I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
On a road trip from North Carolina to Colorado, my friend asked me, “if you were going to take a job, what do you think sounds like fun?”
And I told her, I don’t want any job but writing and publishing and promoting books.
I don’t know what that’s going to be like except what it’s like now: writing a book and considering ways to promote it. There’s really no way to experiment with the entire process without doing it, which is what I plan to do.
On the trip we discussed using personality disorder labels for people: narcissist, borderline, antisocial. I don’t believe it’s useful or truthful to diagnose people with a PD and I find that more casual use of these labels (“she’s a narcissist,” “he’s a antisocial”) obscures more than they clarify.
It can feel so satisfying to explain someone’s behavior via a label. And yet it makes it seem like the world is simpler than it is. Such labels treat what may be situational as dispositional, and not just temporarily dispositional but permanently dispositional. The idea with personality disorders is that they are near-permanent ways of being and behaving in the world, very difficult to change, and somehow inborn. Even when these labels are used casually, they are usually implied to be a description of who that person is, now and forever.
PD-style labels are blameful. They put near 100% of blame when things go bad on one person, the person who has been labeled. It absolves the labeler of their actions which may have contributed and it ignores situational factors which may be at play.
So I recoil when I hear someone say of, for example, their current partner’s ex, something like “She’s a narcissist, that’s what went wrong. And that’s why things will always go wrong with her.”
It gives little agency to the person you’re labeling, it puts blame on them, and it reduces them to a flattened diagnosis rather than acknowledging that they are a complex and complicated person, not reducible to one way of being and behaving in the world.
In a way, it’s a way of refusing to meet someone as the Other. I have written about the importance of being open to the Other in relationship versus looking for the Same. It is also important in any dealings with other people to allow them and relate to them in their Otherness rather than attempting to reduce them to an object, an It, with little free will, as labels like narcissist or borderline do.
Labels like “antisocial,” “narcisist,” and “borderline” do likely capture certain coping and behavior styles that people have:
- Narcissism: high extraversion + very low agreeableness.
- Borderline: high neuroticism + high openness to feelings.
- Antisocial: low conscientiousness + low agreeableness + high impulsivity.
But just because someone has a tendency to act in certain ways doesn’t mean it’s useful to flatten them out and interpret all their behaviors through the lens of a crude label. And it’s likely not useful for them to label themselves either, because the label can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I’m borderline, of course I’m going to feel abandoned and rejected and then act out if someone breaks up with me.”
We are more human becomings than human beings, with selves that are dynamic, relational, and emergent. The relational part is important: if you treat someone as fixed in their dysfunction you don’t give them the opportunity to grow and change and respond differently.
The idea of fixed attachment styles is similarly problematic. The way someone behaves in relationship is dependent upon context. It’s not necessarily a permanent trait even if someone has, for example, a tendency to be anxious in relationship. Someone may be very anxious in one relationship and act very securely in another, due to their partner’s behavior, what else is going on in their life, or some other influence.
I used to find it helpful to label people who didn’t act like I wanted them to. As I’ve been writing my Things Men Gave Me essays, I found that such labels led to uninteresting and uninsightful ideas. “He didn’t want to commit to me; he was clearly a narcissist” is not a good core idea for a relationship story. Instead, treating my partners with the same level of consideration as to their complexity that I give to myself makes for much more engaging narrative.
I wrote before of how recovery memoirs often take the simplistic route, rehashing clichéd ideas and labeling people as addicts, again something often considered as a built-in, unchanging trait. AA has done terrible harm, making everyone think that “alcoholic” is a lifelong accurate label for some people. I think of addiction as a problem with learning and habits, not as something inborn.
This isn’t much of a plan for next week. My only hope with this post was to get myself back into writing, and to explore some ideas that arose on the 22 hour drive from NC to CO. I’m looking forward to more writing this week although of course my main priority is preparing for the Thanksgiving dinner I’m hosting.
I’ll also be continuing the pet paintings project.
I feel grateful for this wonderful life I have!