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.
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 
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.
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.
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.
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.
