A Problem of Character

Recently I wrote about the difference between personality type and personality disorders. Originally called “character disorders,” a personality disorder is “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment” (from the DSM-IV). The personality disorders we recognize today are listed here.

When most people think of the word “character,” I imagine they think first of a person’s moral fiber, his ethical nature. When clinicians talk about character disorders, they refer to problems with the aggregate qualities of an individual’s personality: who is he, when we sum him up? Over the years, my observation has been that character disorders are right behind addictions for the amount of human suffering they cause. Some people’s experiences are that they may even cause more suffering, since they are not as easily identified as other mental disorders and frequently go undiagnosed. We only know that someone causes us discomfort and pain, that being around them is hard, and that we have to watch what we say and do around them. They are not safe people, even if they are predictable over time.

I am convinced that many people’s childhood wounds are caused by having had a character disordered parent. Also known as neuroses, character disorders are marked by rigidity, an inability to yield when given the choice, and an almost complete blindness to the other person’s perspective, suffering, or emotions about an event, often caused by the character disordered person.

People with character disorders or neuroses (what I call “character disorder lite”)  act in ways that cause more problems than they solve–usually for other people more often than for themselves. Almost everything they do, in fact, is about them and results in their getting what they want and need, almost always at another person’s expense. Their blindness to other people’s concerns and needs is usually the result of a deeply held belief about the world, though not necessarily a conscious belief. Their belief in the world as they see it is so strong that any evidence to the contrary is discounted: this is the hallmark behavior of the personality disordered.

During the first decade of a character disorder’s bloom, the ill individual will have many opportunities to have her flaws pointed out to her, usually first by close friends and later by relatives. This pattern occurs mainly because a personality disorder develops out of a misbegotten childhood, in which a child’s parent or parents are themselves doing a disordered dance. The parents may play good cop-bad cop, with one parent the sick one and the other the rescuer or enabler, or each parent may have his or her own obvious disorder. In spite of their problems, though, unlike those with substance-abuse, psychotic, or even mood disorders, the personality disordered manage to keep their children in school, hold down jobs, and even to achieve socially-desirable ends such as education or advanced training, all while the character disorder ticks away like a timed bomb.

Usually, close friends or romantic partners are the first to realize that the character disordered are nutty, mainly due to the disordered person’s inability to yield, compromise, or otherwise see things the other person’s way. A romantic partner who needs a nutty spouse because of having had a nutty parent can serve as a good foil for the character disordered person: the relationship just feels right.  There will be a rush of romance, a deep spiritual connection, something bigger than life and more meaningful; the two become enmeshed and appear to others like a two-headed beast. Where one goes, the other follows; everything is romance and adventure except that the two have undertaken a quest of character without actually having any personhood at all.

Within 2-5 years of entering a relationship with a character impaired person, you know it. You know something is wrong, because the first year’s excuses and apologies have worn off  and the rigidity of your partner, friend, colleague, neighbor or loved one is remarkable. They do all the taking and very little giving. The giving they do is for appearances sake and involves no real sacrifice, for there is always something better to be gotten as the result of any “sacrifice” they do make. They are like vampires, and I’ve thought for a long time that the reason why the vampire is an enduring mythical creature is that our world is full of vampires. They suck the life out of others while giving nothing lively themselves.

Naturally, being the host comes to be a problem for others. The host either falls ill and becomes a vampire him- or herself, or struggles for freedom. Interpersonal conflicts are inevitable whenever the disordered come into prolonged contact with healthy people. They want to play a healthy person but they never can quite pull it off, for there are no substitutes or fakeries for realness.

The inability of the character disordered to yield sacrificially, even when appealed to in the most heartfelt ways, is a hallmark of this personality. They may be aware of the problems experienced by those around them, but they cannot make a connection between these problems and their own behavior. The problems the other person experiences are not their fault; the fault is always with the other person. This is true even when the other person is a person of reputation, experience, or quality to whom the disordered formerly turned for advice or help. Clinicians have written reams about how notoriously difficult it is to treat the personality disordered. They, of all those with mental disorders, are the most likely to get just “well” enough to function again and then to terminate therapy or any healthy relationship they have. They may return a few times a year for consultations, but you will never see a personality disordered person remain in therapy consistently longer than one year. Like addicts, they cannot maintain healthy interpersonal relationships as judged by everyone in the relationship for more than a year at a time. They can fake anything for about a year, or even long enough to get a degree or get the job or land the promotion: but a fiasco will occur and the result will be the loss of trust, relationship, and love.

Friends, partners, spouses, and eventually family members will all come to see the character disordered as difficult, rigid, and someone who cannot be appealed to. They will struggle with the emotional vampire and try to get them to change. There will not be change, for the hallmark of a personality disorder, according to the DSM-IV, is rigidity and persistence of personality traits. They just don’t see that they are the cause of the problem. When negative consequences to their rigid choices and decisions are experienced, they still are not to blame. They march on to the tune of their individual score and make more bad decisions based on an erroneous world view that can only create more negative outcomes.

And much of the problem is about outcomes. The character disordered, lacking clarity, the humility to accept wise advise based on the experiences of others, and being highly defended against changing their own unconsciously-held but deep beliefs about the world, inevitably experience poor outcomes. They buy a house, a car, a dog, marry a person, undertake a career, take a job, adopt a child, invest in a mutual fund, or make some other major decision that others who know them best advise against, have unhappy outcomes as the result of their own choices, have emotional reactions against others for their bad advice, experience all sorts of problems with maintaining what they bought, living in it, driving it, working there, raising the child, caring for the dog, etc. so later sell it, regret it, quit it, give it away, or get rid of it, and all the while never realize or recall that everyone told them so. They went to people who didn’t know them very well for advice and got whatever seal of approval they wanted, let what they did affect everyone who loved them (but didn’t care), and were not to blame for the outcome. There is never a character-changing realization of cause and effect, of sowing and reaping, or of win-win interpersonal relationships, because the true unconscious goal of the character disordered is eternal unyieldingness, of going their own way.

God-like, they cannot change.

Personality vs. Personality Disorders

Last week I wrote about the difference between personality or temperament preferences according to one’s type and moral choices. There’s no personality preference that excuses a person from moral, sane behavior. While working on this series, I was reminded of a family therapy group I co-led with a colleague some years ago. One of the indispensable tools in our tool box was the MBTI, which we used to help couples understand why they often didn’t see eye-to-eye, and what they could do to gain insight and change the way they related to one another.

An interesting byproduct of our work on personality types was a question raised by one of the group’s participants, Ned: what’s the difference between a personality type and a personality disorder? How do I know which is which when I’m dealing with problematic interpersonal relationships?

ned’s story

Ned was a single dad who attended the group because he was trying to heal a broken relationships with his son. After taking the MBTI and learning about personality preferences, he expressed concerns that his own preferences for introverted, intuitive thinking ran so far counter to his son’s extraverted, sensing personality that maybe he had alienated his son needlessly. Perhaps, he suggested, his son took after his ex-wife, the young man’s mother. They hadn’t gotten along very well, either. Were the problems and the falling out they’d had Ned’s fault, after all?

We found that as people learned about type and how it can affect one’s marriage and especially one’s child-rearing experiences, they often became concerned about whether they’d done their children a disservice by not fully accepting or understanding their personality preferences. Decent parents are always concerned about screwing their kids up. Unfortunately, screwed up parents are also concerned about screwing their kids up; they just can’t or won’t do what it takes to produce a healthy child, which primarily involves becoming a healthy parent first. Our work in the group was to try to separate one sort of parent from another, give the able parents the tools they needed, and get the screwed up folks into individual therapy.

I couldn’t answer Ned’s question about the estrangement with his son without knowing more details of the circumstances. Ned came in for several sessions of individual counseling so that we could try to sort things out. Ned was the adult child of an alcoholic whose early childhood was spent in a tense household occupied by an intelligent alcoholic father and dependent mother. After his parents divorced, he’d had to grow up quickly, becoming the “little man” around the house and juggling life between two households, as children of divorce must do. When he grew up, he fell in love with and married another adult child of an alcoholic, Allison, whose childhood had been chaotic and full of abuse and abandonment.

Ned and Allison believed that their love would pull them through any difficulty, and their love worked for them until Allison’s first pregnancy, which ended in a stillbirth. Ned recalled that she had never seemed to recover from the loss of their first child, and gradually developed a wine habit over the next few years. By the time their second child, Gabe, was born, Allison was drinking a bottle of wine every night. One evening while Ned worked late, Allison had passed out on the couch and Gabe had wandered out into the neighborhood. A concerned neighbor had taken the child home and notified Ned.

Ned had given Allison an ultimatum: either she got sober, or he would leave with Gabe. Allison agreed to stop drinking, and they attended AA and Al-Anon, where they learned about the addictive process, recovery, and mental and moral health. Allison had a year’s sobriety under her belt by the time Gabe was four years old.

Over time, however, Ned realized that sober Allison wasn’t much improvement over drunk Allison. She was intensely self-centered, had mood swings, and was also clingy and demanding of his time. She called Ned’s office several times a day “just to talk,” and regularly called him home for one emergency or another. She expressed many fears, including fear of strangers, fear of intruders, and suspicions about friends and family members. She was hyper-vigilant, observing and commenting on everything. Though always busy and occupied with a great many tasks that involved Gabe spending a substantial part of his time with her strapped into a car seat, stroller, or shopping cart, she was deeply lonely. She had no close friends and had alienated the few recovered family members they had. She was obsessive, driven, and tightly wound. Ned began to feel he was being choked.

In an effort to help his wife, Ned suggested she try yoga, which might calm her down, give her something to do, and expose her to other women who might befriend her. Allison loved yoga and began to practice religiously. “Emphasize ‘religiously,’” Ned had smiled wryly. Allison seemed to need an obsession to keep her from being in the present with Ned and Gabe. Though the principles taught in yoga included being present, attending to one’s breathing, and learning to be peaceful, Allison merely talked about her intentions to be present, be peaceful, and be available to others, too. No one who knew her could say that she had improved and could actually manifest her intentions, though Allison sang her own praises to heaven.

There wasn’t a single problem that led to Ned and Allison’s divorce. Rather, he explained, it was “a thousand little things, and the feeling that she was always just acting like a wife and mother but was never really in it.” She created chaos and tension out of thin air, particularly causing conflict with other women. She couldn’t seem to get along with her female bosses or with Ned’s mother or sisters, and regularly seemed to fabricate division in the workplace and family. I told Ned that she had probably been unable to confront her inner “bad mother” and so had to manifest it outwardly, demanding division, fractures, and abandonment in every intimate relationship because she had to externalize her ongoing self-abandonment.

I told Ned about research done by sociologist Jan Yager, who writes that healthy interpersonal relationships are unlikely to be had with people who grew up abused, neglected, or intensely criticized, for they are likely to act out the negative patterns of childhood and adolescence in all their subsequent relationships. People thus treated in childhood must get and act on good therapy or everyone around them will suffer the consequences, consequences the bewildered personality disordered never fully appreciate.

The courts gave Ned and Allison joint custody of Gabe, who hadn’t been well served by the traditional custodial arrangement of seeing his father only four days a month and on summer vacations. Steeped in Allisons’s chaotic, intense environment, Gabe had problems of his own.

We could see why estrangement was the nearly inevitable outcome of Ned’s relationship with his son. The question was, what (if anything) could we do about it?

Afterword

I used to have trouble differentiating between afterward and afterword. When I wrote books, I would have to think about what, exactly, it meant to write the afterword.  I had this problem even though the meaning is right there in the word: after word. It is the word that comes after the other word, all the other words.

This week I’ve been listening to some Jungian teaching about the American unconscious. Something I heard that interested me was that it is a peculiarily American trait to be forward-looking more than backward-looking, and that by being so future oriented, Americans often miss out on the lessons of the past. We are not a wise people, this teacher said. We are a lot of things, but we are not very wise. We are outwardly and consciously sophisticated and advanced, but unconsciously bestial.

This teaching came from the 1960s or 1970s or so, based on some thoughts of Jung’s about the American temperament. I think that the products of our collective American unconscious do bear out the truth of what Jung and others have said about Americans: we appear to be advanced and sophisticated, but underlying it all is a deep, abiding violent, feral, unattached quality. We see this through our media and cinema, where we splash violence, wanton and irresponsible sexual behavior, and other symbols and myths of our hidden collective life.

The ability to learn from one’s past behaviors is possessed by labaratory rats and by human beings. However, wisdom is the sole possession of human beings, if they choose to cultivate and use it. I’ve written about this distinction before, commenting on why we are called homo sapiens; sapient meaning “wisdom,” from the Latin.

The big holidays are mostly over, and I learned a lot this year because this year we changed the way we did Christmas. We gathered on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas day, and we went to an earlier mass rather than the midnight mass. We played “Dirty Santa” rather than exchanging real gifts among the adults in the family. And we ate a different meal than we would normally eat.

By the end of Christmas Day, I had an Afterword for the holidays this year. My word was “interesting.” I was interested to learn that I am as predictable as the next girl, and like receiving certain types of gifts at Christmas. Though this year we told everyone not to buy us gifts, and they didn’t, I discovered through receiving little that I do like shiny things and baubles. I like small gifts like bookmarks and notebooks, colored pens and new gloves. I also like big, extravagant gifts of jewelry. I like things that smell and feel good, too. My son gave me perfume even though I told him not to buy me anything, and I’ve worn that perfume every day since, and I love it (Notorious, by Ralph Lauren).

I learned that my husband will not only give me what I ask for, but he will do a better job shopping than I would have done for myself. You’d laugh if you knew what we gave one another this year, and you’d probably think, “Wow, what a couple of rednecks!” I’d laugh, too, and I’d say you were right! But he did a thoughtful job while shopping for me this year, and I perceived his love through the gifts he gave me. His backwoods girl.

I learned that I liked doing Christmas Day the way we did it in the past, the way it evolved naturally rather than the experimental other-family way I arranged it this year. I like getting up in the morning, early, and coming to the fireplace with our hair all messy and our jammies on, and the smell of coffee and firewood mingling. I like the kids tearing into their gifts, and their squeals of happiness, and how everything is informal and come-as-you-are. I like it when my daughter Lark and her husband, my son-in-law, come over and he opens the bacon and sausage and starts cooking, and how we stand companionably and side-by-side and cook and smile about it. My first son-in-law. He’s like a son to me.

I like it when my daughter Mari comes over with her husband and baby and he has orange juice and champagne and makes Mimosas, which are very good with the breakfast already being cooked, bacon and sausage, and my famous French toast. There is wrapping paper from one end of the house to the other, and dogs rustling through the paper hunting for dropped candy and chocolate, and everything’s a mess. But I really love that. Ivy and her husband arrive, and the testosterone in the house quadruples when my next son arrives about the same time, looking like he just rolled out of bed. His voice booms through the house, and he is wearing a hat and he doesn’t take it off at all. He looks like a big ole lumberjack about half the time, and we don’t have so many trees around here for him to pull off that look, but he manages to pull it off.  And he and his younger brother start bantering and insulting one another, and they laugh a lot. And then all the boys–and there are a lot of them–go off and play Halo or poker or some other competetive thing that has them hollering and laughing at one another, after we finish opening gifts and eating.

I didn’t like shopping late this year, starting after December 1 and ending only a few days before Christmas, without any cookie-baking time. I don’t like the rudeness people exhibit in their rush, especially in traffic or in long lines at the stores. You can really see who people are, for better or worse, at times like that.

I didn’t like putting up with family members who don’t act like family members any other time of the year. I wonder what’s the expiration date on family membership? I wonder why a person feels obligated over the holidays to be polite and even kind and welcoming to family who are absent the rest of the year? I wonder how many years your drunk relative can spend in recovery or can be sober, as compared with all the years they caused so much pain and chaos, before he or she ever feels like family again. If ever? I wonder why I still say “yes, come on over” when what I feel is, “I don’t want to see you. It’s over between us. You are not my [fill in blank with role relationship].”

I am not fooled. But I am polite and even kind and generous.

I wonder why I do that? And whether I will continue.

On Christmas Day, my son Reed was repeating lines about Jesus from various South Park episodes. One of them was, “Every day before I go out, I ask Jesus, ‘Jesus, if you don’t want me to do what I’m about to go do, please stop me,’ but He never does.” We laughed about this, although it also bothered me on another level, this truth from South Park, because the sobering truth is that the Bible teaches that a person can grieve the Holy Spirit of God to such an extent that he can no longer hear God’s voice, and God’s counsel and whispered love are closed to that person. It is as if a person has been rendered spiritually deaf and completely insensate. The possibility of relationship, communication, and communion are blocked. The Spirit flees, and the person may end like the man Jesus healed in the gospels, who had been naked, hiding among the tombstones, violently crazy. Metaphorically speaking.

So, after the holidays were over, I wondered how long is too long. How many years does it take before a door in your heart is closed, and how many more before it is locked? It isn’t a lack of forgiveness, for forgiveness is easier (if you ask me) than continuing along one’s own way with wholeness and discovering that sometimes, one has to leave others behind because their poison may well render us immobile. There’s something about being whole that makes a person not want or need to be around certain kinds of other people. And yet there is also charity and compassion, service and tending to the wounds, hunger, and nakedness of others.

It isn’t easy to figure out. In fact, I don’t try too much to figure it out. I feel my way through it intuitively, and do what the moment requires. Sometimes the requirement of the moment is easier to bear than others. Not returning my mother-in-law’s call was not easy. It was real and it was congruent, but it wasn’t easy. I don’t even know why it was OK to deny her and OK to allow entrance to my brother.

I do know that sometimes the Afterword is “The End.” I know that much. I know that sometimes the Afterword is “Not Now,” and sometimes it is, “Come Back in 20 Years, and Be Sober.”

What was your holiday Afterword this year?