other personality disorder is not so easy.
These are particular cases. So, I would appreciate we all, especially here that we know for experience about mental health, avoid labels, especially psychological labels.

Why? Especially, for clarity, to avoid misunderstanding and because it’s easier to give a more helpful support since we can understand better the person we are referring to.

Hope you don’t take in this as a telling off.
It’s not avoidable to other people outside use badly terminology but we can avoid it here.

And if you disagree or have any criticism to my post, I’m all ears, ok 😀💖
That’s why we are here. 👍

[Yaowen]

You make a lot of good points, in my opinion.

Psychology, I think, is both an art and a science. As a science, it is one of the younger ones. In my lifetime, I have witnessed both evolutionary and revolutionary changes in it. Some things that were once considered settled issues have later come into doubt among professionals.

I think it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that a certain science is nearing the end of its explorations and that all that is left is to fill in some of the minor details. But the history of science seems to show, I think, that even the very oldest sciences can experience major evolutionary changes and even revolutionary paradigm shifts.

So sometimes when I science, or rather scientists think that they are nearing the end of the history of their science, it could be that it is still in the middle of its history or even near the beginning.
Is psychology near its final maturity as a science or is it still in its infancy?

In every age, I think, there are those who think: "Ok, this particular science is nearing the end of the road and it is a mature science now and all that is left is to iron out small difficulties. And then, perhaps, something happens and the professionals in that science will say: "wow, we missed something really big and we need to rethink things."

I remember a time when medical science tended to think that all germs as bad germs. The insight that there are "good germs" had not yet been attained. I remember when Freudianism was seen as kind of the last word in psychology and now Freudians tend to be in a minority. No disrespect to Freudians!

Sometimes a certain set of ideas seem final and then the ideas are cast into doubt by new discoveries. And sometimes then the idea comes back again stronger than before and people will say: "hmmm, looks like we were kind of wrong about being wrong."

I don't know where the "working concepts and theories" of current psychology will be in 10 years or 50 years or 1000 years. Perhaps a time will come when the insights of those concepts and theories will be preserved and incorporated into a much more accurate and helpful model. And I don't know if psychology in the future is in for some revolutionary changes that we cannot yet foresee. so I try to be both appreciative and critical.

Sometimes it is imagination or lack of it which weighs us down. There were questions awhile back when people rode horses of what would happen to the earth when there were too many horses. But then someone with imagination found a previously underappreciated use for something called petroleum. The petroleum was always there but some imaginative person had yet to find a use for it. Silicon was once underappreciated and Lithium.
At one time the burning or deflagration of petroleum was seen only in its beneficial aspects. There then seemed inevitably to follow criticism of petroleum products for their underappreciated negative affects.

There is often the idea that the earth is running short of natural resources, the idea behind scarcity. But the earth is nothing but a huge ball of natural resources. Sometimes what is scarce is imagination, a mind able to find an important use for something that was previously considered trivial.

There are critics of the DSM and its categories, critics who say that it oversimplifies what is more complex and rich and that it mostly facilitates coding in psychology for the purposes of dealing with insurance companies. To be honest, I have not really read books by those who maintain this so I am unqualified to debate it.

I don't know the future of the DSM or the definitions in that standard text. I am certainly open to criticism of it and would like to be intellectually humble enough to appreciate its uses and abuses. I certainly, even without expertise, can believe that it is capable of uses and abuses.

Since psychology as practiced often seeks overtly or covertly to tell people "how they should live," it can sometimes usurp the field of ethics, since ethics also deals with these questions.

I think there is a certain tendency in a science for its practitioners to be temped to use the concepts of that science to try to explain "everything." This is a totalitarian temptation which has sometimes been called "scientism".

So I think it is good in some ways that there are different sciences which prevent each of them from becoming totalitarian in outlook, reductionist in the bad sense.

I think there is also a place in all this for philosophy which regards the totality of all things as a whole and not just as an aggregate as the sciences do. Hopefully all these disciplines put checks and balances on the tendency towards totalitarianism of interpretation of each other.

I am probably wrong about a lot of things that I have written here. What do you all think?

[Travelinglady]

Labels can be dangerous. The DSM was designed to put names to an accepted number of thoughts and behaviors that can be delineated. Then one professional would understand the nature of the people someone else is dealing with. But once a label is given, it can basically take a life of its own--especially when lay people start getting involved.

Even within a label--say, bipolar, there are a lot of different kinds of behaviors--such as some people with bipolar are more manic than depressed or rapid-cyclers or not, mildly manic (even hypomanic) or even manic with psychotic thoughts, and so on.

What particularly irks me as a psychologist is the tendency for people to confuse schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder.

And it's common for someone who is studying abnormal psych to start labeling friends and relatives and even strangers.

By the way, I do say "I have bipolar disorder" instead of "I'm bipolar," at least most of the time. After all, people don't say "I am cancer" if they have cancer.

I don't know if I touched on anything you folks are concerned about, but I did want to make these statements.

Trav, Ph.D.