The Riggs Difference: Where Understanding Leads to Recovery
Many people who come to Riggs have previously been diagnosed with a personality disorder, such as avoidant, narcissistic, borderline personality disorder (BPD) or others. Personality disorders are complex psychiatric struggles that are often defined by core challenges someone has with their sense of self (e.g., identity, self-direction) and relationships (e.g., the ability to form and sustain close connections) and often carry stigma. Nobody wants to think that their personality is inherently disordered, flawed, or off-putting to others. In this post, I want to clarify what personality is and how we think about it at Riggs.
The Big Five Traits in Personality Science
The most common framework in the personality science literature is the Big Five, a collection of traits that have been repeatedly found to describe meaningful differences between people across different age ranges, languages, and cultures (Sun et al., 2018). The five traits include:
- Neuroticism – vulnerability to emotional instability, anxiety, depression, distress, etc.
- Conscientiousness – orderliness, reliability, responsibility, etc.
- Agreeableness – kindness, compassion, cooperativeness, etc.
- Openness to experience – creativity, willingness to risk new experiences, etc.
- Extraversion – assertiveness, friendliness, seeking out social experiences, etc.
While these traits describe how a person generally acts, feels, and behaves across a range of situations, they do not answer the deeper question of why a person behaves the way they do. For instance, someone who is introverted may value solitude and enjoy solitary activities, or they may struggle with tremendous social anxiety and rejection sensitivity in ways that are negatively affecting their daily life. The psychoanalytic approach to personality focuses on underlying motivations, ways of managing distress (i.e., defense mechanisms), and core conflicts that drive a person’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors (McWilliams, 2012).
Personality Style and Personality Organization
There are two ways to think about personality beyond the concept of personality disorder and specific traits:
- Personality Style – Everyone has a personality style influenced by temperament, attachment behaviors, identity, sense of agency, and characteristic ways of managing distress (Shapiro, 1965). For example, someone with an obsessive personality style may rationalize away negative emotions such as anger rather than expressing them directly. Rather than experiencing anger, they may talk about it in a detached, intellectualized way while keeping the emotion at arm’s length. Over time, this avoidance can contribute to anxiety and depression or other mental health challenges.
- Personality Organization – This concept (Kernberg, 2016) refers to the developmental capacities that evolve over a lifetime, including identity, values, reality testing, social cognition (i.e., the capacity to accurately discern the motivations and thoughts of others) and attachment style. Difficulties in personality organization can result in mood swings, unstable identity, maladaptive defenses, or temporary dissociation. These challenges often play a role in conditions like borderline personality disorder. Listen to this fascinating podcast interview with Carla Sharp, PhD, to learn more about personality organization and how researchers are rethinking the concept of personality disorders.
At Riggs, we are attentive to both aspects of a person’s personality; we try to learn about how someone’s personality style developed within a particular familial and sociocultural context, the way it serves a person and how it gets in the way of living a life of flourishing, which is fundamentally related to how someone handles distress.
Through the course of therapy, we aim to help individuals notice the ways they may reflexively avoid distress and find more adaptive ways of handling and tolerating pain. Of course, suffering is an unavoidable part of the human experience, and we all must make choices about how we relate to the pain of our own lives and the pain of those around us.
Moving Beyond the Stigma
One of the benefits of focusing on personality organization over personality disorders is that it reframes personality difficulties as challenges that are part of normal human development. Every human being is struggling to sort out who they are, what they value, how much of their pain they can handle, and how to communicate (or not communicate) it to others. Trusting that others will be there for you in moments of uncertainty is based on your personal history, experience of trauma, and potential moments of betrayal. We are all trying to contend with these questions and develop more robust capacities and new ways of thinking about ourselves and others to develop the resilience necessary to navigate our complex and complicated world.
At Riggs, our therapeutic approach encourages resilience by helping people understand how personality develops, how risk factors and life experiences play a role, and how treatment can foster healthier ways of relating to oneself and others.
Related Resources
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