What causes personality disorder? Nature, Nurture, or both?

[Guest guest]

The most recent scientific research is tending toward the conclusion that

personality disorders are caused by inheriting a genetic *predispostion* for

personality disorder that is then triggered by abnormal home environment (ie:

abusive parenting): a combination of " nature " and " nurture " causes pds to

develop.

The older school of thought that has been popular for a long time is that most

mental illnesses are caused *only* by the environment: its purely our early

developmental treatment (abusive parenting) that causes pds to develop.

But me personally, I think that genes are the key determining factors of both

the personality and personality disorders by a long shot.

My nada's parents were ordinary, unremarkable, stable, mentally healthy people.

Both of my nada's sibs are mentally healthy; their kids are mentally healthy.

Neither of my nada's sibs corroborate her stories of abuse and neglect; they are

bewildered by her claims. My own personal experience of my grandparents was

that they weren't scary, abusive, mean, or neglectful. I think my nada was just

unlucky enough to inherit two sets of recessive " pd " genes when it was her turn

at the genetic roulette wheel.

In the same way that two brown-eyed parents have a one-in-four chance of

producing a blue-eyed child at each conception if each parent carries the

recessive blue-eyed gene, I think that my grandparents must have carried

recessive genes for pd and my nada just happened to hit the pd jackpot when that

particular egg and sperm got together.

My father on the other hand should have been a raging narcissist but grew up to

be a sweet, thoughtful, loving, rescuer kind of guy who was also something of a

dishrag. His childhood was awful. During the Great Depression my dad's father

committed a crime and ran from the law, abandoning his family to starve. This

crushed and shamed my dad, and he suddenly found himself the " man " of the family

at age 12/13. His mother depended on him heavily for emotional support and gave

permission for him to join the navy at age 16 so he could send his paycheck home

to feed them. His mother and his sibs lionized my dad, thought he could walk on

water, and yet he didn't become a self-centered, narcissistic bully. Many years

later, when I was about 4, my dad's father turned up on our doorstep dying of

alcoholism, and my father took him in. That shows the kind of character my dad

really had: he was a good person and about as mentally healthy as anyone could

hope to be.

My Sister and I don't seem to have inherited any of the Cluster B personality

disorders, thank God, although we have both been severely damaged by our nada.

We survived our upbringing carrying some bpd fleas but we're delousing

ourselves. We have PTSD symptoms, low self-esteem, stress-related illnesses and

conditions (propensity for migraine headaches, etc.) But neither of us, thank

God, have the negatively-skewed perceptions, black-and-white thinking, emotional

dysregulation, or the sense of entitlement to be the center of attention at all

times that our nada has. Neither of us have at our core an empty, unfillable

black hole of need. Neither of us feel justified in hurting other people just

because we ourselves feel hurt. We are both extremely grateful for this, and we

feel blessed to have dodged the pd bullet. My Sister's son, whom she raised

alone as a single mom, turned out really great. We are so proud of him. He

worked his way through college, is a young husband and expecting his first child

toward the end of the month. My Sister did a great job with him; fortunately he

had very little exposure to our nada growing up.

So from my own personal experience, which is of course anecdotal and not a

scientific study, I lean toward the theory that genetics plays a more dominant

role than how we were treated, in how mentally healthy we are. I believe that

some people arrive in this world with all their brain wiring functioning

properly and with more resilient to stress, and that others come out of the

womb with bad wiring or missing wiring and more vulnerability to stress.

But I understand that the genetics-as-key-factor theory is still in the early

stages of study and its not accepted by the general medical and psychiatric

community at this point; its also highly controversial and politically incorrect

to propose that people are " born with emotional impairments " although its clear

that some people are born with intellectual and physical impairments.

The " hard " sciences like brain studies and genetics studies just have more

appeal for me and hold out more hope to me for curing or preventing personality

disorders in the future, more than the " soft " sciences like psychiatry.

-Annie

> so what caused her bpd, was it like my nada, trying to control other people?

>