Denial, Procrastination and Personality Disorders expect edits

[walkitout]

This is mostly a placeholder, to make sure I don’t forget to do some research, and possibly write something more formal later.

There’s some backstory, that I might get into in another post, but this morning A. had some questions about what I meant by personality disorder. I have my own definition of what a personality disorder is, that I have seen nowhere else: a characteristic way of Not Solving One’s Own Problems. If one’s default response to something not being the way they want it is to reassure themselves that They Are Smarter / Better than everyone else, that’s narcissistic personality disorder. If it’s to attack people, that’s Antisocial. If it’s to turn a / one’s closest relationship into drama about fear of being abandoned, that’s borderline. If it’s to reassure one’s that one is way hotter than everyone else / that one can “get” anyone they want, that’s histrionic. If it’s to get (a particular) someone else to solve the problem for them, that’s dependent. Schizotypal and and obsessive compulsive personality disorder work a little differently. _This isn’t really how these things are defined._ I am not a trained professional. Etc.

My theory about why DBT / CBT (ugh, acronyms — basically therapeutic approaches that directly engage with the impaired ability to solve problems, and attempt to improve that ability to solve problems, through a variety of strategies) is effective is basically that there’s a bad habit (I have a problem — do unproductive thing) that needs to be replaced with a more useful habit (I have a problem — spin up the Problem Solving Process), but you can’t do the replacement habit until you _have the replacement_. DBT / CBT creates a replacement, and then tries to do the substitution. DBT / CBT work better when they are more tailored and the replacement is a really good replacement, which is why seemingly magical stuff like Do What Works and The Miracle Question are so weirdly effective. This was also the underlying strategy in my advice book: probably at least one part of your life (work / friends / intimate relationships) is working okay; can you translate what works in that environment into something related that will work in other areas of your life?

(I know, you’re thinking, I thought you weren’t going to tell the backstory. The backstory was actually totally something else.)

A. asked: Is Procrastination a Personality Disorder?

I’m like, what? Then immediately went, okay what did she think. She asked what’s a personality disorder. I said, characteristic way of not solving a problem. She thought, procrastination is a way of not solving a problem. Is procrastination a Personality Disorder?

I’m like, not usually thought of that way, and I need to do some research, but I think you have a really novel and good idea here. I think basically Denial (there is no problem), Procrastination (I’ll deal with it later) and then the other Personality Disordered ways of interacting with Life are a continuum of Not Solving One’s Problems.

I would add: fatalism and miracle/wishful thinking probably belong in there somewhere, too.

So there’s the idea, and I will be pursuing the research end of this later.

ETA: Oh, hey! I totally forgot about Avoidant Personality Disorder!

Comments

[ethelmay]

I've always seen procrastination as related to anxiety, and sometimes a trauma response - a form of "freeze" as in fight/flight/freeze. I think of it as a symptom more than a pathology in itself. It's also pretty common in people who either have actual learning differences, or aren't being taught appropriately, or both, and hence aren't mastering skills such as how to chunk tasks. (It still makes me upset to think of all the teachers I had who seemed to have no idea that there were study skills I simply didn't have, but could learn perfectly well if explicitly taught them.)

It comes in a lot of forms.

[walkitout]

Procrastination is a super common response to missing skills that have not been explicitly taught / identified as needing to learn. Task breakdown is a skill that is almost never taught, and if you have a task that is not broken down enough, procrastination is what almost _everyone_ will do in response.

That said, it is not _always_ I Don’t Know How to Do X Because I Never Learned And Do Not Even Realize I Need to Learn That Thing. Every. Single. Year. The house gets super clean, as R. and I both avoid doing the taxes. Actually, a couple times a years, but that’s a whole other thing. We know how to do the taxes. It’s not actually that hard. We have everything we need to do the taxes by the time we start cleaning instead of doing them. And yet, there we are. We even have the money to pay any owing, so it’s not that, either.

But I don’t _generally_ procrastinate — it’s situation specific for me. Procrastinating situationally isn’t a Personality Disorder, any more than a hostile response to unwanted touching is a Personality Disorder, or worrying that someone’s spouse is about to abandon one is not Borderline Personality Disorder if that occurs in the context of recent, increasing absence both physically and emotionally from the relationship and efforts to find out what is going on fail, and credit card statements display frightening patterns of spending and lipstick on your collar and insert country music song lyrics here. People who spend a couple years losing weight and getting into really good shape and buying a new wardrobe and getting a better hairstyle and so forth do not therefore have Histrionic Personality Disorder when they go to a party and survey the crowd and think with pleasure that they are the hottest XX year old there, or whatever.

The Personality Disorder part is the “characteristic thing you do _rather_ than engage with a problem to come up with a satisfactory strategy to mitigate it”.

Basically, if you procrastinate as a knee jerk reflexive response to any internal or external, oh, hey, I should do a Thing, _that’s_ a problem. If you procrastinate about some things cause you hate them, that may also be a problem, but probably isn’t a Personality Disorder. Procrastinating about things you don’t know how to do could be either of those problems OR it could turn INTO a Personality Disorder, if you basically give up on ever doing anything, in favor of procrastinating in hopes that the problem goes away. DSM is clear that these things only count as mental illness if it is interfering with your ability to function in a couple different areas in your life (having a job, having a family, etc.) over an extended period of time and efforts to change that haven’t been successful so far.