What would you make of this person

[Absinthe]

Here's the Psychology enigma for the day :thumb001:

I have a colleague, who's 35 or 36 years old, amazingly looking for her age (she looks like a spitting image of Molly Parker: http://www.ridgefieldbusiness.com/celebpics/mollyparker.jpg)

and it makes one wonder how come she is not only single but she seems to fail in every single attempt to form a relationship with someone:

whereas she is popular with men, no dating seems to last longer than 1-2 weeks, and then they somehow seem to dissappear mysteriously.

Since I am writing the relationships column and she is my supervisor, she is in the habit of taking advantage of me constantly and bugging me for relationship advice, and everytime she does that, her stories always seem to be somewhat weird and incoherent...

Anyway here's some facts concerning her relationship patterns.

She gets overenthusiastic whenever she meets a new guy and takes it for granted that he's already into her.

She tends to be pushy and when things don't go her way, she tends to become avoidant and/or aggressive.

She tends to look way ahead in the relationship, stressing about possible future implications of, e.g., long distance, when she's only dated the guy twice.

Some random facts about her:

She is extremely loud to the point of being annoying as hell! :eek: She yells all the time, she laughs so hard that you can hear her from the next floor, she is generally rather flamboyant.

She seems to have anorexic tendencies as she is thin and with a body to die for (no kidding) and yet she always whines about having gained weight and how she needs to go on a diet.
If she has eaten chocolate the previous day, she will go on a guilt trip and be angry at herself for the following week, needless to say she will think that she gained 4 pounds because of a single chocolate bar.

She talks socially to the phone all day, neglecting her job and duties. Frequently, she talks too loud and everyone can hear about her private affairs.

She talks to herself and also sings to herself while being absent minded. No kidding. She is singing aloud all the time, like some people do in the bathtub, and one can hardly concentrate while working in the same room! :D
And what's worse, she seems to be doing it unconsciously, since she really gets mad when other people are noisy and disturbing her work, while she doesn't seem to realise that she is the noisiest of all! :p

I overhear her (can't help it, as she's screaming) arguing with a lady friend of hers, because they had arranged to go out and the friend decided to bring a male friend along.
She gave hell to her friend for that, because she wanted to be 'just the two of them' so that 'they can have a girly talk' and asked her 'why can't you meet your male friends on your own time', 'aren't I as important to you', and said 'she felt betrayed' and stuff like that.
In the end, she hung up the phone very pissed and mumbled 'what a bitch' for the next hour.
I am mentioning this incident because I thought of this girly misunderstanding to be extremely juvenile and hardly appropriate for a woman her age.

Now, during the first months around her I thought she was merely annoying, and a drama queen.

As time goes by I am beginning to suspect there is something more to it, and she probably needs proffessional help a.s.a.p.! :( I have my own ideas as to what her conditions might be, but since I am not the most objective observer, I would like to ask others about what they think...

Both psychiatric and general observations are highly welcome :) Thanks in advance...

[Angharad]

How long have you known her? It does sound like there is something wrong.

Sounds like bipolar in a manic or mixed episode or borderline personality disorder to me. I am not a counselor, but I do have a psych degree. Even if it isn't one of of those two disorders, she probably has some sort of personality disorder at least. Of course, I haven't seen her, so a real diagnosis isn't really possible. It could be something like histrionic personality disorder too.


There are several other mental disorders which may involve similar symptoms to bipolar disorder. These include schizophrenia,[11] schizoaffective disorder, drug intoxication, brief drug-induced psychosis, schizophreniform disorder and borderline personality disorder.

She sounds a lot like a girl I used to work with. :(

[Absinthe]

How long have you known her? It does sound like there is something wrong.

About 1,5 or 2 years, I think. It's gotten worse lately, at first it was more subtle and evident only to those who got to know her better.


Sounds like bipolar in a manic or mixed episode or borderline personality disorder to me.
...
It could be something like histrionic personality disorder too.


That was exactly what I was thinking!! :thumbs

Borderline personality disorder or Histrionic personality disorder as a general assessment, with manic episodes being predominant in her behavior from time to time.


I am not a counselor, but I do have a psych degree.

Likewise! :p


Even if it isn't one of of those two disorders, she probably has some sort of personality disorder at least.

:icon_ask:Surely she has issues. I don't know how to help her...I can't stand being near her long enough without feeling an urge to strangle her! :D:(

Thanks so much for your input!! :eyes

[Absinthe]

P.S. taking a closer look, I think I'll go with the Histrionic diagnosis...


The symptoms include:

* Constant seeking of reassurance or approval.
* Excessive dramatics with exaggerated displays of emotions.
* Excessive sensitivity to criticism or disapproval.
* Inappropriately seductive appearance or behavior.
* Excessive concern with physical appearance.
* A need to be the center of attention (self-centeredness).
* Low tolerance for frustration or delayed gratification.
* Rapidly shifting emotional states that may appear shallow to others.
* Opinions are easily influenced by other people, but difficult to back up with details.
* Tendency to believe that relationships are more intimate than they actually are.
* Making rash decisions.
* Threatening or attempting suicide[6]


My goodness she seems to be a textbook case... :eek:

[Absinthe]

Didn't know whether to start a new thread.

A woman is 28 years old, lives with her sister who is younger. Their mother is paying for a significant amount of their monthly expenses as the girls' paychecks are hardly enough for anything.

The woman in question, let's call her K., is a very kind-hearted, sweet and loveable person.
But she suffers from an extremely low-self esteem, and she has a rather distorted self image. For example, why she is at least pretty (I would say rather cute), she things that she is ugly as hell and is ashamed for her looks.

But let's take it from the start:

Parents divorced, both have new life partners now.

The father I have only heard of, he sounds like an OK person but he is not participating in his daughters' lives.

The mother....is an interesting case (most interesting for our case as well).

She is in her 50s, yet she almost looks younger than her daughters (seriously!:eek:), as she is extremely well preserved, face, body and all that...
Dresses sexy, perhaps a bit too sexy for her age, but without being tacky.

That is said because it seems as she invests 100% of her time in looking good, and she pushes her daughters to do the same.

I recently realised the mother is a gold digger, she has been living with a guy but she tries to manipulate him into marrying her so that she can get her hands on his fortune (she explicitely stated so).

She visits her daughters' house everyday in order to "keep an eye" on them (more likely, control them), and she manipulates/blackmail them into doing the things she wants for them.

The sister, is, I think, 22 or 23, and she took after the mother. She has that "JAP" thing...she's after wealthy guys, she wants rides with fancy cars, and she spends all of her money (the little that she makes) in brand clothes and all that.
Because she thinks that the more fashionably she is dressed, the wealthier the man she is going to lure into her arms.

She doesn't like her sister and she makes sure she lets her know everyday, by making derogatory comments, calling her a "tramp", useless, and all that.

Worse yet, even though they're living under the same roof and sharing expenses and all, the sister locks her bedroom and takes the key with her because she is afraid that K. "will steal from her".

K. is being constantly put down by both her mother and her sister. Goddamnit she sometimes reminds me of Cinderella! :eek:

They call her fat, ugly, useless, lazy, a tramp, a junky....all those being far from the truth!

The mother thinks her daughter is too stupid to study or do anything for herself, so she thinks the best way is to secure a retard job in the public service for her.

K. is now working for the 6th consecutive year, uninsured, with less than minumum wages, in 1-year trial positions her mother is finding for her in the public sector, hoping that eventually all those years spent in the public sector will ensure her a permanent position.

Once or twice she wanted to apply for better paying and more interesting jobs in the private sector but her mother heavily opposed to that and told her she would kick her out of the house if she did that!

K. has had a long history of going for the wrong men and ending up heart broken.

I need to stress here that she is craving for a stable, long-term relationship and she wants a family!!

However she always ends up with losers, playboys, rebels without a cause and all that.

She's had 2 or 3 relationships, one with a junky and the rest with men who didn't care for her and used her only for sex.

Her current boyfriend is, character-wise, kind of better compared to the previous ones, but still he's made it clear that he's not the "relationship" type.
As a result, K. is extremely insecurely attached to him, making matters even worse by crying and trying to change him, turn him into a potential family man, nagging him to death and thus averting him.

K. seems to be letting herself go, she gained weight and neglecting herself, she's losing the will to socialize (uses the financial issue as an excuse to stay more and more at home).

She frequently cries for no apparent reason and she seems to be more and more absent minded.

She is burning cigarettes on her hands and the scars are visible.

She started psychotherapy last year but quit it and she doesn't wanna go through it again.

Opinions + strategies for help?

[lei.talk]

Escape Your Rat Race by Martha Beck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Beck)

http://static.oprah.com/images/200901/omag/200901_omag_beck_220x312.jpgSheila and I are conversing at a drug treatment center, where she's been remanded. Counselors are listening, so we can't plan a way to break her out. As it happens, escape is the last thing on Sheila's mind. I'm not coaching her through the woes of being institutionalized for drug use but prepping her for her upcoming release.

"In here everything's simple," Sheila says. "Outside I'll have to deal with my crazy mom, get a job, pay the bills. I don't know how to handle that without drugs." When I ask her to picture a peaceful, happy life, Sheila draws a blank. "I can't imagine anything except what I've already seen," she says.

The despair in her voice is so heavy it makes me want to huff a little glue myself, but two things give me hope: a fabled land known in the annals of psychology as Rat Park, and a montage of other clients, once as hopeless as Sheila, who went on to live happy, meaningful lives. The concepts I learned from Rat Park, channeled through the behaviors I've seen in those courageous clients, just may transform Sheila's future.

But first, what is this mythic Rat Park (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park)? And how might it relate to you? The term comes from a study conducted in 1981 by psychologist Bruce Alexander and colleagues. He noted that many addiction studies had something in common: The lab rats they used were locked in uncomfortable, isolating cages. Testing a hunch, Alexander gathered two groups of rats. For the first, he built a 200-square-foot rodent paradise called Rat Park. There a colony of white Wister rats found luxurious accommodations for all their favorite pastimes—mingling, mating, raising pups, writing articles for newspaper tabloids. The second group was housed in the traditional cages.

Alexander offered both groups a choice of plain water or sugar water laced with morphine. Like rats in other studies, the traditionally caged animals became instant addicts. However, the residents of Rat Park tended to "just say no," avoiding the drug-treated sugar water. Even rats that were already addicted to morphine tended to lay off the hard stuff when in Rat Park. Put them back in their cages, however, and they'd stay stoned as Deadheads.

Alexander saw many parallels between these junkie rats and human addicts. He has talked of one patient who worked as a shopping mall Santa. "He couldn't do his job unless he was high on heroin," Alexander remembered. "He would shoot up, climb into that red Santa Claus costume, put on those black plastic boots, and smile for six hours straight."

This story jingles bells for many of my clients. Like Smack Santa, they spend many hours playing roles that don't match their innate personalities and preferences, dulling the pain with mood-altering substances. Miserable with their jobs, relationships, or daily routines, they gulp down a fifth of Scotch, buy 46 commemorative Elvis plates on QVC, superglue phony smiles to their faces, and head on out to whatever rat race is gradually destroying them.

Sheila was actually a step ahead of most of my clients, in that she knew she was locked up. Most people are trapped in prisons made of mind stuff—attitudes and beliefs such as "I have to look successful" or "I can't disappoint my dad." Ideas like these—being deeply entrenched and invisible—are often more powerful than physical prisons. When we're trapped in mind cages, gulping happy pills by the handful and fantasizing about lethally stapling coworkers, we rarely even consider that our unhappiness comes from living in captivity. And if we ever come close to recognizing the truth, we're stopped by a barrage of terrifying questions: "What if there's nothing better than this?" "What if I quit my job, lose my seniority, and end up somewhere even worse?" "What if I break off this relationship and end up alone forever?" "What if I get my hopes up and the big break never comes?"

When the alternatives are staying in the familiar cage or facing the unknown, trust me, most people choose the cage—over and over and over again. It's painful to watch, especially knowing that liberation is only a few simple steps away. If you suspect that you might need to engineer your own prison break, the following pieces of commonsense advice can set you free forever.

"I just don't think I'll ever find the right life for me," Sheila frets.

"Of course you won't!" I say. "How strange to think you would!"

It amazes me how often people use that phrase: "Find the right life." Would you walk into your kitchen hoping to find the right fried egg, the right cup of coffee, the right toast? Such things don't simply appear before you; they arrive because you rummage around, figure out what's available, and make what you want. (If you're rich, you can hire a chef and place your order, but you're still creating the result.)

Bruce Alexander's rats were hand-delivered into paradise. Lucky critters, indeed—but not nearly as lucky as Alexander himself, or the rest of us humans, who have the astonishing ability to envision and build Rat Parks. All animals are shaped by their environment, but we, more than any other species, can shape our environment right back. We can cook the egg, brew the coffee, paint the room, change the space. We can fabricate our Rat Parks, and we must, if we want them built to spec.

"But I don't know what I'm trying to build," Sheila protests when I tell her this. "How can I create something when I don't have a clue what it looks like?"

Time for commonsense suggestion number two.

I often invite clients to play the dead-simple game You're Getting Warmer, You're Getting Colder. The client leaves the room, and I hide a simple object—say, a key—in a tricky place, such as the inside of a cake. (Not that I would have done this with someone locked up. Like Sheila. Absolutely not.) When the client returns to the room, he almost invariably stands still, and asks, "What am I looking for?"

Obviously, I don't answer him. The only feedback I'll give is "You're getting warmer" or "You're getting colder." Eventually clients will start moving. Guided by the words warmer and colder, they quickly identify the general hiding area. Then there's a period of confusion, fueled by assumptions like "Well, she certainly wouldn't hide it in the cake." They go back and forth for a bit, then stop and demand, "Where is it?" Again, this gets them nothing. Peeved, they revert to following the "warmer/colder" feedback until they arrive at the object.

I've never had a client who didn't ultimately succeed. Not one.

My point: Life has installed within you powerful "getting warmer, getting colder" signals. When Sheila thought of leaving the treatment center, her tension, anxiety, and drug cravings soared. The time she had to serve was "warmer"; her outside life, "colder." Certain activities were freezing cold—dealing with her mother, working, paying bills. As we examined each of these, we found that her guidance system was giving her beautifully clear messages. For instance, being around sane noncriminals, even officials at the treatment center, felt "warmer" than Sheila's crazy dope-dealing mother. Working in the cafeteria, with its institutional predictability, was "warmer" than her old cocktail waitress job, where she'd flashed her flesh to elicit unpredictable tips from drunken customers. Living within her economic means felt "warmer" than credit card shopping sprees she couldn't afford.

True, Sheila was a long way from her own Rat Park. But with the knowledge that her navigation system was functioning perfectly, all she had to do was play her life as a game of You're Getting Warmer, You're Getting Colder. The same is true for you. It isn't necessary to know exactly how your ideal life will look; you only have to know what feels better and what feels worse. If something feels both good and bad, break it down into its components to see which are warm, which cold. Begin making choices based on what makes you feel freer and happier, rather than how you think an ideal life should look. It's the process of feeling our way toward happiness, not the realization of some Platonic ideal, that creates our best lives.

"My life is so far from perfect," Sheila says as we end our session. "I don't know if it's fixable."

She's ready to hear my third and last piece of commonsense advice.

This step is something I stole from philosopher and engineer Buckminster Fuller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller). Bucky, as his friends knew him, chose for his epitaph just three words: call me trimtab. Trim tabs are tiny rudders attached to the back of larger rudders that steer huge ships. The big rudders would snap off if turned directly, but, as Fuller famously said, "just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So…you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go."

Every life is a series of trim-tab decisions. Should you read tonight or watch TV? Choose what feels warmer. Self-help or thriller? Choose what feels warmer. Cuddle with the dog or banish him from the bed? Choose what feels (psychologically) warmer.

If you make mistakes, no problem; you'll soon feel colder and correct your course. Making consistent trim-tab choices toward happiness is what steers the mighty ship of your life into exotic ports, safe havens—in short, into every Rat Park you can imagine, and then some.

I say goodbye to Sheila not knowing whether she'll set her trim tabs toward happiness or back to her drug-abusing cage of a life. I've learned not to get my hopes up with humans, who aren't nearly as clear-sighted and authentic as rats. But our session reminds me to keep following my own tiny feelings and impulses to their distant and amazing destinations. So instead of worrying about Sheila—or me, or you—I'll choose to trust our powerful instincts, our desire to be happy, our amazing human capacity for invention. You may choose cynical despair instead—it's all the rage in intellectual circles—but if you care to join me,
I think you'll find it's a whole lot warmer over here in Rat Park.
*

[lei.talk]

K. seems to be letting herself go, she gained weight and neglecting herself, she's losing the will to socialize (uses the financial issue as an excuse to stay more and more at home).

She frequently cries for no apparent reason and she seems to be more and more absent minded.

She is burning cigarettes on her hands and the scars are visible.

She started psychotherapy last year but quit it and she doesn't wanna go through it again.

Opinions + strategies for help?even with my father out of the house,
the urge to hide in the attic
or in a box in the garage
or in the hall-closet to sleep
was - still - over-whelming.

my mother and younger brother
behaved with the same tensions:
he knew where we were
and could burst in at any moment.

they refused to change the situation
and, consequently, their behavior remained - unchanged.

i could not afford a house or apartment
and was psychologically unable to share one.

in my desperate search
for a hiding-place, i discovered
that many commercial buildings were less expensive
than residential buidings, in fact,

long-tenantless ware-houses next to the rail-road tracks
were surprisingly inexpensive
and extremely secure-able (metal doors, large internal-bolts and locks).

one day, while my brother was in class
and my mother was at work,
i dis-assembled my exercise and martial-arts equipment
and hauled it all the the ware-house
in a rented truck.

after returning to the house
for my station-wagon (http://www.stationwagon.com/gallery/pictures/1964_Chevy_Impala.jpg) full of books,
clothes, vitamins and my vita-mix (http://highlyedible.com/vita-mix_maxi-4000_500h.jpg)

and locking it behind the big metal delivery-door
in the ware-house with me -

i was alone = safe (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H84NrdRA8oo).

after a few years of sleep,
i boldly opened my palaestra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaestra) to other over-compensator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensation_(psychology))s
who shared the quest for invulnerability.

by the end of the seventies, i thought i was happy
because i had no idea
how much better life could be.

"Opinions + strategies for help?"

if "K" is unwilling to change her environment
or remove the exacerbating agents,
is there any reason to think she will become healthier?
*

[Sol Invictus]

Here's the Psychology enigma for the day :thumb001:

I have a colleague, who's 35 or 36 years old, amazingly looking for her age (she looks like a spitting image of Molly Parker: http://www.ridgefieldbusiness.com/celebpics/mollyparker.jpg)


Well as a matter of fact I used to date someone exactly like this. She's anorexic, thus really self conscious about her looks. She would flip out on the most trivial of things and would get really emotional when things don't go her way. She's extremely loud when she wants attention, and I think this girl may have some form of mental illness, other than the fact she is anorexic. That's something I find fascinating about these kinds of girls. If only they knew how good they look and how lovely the can be then would they really act the way they do?

This girl also sounds like she could be a lesbian, which is funny because we've always suspected my ex of being a lesbian too, since she always preferred the company of women, often talked dirty with women, and the sex with her was horrible.

They both need help.