Transcending the Personality Disordered Parent - Randy A. Sansone, MD

[ScarletOlive]

Transcending the Personality Disordered Parent Author: Randy A. Sansone, MD & Michael W. Wiederman, PhD Publisher: Mindful Publications, LLC (January 21, 2013) Paperback: 228 pages ISBN-10: 0981853404 ISBN-13: 978-0981853406

Book Description
This book looks at personality disorders and how the concept applies to your parent. After laying out the essential features of personality disordered parents, the authors describe two in-depth cases. Each case illustrates one of two personality disorder styles that are unfortunately common: the intrusive personality style and the distant-hostile personality style. The authors offer a number of practical tactics for psychologically and spiritually transcending the problematic past of having been raised by a parent with a personality disorder.

"This book is designed to offer supportive guidance on the path of recovery from toxic parent-child relationships." ~ Dr. Wiedermen

Chapter 1 Personality Disordered Parents
Chapter 2 Social Foolers and Outright Liars
Chapter 3 Reacting, Not Responding
Chapter 4 It's All About Me, Me, Me
Chapter 5 Bullies and Victims
Chapter 6 Adding Children
Chapter 7 The Intrusive Parent
Chapter 8 The Distant-Hostile Parent
Chapter 9 Psychological Transcendence
Chapter 10 Spiritual Transcendence
Chapter 11 Embracing the Path

About the Authors
Randy A. Sansone, M.D., is a professor of psychiatry and internal medicine at Wright State University School of Medicine in Dayton, OH. Dr. Sansone has published more than 400 articles and book chapters. He co-edited the books Self-Harm Behavior and Eating Disorders and Personality Disorders and Eating Disorders, and co-authored the book Borderline Personality Disorder in the Medical Setting. Dr. Sansone has maintained an active interest in the treatment and research of personality disorders throughout his career.

Michael W. Wiederman, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Columbia College, an all-women's college in Columbia, SC. Dr. Wiederman has published more than 200 articles on a wide range of topics, including gender, sexuality, body image, and disordered eating. He authored the book Understanding Sexuality Research, co-authored The Complete Guide to Graduate School Admission: Psychology, Counseling, and Related Fields (2nd ed.), and co-edited the Handbook for Conducting Research on Human Sexuality.

[Maytree]

This is a pretty good book and probably worth your time if you have a parent with BPD and/or NPD, but I feel like I should give a couple of qualifiers before recommending it whole-heartedly.

First, the good points:  In many ways this is a solid, concise primer on what it's like to grow up with a personality-disordered parent. It doesn't try to classify parents according the the current 10 "personality disorders" in the DSM-IV-TR (which, given that those are being rearranged and dismantled in the DSM-V, was probably a good call.) Instead it divides personality-disordered parenting into two broad categories: The "intrusive-overwhelming" parent (more like a BPD) and the "distant-hostile" parent (more like an NPD). The book describes the main characteristics of the personality-disordered parenting style and then gives two detailed case histories, one of each "type": a mother who is essentially a borderline, and a father who is extremely narcissistic.   

The book also does not shy away from the notion of going "no contact" with personality disorder parents -- if anything, it's in favor of this approach, referring to this process as a "parent-ectomy."  It also acknowledges that you may have to distance or separate yourself from siblings or other family members who are enmeshed with the personality disordered parent and that this will probably be difficult and frightening (but ultimately worth it in most cases.) The authors also reject the canard of "Your parent was just doing the best he/she could," acknowledging that that probably wasn't the case and isn't an excuse anyway.   

Another thing I really liked is that the authors stressed the "social face" of the typical personality disordered parent, and how difficult and confusing this is for the child to see. They refer often to the "Jekyll and Hyde" nature of personality disorder parents who can behave well most of the time in open society or in their jobs but completely change when at home in the family setting. 

Okay, now for the bad points. There are two, one relatively minor and one that really bugged me, although it might not bug everyone.

The small matter was that the book didn't really have a lot of new information or ideas for me because I've read so much on this topic already.  Most of the info was pretty basic, although it was condensed and presented well -- it might, for example, make an excellent first book for an adult sibling of yours when you want to broach the subject of your disordered parent's patterns of behavior, or even for a well-read teenager.  But if you have done a lot of reading about BPD and/or NPD, you won't find too much here that's new to you.  About the only thing I ran across that struck me as new and interesting was an idea the authors put forth regarding a possible psychological mechanism for the "Jekyll and Hyde" nature of these parents: namely, one of "cognitive fatigue", which is to say that since behaving well -- in a non-raging socially acceptable manner -- is foreign to the basic personalities of these people, it takes enormous effort and attention for them to "act normal" during their regular work day and when around outsiders, and by the time they get home they're exhausted from the effort and simply don't have the strength (or motivation) it takes to rein in their nastier true personalities. They're inflexible, so they never internalize "decent" behavior and it never become normal and (relatively) effortless for them the way it does for psychologically healthy people. It's always a strain, and thus it always takes willpower for them to behave decently, and willpower is something that people have a limited supply of in each day.  I don't know if that idea is correct, but I thought it was interesting anyway.

The bigger problem with the book -- for me, at least -- was in the last couple of chapters where the authors talk about making a "spiritual" recovery from this kind of parenting. They made a very minor effort to address psychological recovery (mostly advice on the necessity of separating from such parents) but it was extremely basic; they did not provide any exercises or practical suggestions of any kind for dealing with the rampant psychological and emotional issues being parented by a personality-disordered individual can cause.  In the "spiritual" recovery part, they take an Eastern (quasi-Buddhist) approach and talk a lot about mindfulness and meditation, which is fine -- but they also talk about "purpose" and "forgiveness" in ways that set my teeth on edge.

The "purpose" part tells the offspring of these people to view their upbringings as "gifts" or "purposeful", as if there is some kind of greater meaning to what they've been put through.  That idea is one I emphatically reject.  I think that the ability of human beings to learn and grow from suffering is a miraculous thing, one of the best things about human beings -- but that doesn't mean the suffering is "purposeful" or that there is any kind of meaning or pattern to it.  The authors edge up to -- but do not actually go so far as to state -- the idea that "we choose our parents", which as I feel is a horribly abusive idea that shifts responsibility for the abuse to the child who in some supernatural way "chose" to have crappy parents because they "needed to learn" something for some greater spiritual purpose or journey. Even reincarnation is mentioned, which really got my eyebrows rising. (I mean, what horribleness CAN'T be washed away by saying, "Oh well, you did something in a past life to deserve this, and in your future life you will be better for having had this horrible experience!" Until we can prove that there are "other lives", it's immoral to do anything but focus on the life you have RIGHT HERE AND NOW, guys!) 

Saying that it's possible to learn and grow from suffering doesn't make the suffering "worth it" unless you freely choose it.   If someone sold you into slavery doing hard labor and then you were freed ten years later, what would you think of some joker going up to you and saying, "Well, hey, look at the great washboard abs you got from all the exercise! Wasn't the suffering worth it?"  HELL NO.  If I want to suffer in the gym to get washboard abs I'll do that of my own free choice and without coercion, thanks very much! 

So I am very much NOT on board with regarding human suffering as "necessary" or "purposeful" or "important".  It's none of those things.  But of course, there were people a hundred years ago who thought that using anesthesia for surgery would lead to the corruption of the human spirit by relieving people of the suffering God "wanted" us to experience.  Okay, if YOU want to have abdominal surgery without anesthesia, you go right ahead... .   me, I'd prefer to be unconscious. 

As you can probably tell, I get pretty irritated by people whose psychological response to the inevitability of human suffering is to basically throw up their hands and say, "Well... .   suffering MUST be good for us, because there's so much of it!"  Please, spare me.

Then the authors jumped on the "forgiveness" bandwagon.  To be sure, they did acknowledge that due to conflicting definitions of what it means to "forgive" someone, that this is a difficult and complex topic.  Given that they were coming from a quasi-Buddhist viewpoint, however, I would have expected them to use the much more appropriate (and baggage-free) word "detachment" for the concept they were trying to convey.  To an audience raised in a Christian cultural context, "forgiveness" generally means "I have forgiven you so our relationship will return to the way it was before the offense", which is never a good idea with an abuser.  ":)etachment", on the other hand, says "I'm not going to take revenge on you for that, but I think we should go our separate ways now and each try to be happy in our own way. Goodbye."   The authors don't make this distinction and in fact their whole discussion of "forgiveness" is really muddy and unclear.

So, to sum up:  A pretty good, concise, and clear description of the issue of personality-disordered parenting, but look out for the overly-simplistic (and rather condescending... .   )  "spiritual recovery" advice in the last two chapters. In fact, you can just skip those chapters entirely and you won't be missing out, in my opinion.