How to Survive a Relationship with a Loved One with Personality Disorders

When you are dealing with loved ones with Personality Disorders, you experience excruciating headaches from their behaviors which "do not make sense." The headaches are similar to a "hangover" acquired from consuming too much alcohol. When intoxicated, not only is it an unpleasant physical experience, it is also affects your moods, mental and emotional states. You feel queasy, irritable, anxious and sick. Like a hangover, you feel guilty and a fool.

Emotional hangovers are recurring negative thoughts that you cannot get out of your mind. It becomes distorted over time. It results from being the "shock absorber" of the rages of your loved ones with personality disorders. Emotional hangovers haunt and torment you. Emotional hangovers cause you to feel self-pity and put you in despair. Emotional hangovers make you feel stuck. You cannot move forward in your goals in life. It cripples you.

What are examples of emotional hangovers? How can you get rid of these emotional hangovers?

The examples of distorted thought processes include the following according to Kathryn J. Hermes, author of Surviving Depression:

1. "all-or-nothing thinking or black-and-white thinking", no in-betweens
2. generalizing into conclusions just based on one evidence
3. everything is a catastrophe
4. feeling of being controlled
5 interpreting everything as reflecting on one self
6. preconceived idea of what is fair
7. reasons emotionally over logically
8. demanding change from someone else
9. own perception of the rules of life
10 overly pondering what the other person is thinking

The first step is to stop being intoxicated with the emotional roller coaster ride of this relationship with someone with Personality Disorder. Your loved ones with Personality Disorders thrive in drama. You will be sucked in like a vacuum to the emotional chaos if you do not accept that Personality Disorders are illnesses that need professional help both for the sufferers and for the loved ones.

In dealing with your chaotic relationship, you must always seek "calmness". Any therapeutic intervention prioritizes putting the person in crisis to emotional calmness. This is the first course of action. But, your loved one cannot be calm if you look stressed out, feel agitated and too much affected by your loved one's outbursts.

What will bring you to a state of calmness?

You have to take your fears one day at a time. If you stretch your mind to the future and let emotional hangovers stay with you, you cannot get out of this disturbing state.

A "prayer regimen" can lead you away from the torments. Thousands of prayers are in existence to help us meditate and be at peace. The Bible also contains many verses that can bring you to another world where your heart can calm down. Do not even try to do anything else until you achieve this "peace".

If you pray for the person who hurt you so badly, you will find yourself getting rid of your emotional hangovers. When you bless instead of cursing back the person who just cursed you, then you do not allow yourself to go down to their level. It is only in this way that you can forgive this person. Forgiveness is a practice of being at peace.

In dealing with personality disorders, both the sufferer and the caregivers find themselves in the dark nights of depression, hopelessness, and loneliness. The desolation feels desperate that it is very difficult to even think of prayer. The sufferer of mental illness feels unworthy of God or the people that care and loved them.

The sufferers and loved ones of those with Personality Disorders may have done their part and begged God for their healing. As a result, when they are not cured through their spiritual efforts, they question God's mercy and become very bitter. "Where is God? Why is He not healing me? I am probably a bad person." Thus, they sink deeper in their depression and they distance themselves from God. In their anguish, they compare their present desolate states to their once useful and productive lives.

Depression is just a temporary period in one's life. It might recur or come back for most of a person's life, some can never leave the state completely. In the same way, with Personality Disorders, it is sometimes too difficult to comprehend. Some will look at Personality Disorders only from the perspective of mental health, but there is a spiritual dimension in order to understand, deal and heal from Personality Disorders.

It is very easy to condemn your loved one with Personality Disorders who has caused your life so much misery. It is easy to get into the habit of holding on to their unfair treatment and actions. But, we must let go and forgive ourselves and our loved ones who has caused us direct harm for healing to happen.

Healing requires the removal of emotional hangovers in your life, acceptance of the realities of the personality disorder and understanding the spiritual realm where the disorder operates. Your emotional health will depend on your recognition of the point when Personality Disorder has reached "abuse". Abuse is evil. Do not let your loved one convince you otherwise.

Source:

Kathryn J. Gernes, ESP, Surviving Depression