All of us have our own unique ways of feeling and thinking and expressing ourselves. Most of the time, our uniqueness is seen simply as an individual difference – or something special about each of us. In fact, this is what brings interest and variety to the people in our lives. This is a positive thing. One of the healthiest things we can do is to achieve a fairly objective understanding of just how we are unique or different from other people. Then we can understand how our behavior impacts other people and we can adjust the way we act around other people accordingly. That is, we can problem solve our way through situations when we have a good understanding of our unique personality characteristics. We are talking here about personality style – and all of us have our own styles.
Some of us, though, have personalities that vary significantly from the expectations of the culture. This can involve patterns of feeling, thinking, impulse control and interpersonal functioning that cause distress – sometimes to the person, but especially to those around the person. If the pattern is enduring and pervasive (that is, it persists over time and can be found across a broad range of situations), then it might meet the criteria for a personality disorder. One of the features of a personality disorder is that the person may not realize how their behavior affects others – and that’s why it continues over time and with a variety of different people. So a person with a personality disorder may have difficulty with problem-solving, which impairs their ability to adapt to life’s challenges. People with personality disorders don’t feel distressed about their personality traits, but may suffer from the reactions of others to them. Personality disorders seem to begin fairly early in life, and, unless a change in made, they may continue on through the person’s adulthood. It is important to realize that the behavior of those with personality disorders may have served a positive function at one point in the person’s life – but now those behaviors are an ingrained part of the personality but no longer serve the person well. They actually work against the person’s ability to adapt.
Professional therapists help people to address a number of problems in everyday living, such as mood and thinking disorders, anxiety, impulse control problems or addictive behavior. Personality disorders fall into their own category, however. That is, personality disorders may, or may not, be related to these more traditional areas of treatment. For example, a person suffering from depression may, or may not, also have a personality disorder. Fortunately, there is help for people suffering from personality disorders, as well as their families, work colleagues and close friends. In most cases, people who suffer from a personality disorder can learn to make changes in the behavior that causes distress. It’s not really feasible to say that therapists can “cure” a personality, but they can help the person learn to manage life’s details and responsibilities better.
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