I am just trying to understand how many Self do people have ?.
Do you behave differently towards the people you do not like (lets say Family) and different with people you like (True Self).
I am confused…please help.
I definitely have a False Self in me due to Parental terrible abuse (continuiing to this day) …So please clarify with me.
I have one self. I may act and react differently in different situations depending on a number of factors, but it is always me.
The self is an illusion
It sounds like you are operating under misinformation. People with SZ do not have other “selves” —that is a different disorder called Multiple Personality Disorder. It is human nature to behave differently around different people, but that is not the same as having other selves.
@locamotion Depends on how one sees sz patients, I suppose. I focused heavily on borderline personality organization in school and practice. (See https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=borderline+personality+organization+, as well as the horrendously challenging books linked below.) I read a lot of Richard Kluft’s famed and seminal work on MPD, as well as work from other veterans in that dx.
When I began to work with sz pts in and out of long-term residential hospital settings, it became increasingly evident to me that they shared many of the same symptoms as borderlines and MPDs, including a somewhat more subtle flip-flopping from polarized, opposing, mutually unaware “personas” (eg: from anxious and attachment seeking to hostile and attachment dismissing or rejection). These personas did not have distinct “names” (like Sheila vs. Patsy), but they were very obvious, and it was clear when talking to either one that the one I was speaking with did not know the other one, at least not in any depth or detail.
Thus, I stumbled onto what others far more expert than I have been calling a “spectrum” – or “range” – of “split off selves” running from “milder” or more subtle to “harsher” and more obvious. Because she is deceased now, I can say that I saw this very clearly in Manson cult member Susan Atkins when she was at Chowchilla. She could go from Sunday school teacher (which she was at Chow) nicey-nicey to – when she felt threatened or accused – seething monster… in just a few seconds
I suppose that a dual diagnosis is possible in some people, just a biplor can be hand in glove with SZ. However I would suggest that it IS a dual diagnosis and not inherent in SZ. Certainly not experienced by the majority of people with SZ. Of course, I present differently when I am psychotic from when I am not. That is the same with any disease that occurs with “flare-ups”-- periods of remission. It does not imply another “personality”
That was one fascinating post.
??? How many times have you diagnosed sz patients? They are quite often dx’d with several other symptom sets. Clinical depression, general anxiety disorder, bipolar, post-traumatic stress disorder, and autistic spectrum stuff seem to be the most common in Axis I. Paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, avoidant, narcissistic, histrionic, obsessive-compulsive, nihilistic depressive, and borderline personality disorder in Axis II.
Of course. We all do.
Actually, that depends. Many experts on sz have asserted for decades that many “effectively” medicated sz pts become criterially and clearly borderline under stress. (If one knows what borderlinism actually is at the physiological, cognitive and behavioral levels, it’s very easy to understand why those experts asserted what they did.)
If people have multiple selves – meaning something like “complexes” of values, beliefs, emotional states and behavioral expressions that are discrete from other such complexes – it’s usually best to try to develop an emotionally stable, “executive personality.” Once accomplished, those existing “personas” can become known to it sufficiently to make it possible for the e/p to keep an eye on them… and ultimately bring them under its “administration.”
Unification (or “integration”) is sometimes possible, though not always. In whatever event, however, the person with all those personalities typically feels a lot more comfortable in his or her own skin when the e/p is on top of things.
No shame, no guilt, no embarrassment, not humiliation, nor harm, no foul.
That was my point exactly. Dual DX, rather than integral to SZ…because I would dare to bet that not every person with SZ, presents another persona.
Ohhhh. Okay. I get it.
Well, not like someone who dresses differently and has a different name. But if they are generally chill when medicated, under stress, they may “flip” to a hostile presentation that believes totally different things – and thus sees reality differently – than the chill one. It’s way past typical, neurotic-level reactivity and looks just like what we see in the classic, right-out-of-a-textbook borderline.
Everything about BPD fits me so well that I wonder is my bipolar diagnosis simply mistaken and now I’m thinking is that their lack of knowledge or a deeper involvement into patients situation the reason that made my pdoc say ‘borderline is not a disorder, more like the way you cope with the stress’.
They don’t like to hear that patients read and interpret that stuff by themselves.
I think Borderline personality disorder is more to do with conflict between the False self (Conditioning/stress/abuse from parents) and your True Self. When that is unresolved it leads to Borderline.
A good psychoanalyst should be able to cure this in 2 weeks.
I have my public self where I try not to let any of the cracks in my pysche show and my private self where I can be me around family and friends without worrying (or bothering with eye contact, which I hate with a passion).
Pixel.
typical of Indians (people living in India).
Most have 2 Selves - one which they show to their family (Parents/Husbands) and one which is secret (never revealed) except to a close few…and another Self which is kept for Public (In Workplace/Job/office etc). The third one is quite weak.
Though Im an Indian I have different type of self and not a typical Indian.
I will definitely stop short of calling it as Multiple Personality or im sorry Dissociative Indentity disorder since Indians have an art of Switching between the selves at will without any problem and are aware of all the selves in themselves.
But that does not mean that the selves are similar…In fact they are VASTLY different from each other in almost everything.
Bipolar refers to flip-flopping emotional states; borderline to flip-flopping cognitive states (ways of perceiving and reacting to events). One can have both, and – in fact – it appears that that is the case most of the time. One noted expert on both, Joel Paris, seemed to think they were really the same thing. But I think the nosology above – that has been floated for decades by such as Melanie Klein, Karen Horney (pronounced horn-eye), Harold Searles, Otto Kernberg, James Massterson, John Gunderson, Bill Meissner and others who really seem to be able to see the two – is accurate: Bipolar is “up” and “down.” Borderline is more like “back” and “forth.”
To a degree, your p-doc is correct. Because all personality – or character – disorders are complex collections of coping mechanisms. But they do tend to become behavioral “styles” in people over time, as those who demonstrate them develop habituation and normalization of those behaviors via repetition of seeming rewards and reinforcement, far from the least of which is ex-pression and discharge of bottled up frustration. Most mental health pros sense that that frustration stems from not being able to make themselves understood by significant attachment figures in childhood.
While I wouldn’t say that is universal, it is definitely the case at times. (Sigh.) Especially if the doc or therapist is easily frustrated and regresses to an authoritarian ego defense, something that seems – btw – to be more common in cultures where rule-bound, patriarchal, I-am-right-because-I-am-a-doctor authoritarianism is more often the unconscious and unrecognized norm.
You can be just graciously simple when you want. 
TYvery much!
This is – according to the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic “schools” of “psychophilosophy” – a description of the neurotic-level personality, rather than one that is borderline. In the former, there is always a comfortable, secure, relatively conflict-and-anxiety-free collection of expressions, along with the edgy, judgment-conscious, insecure, somewhat anxious false self.
In borderlines, there seem to be several gradients of the two selves running from a more conflicted, less-often “comfortable” version of the neurotic personality all the way to one that has almost no “comfortable” self and two or more highly agitated, uncomfortable, edgy, etc., selves, some of which are “socially competent” but false; some of which are socially incompetent (maybe even ardently asocial, hostile or anti-social) and not false (in the sense of being “as if.”)
At the extreme end of this borderline spectrum (see below) are those who seem to be psychotic – even sz-like – much of the time, but who suddenly surprise others by finding the eyes of their mental hurricanes for a little while.
An intriguing observation. The southern Asian, Brahman (etc.) culture’s typical presentations of self and false self have fascinated me ever since I began to watch a parody of them on a British TV show with an all-Indian cast called “The Kumars at #42.” (It was hilarious, even if it was a sort of southern Asian “Amos & Andy” because it poked fun at the stereotypes of a hyper-rigid, hyper-righteous father, and a mother who agreed with whatever her husband said no matter how much it disagreed with what he had said one minute earlier, from the point of view of the son who – raised in the UK – had other cultural perspectives.)
The two selves you describe are straight out of D. W. Winnicott’s and Helen Deutsch’s first descriptions of the “false self” and the “as if” personality from back in the '40s, I think.
so a neurotic level personality is a normal level functioning personality?.
I have a cold right now. Maybe it’s that.