What deforms our personality?

Usually they talk about professional deformation — when one competence develops to the detriment of other personality traits. For example, the surgeon becomes too cold-blooded, and this may look like cynicism. The therapist, on the other hand, is so understanding that he loses the healthy aggression and the ability to be firm, necessary to protect personal boundaries.

Or the teacher, with his ability to notice mistakes, gets used to giving marks to everyone and always, even when he is not asked about it.

As for personality deformations in general, there is no such term in the international classification of diseases. Psychologists usually talk about neurosis or personality disorder. Personal disorder is a violation of order, structure, when the entire structure of dealing with oneself and with the world is deformed.

The deformations that occur in the first seven years of life leave a particularly deep mark, disrupt the very process of formation and maturation of the personality. These structural distortions tend to be very persistent and are referred to as personality disorders (PDs). And the deformations that arise in the next seven years are a little less profound and are called neuroses. What are the causes of these deformations?

Relationship quality

Each of us is born with our own unique psychodynamic pattern. Everyone has a predisposition to certain feelings and behaviors. One is already nimble from birth, the other is slow. One is hardy, and the other grows more reverent, vulnerable, it has a low threshold of sensitivity. Growing up, we gradually recognize ourselves and adapt to these innate features, learn how to deal with them somehow.

In childhood, the ways of dealing with oneself and the world are set by adults. And not with unfounded attitudes, but with their behavior and lifestyle. For example, a critical, intolerant attitude of a mother to a child forms the same attitude in him. Is this a personality disorder? Undoubtedly.

We often hear that the sports or, say, ballet world is cruel, it can break a child, makes him more aggressive, and gives rise to intrapersonal conflicts. However, it is not sports, not music lessons, not other external circumstances that deform a person, but the attitude of significant adults.

Here is a typical example from life. A successful metropolitan businessman forces his son to go swimming. The boy trains five hours a day, six days a week, because his dad set him the task of getting into the youth team of the city. At the age of 13, the son says: «I won’t swim anymore.» And then dad starts to terrorize him. He says: «I will deprive you of pocket money!» The son replied: “I don’t need money.” The father insists: «Then I will not pay for the school in which you like to study so much.»

There is no dialogue at all in these relationships. Dad went through an era of capital accumulation in his youth and realized that only the strong survive. He wants his son to be like that. But times have changed. The father prepares his son for the conditions of war, and he wants to live a peaceful life in completely peaceful circumstances. Intensive studies become violence for him. Even if this boy still gets into the national team, he will be undermined from the inside, broken. And the father does not even think about the fact that now he is doing something wrong in relation to his son. He himself was treated in this way as a child, and his character has long been deformed.

Overload or misunderstanding?

Ballet, sports, music lessons or school lessons can deform the child’s personality not because he encounters violence and great overloads there, but primarily because of the painfully pathological attitude of the parents: “you must”, “you must”, “if if you miss one lesson, I will deprive you (and then choose what exactly).

If the meaning that adults put into this work is alien or not clear to the child, he can become a successful athlete or famous musician, but he will remain an unhappy person for life. He was left alone with a difficult situation, and everything he did was associated in his subjective world with violence, with years of misunderstanding and insensitivity of loved ones.

And vice versa, the most serious trials (be it a betrayal of a friend, an unfair punishment, a deafening failure or sudden fame) will not break a child if there is someone nearby who will share, discuss his problems with him, help him find new meanings and resources, offer a way out. For example, this wise adult will try to save the child from a traumatic situation. Or help overcome fatigue and the desire to quit classes. Or find a team, a school where the coach is better. Or support in a conflict with the coach, because there is a reason to endure his tough dictatorship.

Of course, we are talking about activities that suit the temperament and abilities of the child. If parents, sending a physically weak son to gymnastics, and a daughter without fine hearing to violin lessons, demand high results from them, then the cause of personality disorders should be sought precisely in their blindness, and not in the harsh requirements of teachers.

Perhaps hours of training will develop the child’s will and discipline. But something more will be taken away — the opportunity to do what is more suitable, to enjoy what you love. And they will probably form a great sense of guilt — due to the fact that they did not live up to the hopes of their parents.

Force of circumstances

How much a traumatic situation will affect a person depends on two circumstances:

1. On how intense and regular (or prolonged) its impact will be.

2. From individual predisposition.

One child can take on the manipulative attitude of a narcissistic parent towards himself and grow up to be just as cold, selfish, devoid of empathy for others. And another child of the same parent, on the contrary, will grow up depressive, sensitive to pain, although in other circumstances it could turn out to be cheerful, soft.

Restore balance

Each of us has our own deformities and weaknesses. For example, the inability to correlate reality and fantasy. Many young mothers like to draw beautiful pictures in their imagination: “Today my child and I are going to visit a friend, I put on a beautiful dress, he falls asleep, and my friend and I drink wine and chat about love.” But as soon as she has time to put on a dress, the child begins to cry. He does not want to sleep, does not want to eat, his mother is angry with him for ruining «such a moment.» Which actually had nothing to do with reality.

Do our deformities require correction, correction?

It largely depends on whether we ourselves see the problem in violations. For example, with some of our qualities, we can coexist for many years. But if they begin to interfere with us or our relations with others, we still need to gather our strength, see these violations, recognize them. And then — try to track the moments when these weaknesses and deformations “wake up” in us.

It is important to understand: what has already been formed, what has crashed into the structure of our personality, will not disappear.

But we have a choice — to allow these impulses and memories to control our actions and our lives or not. No matter how harsh, unpleasant, erroneous act we have committed, we have the opportunity to pull ourselves together, apologize, admit guilt and reconsider our decision.