Excellent Article: Your Ex Doesn't Have A Personality Disorder - The Toast
A lot of people come whipping into this forum claiming their ex-partner is BPD or a Narcissist. This article does an excellent job explaining why this is probably not the case. (Not considering that only 0.5-1% of the population has a NPD.)
I always warn everyone that there is a lot of material and infographics out there on the internet that will lead people to "believe" that their ex-partner is personality disordered. This article breaks down why they probably don't have one...
The explanation they offer for "confirmation bias" is one of the simplest and best I have ever read:
Third point is straight to the point!
And the article concludes nicely with this important reminder for anyone trying to label their ex-partner as personality disordered...
Excellent food for thought...
Good Luck!
Tayken
A lot of people come whipping into this forum claiming their ex-partner is BPD or a Narcissist. This article does an excellent job explaining why this is probably not the case. (Not considering that only 0.5-1% of the population has a NPD.)
In the shadowy corners of the internet lives a subset of breakup listicles designed to help you diagnose your ex-partners’ psychopathology. Oh, you didn’t know this was a thing? It totally is a thing. According to several recent pieces on sites like the Huffington Post and Thought Catalog, almost everyone who ever dumped you had a personality disorder...
First, it’s actually fairly easy to find a personality disorder that fits any individual to some degree. This is because personality disorders are designed to describe extremes across a broad range of maladaptive interpersonal styles (Millon, 1999). Everyone has some traits or tendencies that align with a disordered interpersonal style because we’ve all got our own special quirks. When we are in a happy relationship with someone, these quirks are endearing at best and mildly frustrating at worst. When a relationship hits the skids, the trouble starts. Many classic theories of psychopathology acknowledge that stressful life event can heighten maladaptive traits for a period of time (Prochaska & Norcross, 2009). Breakups are typically stressful, therefore if you go through a breakup with someone it’s likely that their (and your) more challenging traits will magnify.
Second, emotion impacts how we process and interpret information. There is a term to describe this called “confirmation bias” (Fiske, 2010). Confirmation bias means that how we attend to, interpret and remember information supports our preconceived beliefs. When we are faced with information that contradicts our beliefs, we experience discomfort. This discomfort is a powerful motivator to see what we already believe. This isn’t a conscious process, and in a way it’s protective of our cognitive resources. It takes time, energy, and effort to change our beliefs. The world runs much more smoothly when we all have the inherent tendency to see what we already believe. But sometimes a trade-off for cognitive simplicity is accuracy. This means that once we decide “this person is acting crazy,” we will actively work to make the “facts” fit our thoughts. So if you believe your ex must be a narcissistic jerk, it’s extremely easy to selectively remember all the information that supports your hypothesis.
Third. it’s easy to twist memories about how a person acted in a relationship to fit a personality disorder if you don’t think about two aspects that are crucial to the diagnosis a personality disorder; to what extent and to what degree symptoms are occurring.
The diagnostic labels that come from this process facilitate communication between researchers and practitioners, providing language to describe a common experience of suffering for a subset of individuals. But mental illness labels can also be used as a way to dismiss or degrade. It’s unnervingly easy to write someone off as not mattering in our society if they’re “crazy.” This is especially true with diagnosis that have extra stigma attached, like personality disorders. So sometimes I worry when I hear someone flippantly diagnosing their ex-partner as a sociopath, borderline or narcissistic. Those are powerful labels that mean so much more than what I think the person using them is trying to convey which I suspect might be; “this person behaved in a way I dislike, do not understand and it hurt me.”
Good Luck!
Tayken
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