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new faces which we then love and hate. Instead, every interpersonal arrangement
is new, suspect and run on a cash-and-carry basis. We are made to feel like there
are no seats for us inside of them. Even Debbie, with her history of selfless motherly
devotion to her “children,” felt like an empty husk, encased in the exoskeletal armor
of compulsive correctness. With their inner life unpeopled, the best we on the
outside can hope for is to be valuable to them as tools, like forks and chairs.
In new and potentially therapeutic settings, for example a genuinely loving
foster family, these children manipulate, testing for the feared loss and abuse that
first generated their detachment. They provoke the very mistrust they fear. The
sexually exploited child is seductive. The physically abused child provokes attack.
Personality constellations which can be adaptive, when narrowed and fixated,
become impediments to new and reparative experience. It is in this way that
personality disorders are self-maintaining.
An irony is that these interpersonally empty and rigid patterns in personality
tend to occur in the most constitutionally robust of the abused and neglected
children. They are those who have escaped early death from failure to thrive,
severe neuropsychological impairment, chronic depression, severe social
withdrawal or the pediatric psychotic disorders. The children with sufficient flexibility
to adapt quickly and survive often settle into empty-centered rigid caricatures of
adult personality styles.
Of course, well-defined and characteristic personality patterns do not require
abandonment and abuse or the pathological simplification of traumatic deforestation
of neuronal connectivities in order to emerge. Demanding social selection of
particular personality proclivities that are competitively advantageous for highly
sought positions also results in the appearance of well-defined personality styles.
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Common examples are the technical types, “techies,” “nerds,” whose work require
long hours alone to master and execute, as in doing mathematical proofs, solving
problems in theoretical physics, unraveling computer programming problems or
writing highly technical tracks. These activities can be aided by the personality
inclinations of shyness and distantiation, the experience of discomfort in social
occasions along with a rich private fantasy life. Diagnostically oriented mental health
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