5. Splitting and Choice

Splitting involves no choice. It is an automatic defense in which bad traits are attributed to a "bad object" (devaluation) and "good qualities" to a "good object" (idealization).

Writing off a narcissist or a psychopath is a personal, deliberate, cognitive choice. Society, at large, does not "give up" on them. It offers them therapy, rehabilitation, medication, jobs, and community services. But each individual must makes decision whether to invest in a narcissist or a psychopath - or in someone who is neither. Some people prefer the former.

6. Personality Traits or Styles and Personality Disorders

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision [Washington DC, American Psychiatric Association, 2000] defines "personality" as:

"...enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself ... exhibited in a wide range of important social and personal contexts."

The difference between having a personality and having a personality disorder is not in degree - but in flexibility. Personality disorders are rigid patterns of perceiving and reacting to people and to events. It takes concerted and intensive intervention (therapy and medication) to alter them (even to an imperceptible degree). As a result of this pathological straitjacket, people with personality disorders are dysfunctional. "Normal" personalities adapt much faster and more easily to changes in external circumstances, to new demands, new people and new situations.

Patients with personality disorders share certain characteristics:

1. Except those suffering from the Schizoid or the Avoidant Personality Disorders, they are insistent and demand preferential and privileged treatment. They complain about numerous symptoms, though they frequently second guess the diagnosis and disobey the physician, his treatment recommendations and instructions.

1. They feel unique, are affected with grandiosity and a diminished capacity for empathy. Consequently, they regard the physician as inferior to them, alienate him and bore him with their self-preoccupation.

1. They are manipulative and exploitative, trust no one and find it difficult to love or share. They are socially maladaptive and emotionally labile.

1. Disturbed cognitive and, mainly, emotional development peaks in adolescence.

1. Personality disorders are stable and all-pervasive not episodic or transient. They affect all the dimensions of the patient's life: his career, his interpersonal relationships, his social functioning.

1. Though the patient is sometimes depressed and suffers from mood and anxiety disorders - defenses - splitting, projection, projective identification, denial, intellectualization - are so strong, that the patient is unaware of the reasons for his distress. The character problems, behavioral deficits and emotional deficiencies and instability encountered by the patient with personality disorder are, mostly, ego-syntonic. This means that the patient does not, on the whole, find his personality traits or behavior objectionable, unacceptable, disagreeable, or alien to his self.

1. The patient is prone to suffer from other psychiatric disturbances, both personality disorders and Axis I disorders ("co-morbidity"). Substance abuse and reckless behaviors are also common ("dual diagnosis").

1. Defenses are alloplastic: patients tend to blame the external world for their misfortune and failures. In stressful situations, they try to preempt a (real or imaginary) threat, change the rules of the game, introduce new variables, or otherwise influence the external world to conform to their needs.

1. The personality-disordered are not psychotic. They have no hallucinations, delusions or thought disorders (except those who suffer from a Borderline Personality Disorder and who experience brief psychotic "microepisodes", mostly during treatment). They are also fully oriented, with clear senses (sensorium), good memory and general fund of knowledge.

7. Toxic Relationships

Many things bind people together: love, fear of abandonment, pity, memories (nostalgia), or dependence.

With the exception of love, the other motivations I mentioned are shaky and unhealthy grounds for a long-term relationships.

But easier said than done. You evidently KNOW that you should let him go - but you do not FEEL it. What you feel is possessiveness, pity, (abandonment) anxiety, and the risk of losing your emotional investment (in the "rescue" operation).

The fact that you had bailed out of previous relationships demonstrates a PATTERN of instability in your relationships. You seem to knowingly commit yourself to unsustainable liaisons, predicting full-well their ultimate demise. These are self-defeating behaviors.

Such deep set issues require protracted professional help.

next: Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List Part 46