What is Personality? (And Personality Disorder), w/ NPD Example | FRANK YEOMANS

personality is a very interesting concept everybody uses the term but when you think about it it's not quite so simple and academic psychologists debate about it all the time and how to understand it I think personality is the kind of automatic instinctive ways that we think feel and act it comes naturally to us and when you're treating somebody with personality sort of they say this can't change it's just who I am but the question is how do we become who we are and what determines who we are so I think personality is about the internalized images of self and other that we incorporate over the course of development these give us a sense of self and a sense of others that may or may not be so accurate because of a lot of reasons so a person with a personality disorder we see them as having an internal sense of self and others that is not accurate given that you could say oh it's a cognitive problem it's just about how they think but we know from brain studies and from our clinical work that it's also a very emotional problem it's the gut reaction you have to the slightest trigger event so it's in a given situation how do I feel about myself how do I feel about the other it happens automatically it determines how you behave it determines how you think and when it's disordered it makes life pretty complicated difficult and often miserable thank you is that clear yeah that is clear okay yeah cuz I always feel like it's such um a grand term you know personality disorder and to like parse out what is personality yeah can I give you a simple example because I think examples help my first patient after I finished my Psychiatry training was an angry mid-30s guy with a narcissistic personality and people with narcissism or narcissistic personality often have a big chip on their shoulders they have a lot of envy and resentment so on so forth in spite of the grandiosity which tries to fend that off in sessions I was used to his being very critical of everything I said and finding me stupid and so on and so forth that goes with the territory but in one session he was telling me a story about when he was a child and his parents did something that was really insensitive and and mean and it brought tears to my eyes which isn't what one generally does as a therapist but it happens once in a while so he looked at me and he said you have tears in your eyes so I said yes and he scrutinized me and he leaned forward and saidou mocking me so that's where his personality interfered with his ability to interact with the outside world he took what most people would find clear evidence of sympathy or empathy and turned it into the opposite that's what we call the distortions based on personality disorder in other words the internal images one has of self and other may not correspond so well to the external reality and people live more in response to their internal images than to what's really going on around them

Channel: BorderlinerNotes

Views: 72,959

Keywords: Narcissism, Frank Yeomans, Yeomans, BPD, Borderline, NPD, Personality Disorder, Therapy, Transference-Focused Psychotherapy

Id: bM11wlL25-c

Length: 3min 16sec (196 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2019