Hey, deserving listeners. I thought I would answer some patron emails here. There were some other emails about dependent personality disorder that I thought I would review.

So it's kind of a follow up to the follow up from last week.

Patron Becky from Canada wrote in and said, thank you for doing that series on dependent personality disorder.

I deal with social anxiety and depression, but this kind of completes the picture for me.

My core beliefs are that I'm not important. I am a child and others will see that and I am incompetent, even though I'm a 34 year old adult with a job and a relationship.

I had an overprotective mom. My parents fought a lot. My dad got drunk on weekends and was verbally abusive to my mother.

I was very shy and people pleasing to my mom to make up for the abuse that she was going through.

I've been to therapists often on, but no one has ever mentioned any kind of diagnosis that I know of.

Much less dependent personality disorder. Is this something that is becoming more well known and of email?

Well, patron Becky from Canada, what I will say is that, no, dependent personality disorder is not very well known.

As evidenced by the fact that a lot of therapists still use the term co-dependency, which of course, if you listen to my deep dive on dependent personality disorder, you understand that that is an incorrect, often an incorrect usage of the term.

And also personality disorders in general are not very well known. So let alone dependent personality disorder specifically.

Why is that? Well, it's because one, as I always say, personality disorders are very complicated.

It takes a lot of training and a lot of experience and a lot of supervision to understand any one of them.

You cannot understand these things by just reading a book or looking at the symptoms or watching a, you know, a video of something.

You have to experience these people firsthand, either as clients or even in your personal life. And you have to be very, I don't know, educated on psychology and personality disorders and personality.

And it's pretty complicated. So you're asking Becky, well, none of my therapists, I've been therapist off and on and I have these issues and I've talked about them, but no one ever talked about dependent personality disorder.

So one, it's possible that they did diagnose you with dependent personality disorder either in officially or unofficially, meaning that they had to accurate conceptualization of you as someone with dependent personality.

I don't know if you had dependent personality disorder, but if you did, then this is possibility that they did accurately conceptualize you, but just didn't mention it.

It's also, I think, equally as possible that they just had no idea what dependent personality disorder was. Now, do you need to understand dependent personality disorder in order to treat what might be observed in you? No, I mean, if you came to someone and presented a schema that you're not important.

And it doesn't take a genius therapist to know that correcting for that is important cognitively and healing wise.

The other thing that factors into why a lot of therapists don't understand dependent personality disorder is that there's very little training if any at all.

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