Getting over those dark clouds

Personality disorders are found at the heart of abnormal psychology. This is a class of disorders characterized by their unyielding and persistent patterns of thoughts and actions. However, the mere possession of one personality trait found in a personality disorder does not connote that you have a personality disorder. While humans possess many traits in common with others, they are all unique. A personality disorder refers to a maladaptive pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviour, steadily displayed by a person over a long period of time, which creates mental distress and survival problems. Self-Injury? You're not the only one.

"…I sit where instructed, erect but listless. When you ask me how I feel, I say "OK." I react with invariable, almost robotic equanimity to the most intrusive queries on your part. I have no feelings when you ask me about my uneventful childhood, and my conventional parents, whom of course I love. I am alone to feel my sickness, the sickness that plague every creature, the sickness of life, the sickness of the world…."

Psychotherapists religiously believe that intimate human relationships are good for you. In fact, Freud once said that health requires success in work and in love. However, for some people, love may not just be unwelcome, but blatantly venomous. Cluster A introduces an odd and eccentric syndrome by the name of Schizoid Personality Disorder (SPD). Schizoids are characterized by their characteristic lack of interest in social relationships, a tendency towards a solitary lifestyle, secretiveness, and emotional coldness.

In early 1900s, Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, coined the word, "schizoid" to represent people with demonstrated reclusive, withdrawn behaviour. Schizoids live a passionate secret life often exposed as replete with vibrancy of fantasy whenever it becomes available for scrutiny. Such a person is removed from society to such a degree that he or she believes reality to be perilous. A Schizoid, therefore, is following a primeval human instinct to ensure his safety.

Narcissism is born of the prevalent solitary life of a schizoid. What he loves is inside him, and identified with to a great extent. The narcissism of the schizoid is an upshot of the fact that having what he loves within himself, he feels safe from the anxieties associated with connecting to substance within the real world.

A schizoid hides behind a cloak of narcissistic self-sufficiency, to safeguard against anxiety born of coping with people. The more that schizoids can rely on themselves, the less they have to rely on other people and make themselves vulnerable to probable dangers and anxieties related to reliance and, even worse, dependence. For a schizoid, a sense of superiority naturally goes with self-sufficiency. When you have no need for human interaction, people can be dispensed with. "If I am superior to others, if I am above others, then I do not need others. When I say that I am above others, it does not mean that I feel better than them, it means that I am at a distance from them, a safe distance. It is a feeling of being vertically displaced, rather than horizontally at a distance."

Loneliness is an inevitable consequence of timidity and elimination of interpersonal relationships. It divulges itself in the powerful ache for companionship and love which repetitively break through a schizoid's barriers. The promise of personal safety comes with a prize. A schizoid feels "Depersonalization," which is a loss of a sense of identity and individuality that comes with the fortress he builds around himself. The patient may feel depersonalization when anxieties seem overwhelming as a partition of the observing and participating egos.

For a schizoid, regression represents the flight backwards to the safety of the womb when the society becomes too stifling and traumatic. Regression comprises two different mechanisms: inward and backwards. Regression inward alludes to reliance on primitive types of fantasy and self-containment, while regression backwards is a distinctive phenomenon that signifies the most powerful form of schizoid cynical withdrawal in an attempt to find safety from reality.

…I am bored with our encounter when I'm not annoyed. How do you want me to describe my relationships? In whom do I confide? "Confide?" Who are my friends? I share my troubles with my sister. When did I last speak to her, you ask. More than two years ago, I think. the sickness that plague every creature, the sickness of life, the sickness of the world…..What was the driving force behind Marilyn Monroe's success? What prompted Napoleon's desire to dominate the world? Years of research brings us one of the most controversial diagnoses in contemporary psychology – Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It is a Cluster B- dramatic, emotional, and erratic disorder.

Borderlines follow a persistent pattern of volatile interpersonal relationships and self-image. Much like a child, a borderline lives in a world of Spiderman and Dr. Doom. Due to his failure to understand and accept human discrepancies, a borderline cannot merge good and bad attributes to form a steady, logical picture of a human being. At a given moment, society is either black or white. A borderline knows no happy medium; if a person is revered one day, they may be completely degraded and rejected the next. This is called "splitting."

Thus, when “Spiderman" fails in due course, a borderline is forced to streamline his one-dimensional grasp on human nature and banish either himself or his former hero to the underground dungeons. Splitting, a defence mechanism meant to defend against an onslaught of clashing emotions and the anxiety born of attempts to resolve them, ironically causes a borderline to lose the sense of own identity and of others more radically.

A borderline's attempt to avoid true or visualized rejection is almost hysterical. They are impulsive in at least two areas that are destructive (i.e., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). They experience chronic feelings of emptiness, inappropriate and passionate anger or incapacity to control anger. They suffer instability in mood including irritability or temporary angst.

Borderlines experience a state of dissociation, where they withdraw from reality. This state exists in forms of daydreaming, performing actions without being fully connected to their performance and other more disconnected actions. The state implicates the lack of connection, typically of one's identity, with the rest of the world.

"...Nothing gives me pleasure. Now I am happy but tomorrow I will grieve. I will self-medicate with alcohol. I will physically hurt myself. Then I will feel guilt. Shame. Resentment. I want to die, but I feel too guilty for hurting those I love. Stress! I hate you, don't leave me..."