I was thinking about narcissism and how I had heard that narcissists are overcompensating for their self-doubt. I also considered my own pathological tendency to be a “people pleaser”. In therapy, a counselor asked me why I tend to walk on eggshells around people and tried too hard to be liked. I realized I’m a people pleaser because I have a desire to be liked by everyone, and that in some key ways I derive my sense of self-worth from the approval of others. With this in mind, a new realization started to form in my mind: Personality disorders (like my people pleasing) are misguided attempts to cope with our insecurities. I ran this idea by my Ivy League-educated neuroscientist, and he confirmed my suspicions. More than that however, he told me about many personality disorders I didn’t know about or hadn’t named, and showed how each of them relate to self-worth. I basically only knew about narcissism and people pleasing, and I had a vague idea what being histrionic was, but that was about the extent. He told me about the three clusters, A, B, and C.
Cluster A is about pushing people away. The most common ones are paranoid personality disorder, schizoid, and schizotypal. Google them if you want but they’re all ways of expressing a pervasive distrust of others and an unrealistic determination to go it alone.
Cluster B is about attention seeking and demanding validation. Borderline, narcissism, and histrionic are the most common expressions. Borderline is characterized by a strong fear of abandonment and severe overreactions to that possibility. Histrionic is pathological attention seeking. Narcissism is dramatically inflated self-worth as an overcompensation for self-hate.
Cluster C is my flavor. It’s characterized by obsession and perfectionism, people pleasing and being a doormat for others to walk on. Cluster Cs can be anxious and on edge, fearing rejection and disapproval.
The insight for me when my brother-in-law was explaining these was how each cluster is a different misguided survival style. All of them arise from a broken sense of self-worth, and EVERYONE struggles with one or more of the flavors. Even if we’re not diagnosable, we’re all liable to act in toxic ways, and those behaviors can be categorized into one of these clusters.
This realization gives me more grace for people. Everyone has been told in one way or another that they’re not adequate, and our disorders are just the ways we try to compensate and find our way in a chaotic, insecure world.
All of the disorder clusters have their rewards. Cluster As are less likely to be disappointed by people. Cluster Bs soak up the oxygen in the room, are usually the life of the party, and tend to be promoted at work.
Custer Cs are generally well-liked and can succeed in customer-service roles.
But all of them run up against the hard wall of their limitations, and when our survival coping mechanisms inevitably fail us, cause harm, and damage our relationships, we’re left with no recourse. We typically rely on the same behaviors that got us into the mess. We find rock bottom and we start to dig.
In an earlier post, I said that God designed all life to thrive. I think the main barrier to our thriving is our broken sense of self-worth. It causes us to act in toxic ways towards each other, harms our relationships, and leaves us feeling harried and confused. So, what is the answer? The answer deserves its own post, but I’ll sum it up here: RULER. This is an acronym for Recognize, Understand, Label, Express, and Regulate. In order to love ourselves properly, we need a proper understanding of our inner life. This acronym from Marc Brackett’s book Permission to Feel allows us to look under the hood and see what is driving our behavior. It allows us to observe ourselves as if we were a third party in an interaction, diagnose what is actually going on in our lives, and make constructive choices.
Which cluster do you most relate to? Awareness is the first step to healing, better relationships, and getting on the path towards thriving.
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