Hiya, I'm scratching the surface on personality disorders today.

As you can probably imagine, I see a lot of clients who have had very difficult upbringings.

Their experiences when they were growing up were not what their young brains actually needed in order to feel safe or that they could trust other people. And that can cause what we

call personality disorders. And so I want to very briefly go over three different types of

personality disorder today. Maybe it can help you to understand yourself a little bit better because

this is a spectrum thing. There are degrees

of this. Or maybe it's just fascinating to you. And if you are interested in more, you can find the

full episode on my Patreon page where I go a bit deeper. So the three I'm going to refer to are

emotionally unstable, often called borderline, narcissistic and histrionic personality disorder.

And there are overlaps, especially between borderline and narcissistic.

And please recognise these are just constructs.

Labels to help us understand ourselves better. It's not who you are if you recognise

yourself in this. It's like having an allergy. Being allergic to gluten doesn't define you. It just

means you have to work a little bit harder at life because you can't simply accept every piece of

food that's put in front of you. You have to do a bit more mental work to see

if it's safe first. Now, when you're young and you don't know which foods are safe or not,

that mental effort is conscious. You work hard at it. But over time, it becomes more unconscious,

automatic. But you're still going to be wary.

Well, it's a bit like that with personality disorders, only you're allergic to other people,

relationships, the possibility of rejection instead of gluten.

So these disorders are made up by psychologists to try and make our lives a bit easier,

that's all. And it's not set in stone. And not always right when it's been diagnosed either

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