Oct 11
5

Spotting Personality Disorders

Personality disorders are a prime cause of interpersonal conflicts.
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Here’s how to spot the telltale behaviors that typically indicate their presence.

To spot and identify a personality disorder:

Once you notice that there is something wrong with the way a person relates to others, ask yourself if the problematic behavior is primarily about the fact that the person:
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A. Is odd/out of touch; their actions are really weird (or paranoid).

B. Upsets/hurts others. They create conflict or unhappiness.

C. Is irrationally fearful or anxiously controlling. They’re uptight/nervous.
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If you choose A, the person may have a “Cluster A” personality disorder.

If you choose B, they may have a “Cluster B” personality disorder.

If you choose C, they may have a “Cluster C” personality disorder.

Next, click here and look over each disorder listed in the cluster that you chose.

If you identify them as having the minimum number of traits required, then you’ve probably solved your puzzle. (FYI: Some people do have just a couple of traits).

Are you a psychologist? No. Is this an official diagnosis or a perfect science? Of course not. No doubt, there will be some mistakes in your layperson’s venture into psychology.

But you’ve likely pinned it down fairly decently, and that can make your search for information about what to do much more effective.

Join us Friday — we’ll be discussing “narcissistic supply”.

You are reading Light’s Blog. The rest of Light’s House is here.

Healthy Relationship Quiz

Black and White Thinkers

OCPD at Work

Tags: a, b, c, checking for, cluster, diagnosing, identifying, knowing, mental disorder, noticing, personality disorder, recognizing, seeing, spotting

This entry was posted on October 5, 2011 at 3:22 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in aspd Borderline Personality Disorder Dealing With Toxic People Histrionic Personality Disorder Narcissism OCPD Personality Disorders Psychology Things Toxic People Do by Light 8 Comments

Kim says:

December 22, 2011 at 6:59 pm

We can all educate ourselves and learn in textbook format what all of these disorders mean, but nothing compares to actually experiencing it firsthand.

I married into a narcissistic family, but before I met them, I knew the textbook definition of a narcissist, but had NO idea what it truly meant.

If you ever meet people and find yourself second guessing who YOU are and experience overall feelings of confusion, I’d say something is probably amiss. That was my experience with my husbands narcissistic family.

Since I’ve learned more about narcissists and have been dealing with it firsthand, I can meet people and I’m more in tune to my intuition in terms of when something isn’t right. Go with your gut.

A neighbor of ours gave me this feeling. I always said, something isn’t right about her. I don’t trust her. A couple years later, she got upset with us over a trivial matter and then we were on the receiving end of her wrath which was a three year smear campaign which included legal drama and lies, deceit, and anything she could do to wreak havoc in our lives. The more we told her to go away, the more she initiated contact with us and sought out third party intervention as a means to retain contact with us. We had to resort to law enforcement involvement, legal means and no contact demands.

Whether she is narcissistic, histrionic or otherwise (emotionally unstable personality disorder also describes her well), something is definitely amiss.

Initially, her odd behaviors were trivial – like copying everything we did within a span of hours or a few days – things like imitating the way I dress, my holiday decorations (she’d take hers down and then replace them with an imitation of my own and no shame in doing it), we’d tell her we like silver cars, she’d go out and buy silver cars. We’d buy things for our home and she’d get upset like everything was a competition. Really weird behaviors that most people would just slough off.

Later she resorted to following us – we’d go to our front yard, she’d go to her front yard – we’d open or close our garage door, she’d do it within seconds, we’d go outside and she’d resort to making the same noise in an attempt to “condition” us in some way every time we used our yard – anything to let us know that “shes there” watching us. She then resorted to tampering with our property to which we had to install a surveillance camera, and she then resorted to filing complaints that we did so to view the interior of our home. Anything to play the role of the victim. And when the police or other authority figures are around, oh, she’s sweet as pie. But on the turn of a hat, even with authorities, she can’t control herself and will throw temper tantrums you’d expect to see from a child – foot stomping, fist clenching, inappropiate verbal outbursts, and she will go to any lengths to get her way. A complete nightmare.

Go with your gut instinct. If you think somethings amiss, it probably is. This person has cost us thousands of dollars defending ourselves against her false accusations against us, in which we had to threaten a harassment restraining order to get her to stop. At that point, she began involving third parties to do her bidding for her. Crazy people out there.

Light says:

January 22, 2012 at 4:57 pm
At that point, she began involving third parties to do her bidding for her.

Oh, we call those “Flying Monkeys” around here. The Wizard of Oz is so handy for analogies and metaphors about narcissism.

What a nightmare she was!

Gwen says:

June 10, 2012 at 10:12 pm

I’m not really afraid of Cluster C type people, in fact, I fit into that cluster myself. It’s the other clusters I’m afraid of! :(

Light says:

June 10, 2012 at 11:18 pm
Yes, Cluster B disorders are the most seriously problematic, in general. And cluster C typically involves a somewhat better outlook in terms of treatment efficacy.

June 10, 2012 at 10:16 pm

Hmm, I read about Schizoid again in Cluster A and I really think it’s unfair that schizoids are labeled negatively because they don’t like to engage in various pleasures and hedonistic things. That’s really quite an unfair thing. And also the aspect of introspection seems unfair to associate it as something negative or relating to a disorder. :( I don’t know, that’s just my opinion, but something about that seems almost hurtful, especially since introverts tend to be introspective — why does the APA associate being introspection with such disorders?

Light says:

June 10, 2012 at 11:19 pm
I think in general, they’re referring to an excessive amount, significantly outside the normal range, as opposed to reasonable differences in personality types.

Fastnet says:

September 15, 2012 at 2:04 am

This site has been such a revelation for me over the past week or so! At first I surmised that I was just an ‘ordinary’ scapegoat, but I can now see that there was likely an OCPD parent, a BPD sibling, an NPD “best friend” and, for a short time, an ASPD-work colleague who wreaked a decent amount of havoc after I allowed him into my social life.

While I’m currently enjoying something of a ‘honeymoon period’ following these revelations / discoveries, I’m (perhaps inevitably) becoming a little concerned about the road ahead. I am already finding myself spending a lot of my days recalibrating memories / past experiences and guess that I am concerned about how long / arduous / exacting a process this might end up being. I’ve withdrawn from things quite a bit in the last 10 years or so, though (now early 30′s), so at least get the sense there may not be as much to recover from as a result of these years!

These disorders and their names / symptoms etc. should really be far more well known than they are. Here’s to the day when they will all be far more ‘mainstream’ and children might even become aware of them while they are in the process of being compromised by them.

Thank you again.

Light says:

October 15, 2012 at 10:49 pm
These disorders and their names / symptoms etc. should really be far more well known than they are. Here’s to the day when they will all be far more ‘mainstream’ and children might even become aware of them while they are in the process of being compromised by them.

I hope somebody makes wallpaper out of this quote and pastes the planet with it. So true!