Fun with Labels
I’ve always known I was different, but I never knew how or why until a year or so ago. It’s quite a tale how I got to that point and it would almost require writing a novel to explain it. I met a girl, and fell for said girl, and it turned into a disastrous five year involuntary lesson in personality disorders, psychopathic tendencies, and abnormal psychology. Does she have a histrionic disorder, the narcissistic one, or a borderline personality disorder? She might have them all, or she may have simply been a sociopath. Trying to bring her back to reality resulted in me sinking deeper and deeper until I found myself questioning my own sanity. It sucked.
Its amazing what the mind is capable of when it feels the need to keep events from your awareness. It’s amazing how hitting rock bottom can interfere with that. I started recognizing that maybe my childhood wasn’t quite normal and that maybe I didn’t grow up being tougher and smarter for it. In fact I may have been damaged. I didn’t go to the psychiatrist for my own benefit, as it usually goes with personality disorders, but I couldn’t help but ask what might be going on with me. After he described it as being consistent with depression I began filling him in with everything odd about me. Its ironic that I had obsessively invested so many years studying personality disorders and skipped over the one that might apply to me. He started giving me the standard clinical interview from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for a Schizoid personality disorder and I’m fairly certain I didn’t do well on it. Thinking back I can see my childhood dream was to just get away from everybody and apparantly I’ve done a fine job of taking that to an extreme. I think my inner child and I are about to go to war.
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4 Responses to “Fun with Labels”
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sometimes i wonder if i would have in fact ended up so damaged,, if no one ever told me i was…..would it have been different if i had never allowed myself to be labeled?? or would i have been more lost,, forever wondering what was wrong with me???
Thats a great comment, and way too deep for me to answer. Does getting a label lead to more healing or excuses and self fulfilling prophecies? For me its been a little of both. In my situation, getting a label offered me insight and explanations that I had been seeking for a long time. It allowed me to recognize defenses that were useful as a child but self defeating in adulthood. Having an awareness has allowed me to overcome some, but not all, of that. It probably has a lot to do with the label you get, but we’re all a lot more than a label.
for me, it(being labeled) helped me make sense of what was happening to me. i was hospitalized for the first time at age 4 (suicidal and homicidal behavior) …they didnt diagnose me bipolar til i was 13 or so after being hospitalized for the 3rd or 4th time. i actually have three dx’s. bipolar, borderline personality, OCD. did u know almost all bipolar dx have another dx of some sort??? anyway… it made things easier to cope with and understand because i knew i had an illness and was not just a freak. i could process things better knowing that there was an actual cause for everything going on in my head….
Thanks for sharing, Joanna,
I wouldn’t be surprised if a few more labels didn’t fit me. Having labels would be helpful to me because it provides some understanding and goals. I worry that having a label also comes with a stigma, though, and once people learn your label they dehumanize you and can’t see the person beneath it. I know I’ve been guilty of that at times.