What are personality disorders?
With a personality disorder, you typically experience emotions and thoughts that diminish your ability to:
face and adapt to stress
connect and bond with other people
effectively solve problems
For example, if you have a personality disorder, your reaction to losing a job might be blaming your co-workers for the dismissal and getting into a fight with your boss. You might not realize how some of your behaviors might have led you to face these difficulties.
Now, it’s true that people who aren’t living with a personality disorder could have this same reaction. We all may feel angry, emotional, and paranoid at times.
But if you cope with stress in a similar way every time, and these traits are causing ongoing problems in your life, a mental health professional may reach the diagnosis of a personality disorder.
In other words, most people might recognize in themselves a few traits from a personality disorder.
Your personality helps you function in life, with all the challenges that might usually come up. This means that even if you go through painful or stressful situations, you’ll have a strong chance to overcome them and move on.
How you cope with hardship may be different from how somebody else does. We all have our own ways of getting through, and that depends greatly on our dominant personality traits.
For example, you may be, among other things, patient, resilient, and persistent. These personality traits may help you overcome losing a job and become motivated to find a new and better one.
They’ll help you bounce back from your initial feelings of disappointment and devote time to finding another position. Even if you know it might not happen overnight, you stay motivated.
You may also reflect on the circumstances that led you here, assume responsibility (if any), and take note of the lessons learned.
If you have a personality disorder, though, this isn’t the case.
To actually receive the diagnosis, you would have to show all or almost all of the traits that characterize that disorder. Also, these traits would cause you a great deal of distress and problems in your life.
Not all personality disorders have the same symptoms and dominant traits. Something they all have in common, though, is that people with the disorder experience difficulties responding to the demands of life.
These difficulties affect:
relationships
work performance
views of the world
inner experiences
This isn’t a personal choice. Personality disorders are the result of many factors that have influenced your life, including:
genetic inheritance
biological processes
learning development
cultural experiences
traumatic situations
childhood relationships
There’s no one cause for personality disorders. And it’s not clear why not everyone reacts the same way to the same external and internal factors.
This is why experts believe the cause might be a specific combination of all of the above.
With a personality disorder, you typically experience emotions and thoughts that diminish your ability to:
face and adapt to stress
connect and bond with other people
effectively solve problems
For example, if you have a personality disorder, your reaction to losing a job might be blaming your co-workers for the dismissal and getting into a fight with your boss. You might not realize how some of your behaviors might have led you to face these difficulties.
Now, it’s true that people who aren’t living with a personality disorder could have this same reaction. We all may feel angry, emotional, and paranoid at times.
But if you cope with stress in a similar way every time, and these traits are causing ongoing problems in your life, a mental health professional may reach the diagnosis of a personality disorder.
In other words, most people might recognize in themselves a few traits from a personality disorder.
Your personality helps you function in life, with all the challenges that might usually come up. This means that even if you go through painful or stressful situations, you’ll have a strong chance to overcome them and move on.
How you cope with hardship may be different from how somebody else does. We all have our own ways of getting through, and that depends greatly on our dominant personality traits.
For example, you may be, among other things, patient, resilient, and persistent. These personality traits may help you overcome losing a job and become motivated to find a new and better one.
They’ll help you bounce back from your initial feelings of disappointment and devote time to finding another position. Even if you know it might not happen overnight, you stay motivated.
You may also reflect on the circumstances that led you here, assume responsibility (if any), and take note of the lessons learned.
If you have a personality disorder, though, this isn’t the case.
To actually receive the diagnosis, you would have to show all or almost all of the traits that characterize that disorder. Also, these traits would cause you a great deal of distress and problems in your life.
Not all personality disorders have the same symptoms and dominant traits. Something they all have in common, though, is that people with the disorder experience difficulties responding to the demands of life.
These difficulties affect:
relationships
work performance
views of the world
inner experiences
This isn’t a personal choice. Personality disorders are the result of many factors that have influenced your life, including:
genetic inheritance
biological processes
learning development
cultural experiences
traumatic situations
childhood relationships
There’s no one cause for personality disorders. And it’s not clear why not everyone reacts the same way to the same external and internal factors.
This is why experts believe the cause might be a specific combination of all of the above.