Here is the full transcript of Fiann Paul’s talk titled “Gifts of Wounds And Personality Disorders Traits” at TEDxBend conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
“Life’s blade Deep cuts Many to burden and dust Some into diamonds”
I wrote this haiku, and I would like it to indicate that we know a lot about the burden of the wounds that we carry and how we struggle with them. Personality disorders from a social point of view are perceived as something dysfunctional. But I would like to focus on the gifts of wounds and personality disorders traits that I metaphorically related to as diamonds.
And I would like to take us on a journey to find out that maybe some of these traits set someone on a mission to the moon or on a mission to liberate our planet from the trap of fossil fuels. I am an explorer and an endurance athlete, and for a lengthy amount of time, I need to endure environments that look like this.
When I started organizing my own expeditions, I learned what kind of personality traits I am looking for in order to identify the best candidate for a team member, and I was surprised to find out later, when I learned psychology, that all these traits are listed there on the maps of personality disorders.
So I realized that I’m looking for immunity to hardship, compulsion to perform, preference of solitary activities, master at self-preservation. So I basically realized that I am looking for crazy people and that I am cultivating craziness myself, but to be precise: crazy enough, because today, we don’t talk anymore about disorders in the binary mode, as in we have it or we don’t have it. But we are talking about the continuum of the disorder and the traits of the disorder, and we all are somewhere on this continuum.
I decided to highlight here the disorders that offer some gifts – not all of them do, and not everybody manages to harvest them, but many do – and I will focus on these today. I dare to consider that these traits were strictly linked to endurance hunting, and possibly, from the evolutionary perspective, genetically reinforces preferable ones.
Endurance hunting is not only related to the origin of the endurance performance of humankind, but in my opinion, it is also essentially related to the origin of the humankind itself. Endurance is the only aspect of physical performance where humans can outperform all the other land mammals – not speed, not strength, not explosive power, but endurance. Physicality apart, I decided to investigate the most contributing individuals in history and find out whether they also displayed any of these traits. And I was shocked to find out that they not only displayed some of these traits, but actually, their contributions were based on these traits.
Psychopathy
I will start with something easy to grasp: A person who cuts human hearts with a blade remains calm and focused and emotionally detached, it must be a psychopath, right? Indeed – so must be a cardiac surgeon. Indeed. But it is a very positively and constructively channeled psychopathy. The gifts of this skill are splendid, and the contribution to humanity is vital. We need it exactly this way. Psychopathy is defined as complete shutdown of feeling function. When we completely shut down feeling function, we are capable of doing pretty odd things.
Schizoid Personalities
Through deeper psychological prism, I would like to introduce the most explicit example of wounds and contribution: schizoid personalities. Schizoid shouldn’t be confused with schizophrenic – that’s a different thing. Schizoids are those who not only manage to harvest some of the gifts of wounds, some of the diamonds, but they’re actually those thanks to whom – and I would dare to say only thanks to whom – the entire civilization progressed.
What made them capable of contributing so much? If you think of 10 most prominent scientists, nine of them will be either schizoid personalities or very high on the schizoid continuum. Imagine you’re playing a role-playing game, and imagine that just as it is in a role-playing game, you have certain amount of skill points and you need to dispose them into different skill bars in order to constitute the character and the attributes of the character, and imagine you put all these skill points into one particular area, which in the case of schizoid personalities most frequently happens to be intellectual capacity.
As a result, you have an individual who is elevated to the level of genius in one particular area but is pretty miserable in the most basic aspects of life. But as a result, this person can climb to the top of the skill bar and share the gifts from the top of the mountain that harmoniously developed individual wouldn’t be capable of climbing. When we research personality disorders, we will come across symptoms, and symptoms are very incomplete when it comes to understanding the whole complexity of it. What’s really revealing are causes, causes that expose the machinery behind the drive of the psyche.
And when it comes to causes, we learned that schizoid personalities were wounded the deepest among all the personality disorders in the earliest and the most critical stage of personality development – in the infancy. And as a result, the access to the most basic aspects of life is denied. If it was a role-playing game, we will talk about adventure skills, but because it is life, we are talking about life skills, such as connectedness, intimacy, bonding, sexuality, physicality, emotionality.
And lack of possibility to initiate development in these particular areas – and they are denied because they either triggered the wound or they threatened the ego, so it’s not safe to go there – is overcompensated to overdevelopment in one area that is safe and allows this development to happen. Among many intriguing features, schizoid personalities often happen to choose difficulty as preferable lifestyle because it helps them to reenact the difficulty of the origin that is perceived as native so it psychologically feels homey.
And if another aspect of life is chosen for overcompensation – something slightly more physical than intellectual capacity – then this person will be climbing this top of the skill bar that I mentioned, free solo.
OCPD Personalities
Next swing of the life blade: OCPD personalities. OCPD shouldn’t be confused with OCD. These are different things. OCD is a person who compulsively washes hands 30 times a day; OCPD, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, is a person who is characterized by compulsion to perform and being completely and constantly task and goal oriented and having no access to leisure mode, among many other attributes. If you think of 10 most prolific entrepreneurs, eight of them were either OCPD personalities or very high on the OCPD continuum.
What made them capable of creating this impressive enterprises? Imagine that all the love, care, passion, time, attention, energy, focus that you dedicated to your dear ones – to your family, to your friends, to your children – imagine you dedicated all to your enterprise. It’s an incredible amount of passion and potential, and individuals fueled by this passion can work 16 hours a day and may happen to manage to elevate this enterprise to the rank of international empire.
But again, causes will be more revealing than symptoms, and when we look at causes, it is that OCPD personalities deploy this strategy of being constantly busy and work oriented in order to avoid connecting to something that’s perceived as frightening, painful, or difficult, usually in the emotional realm of past or presence. It is a very effective strategy; to put it simple, if we don’t want to feel or think about something that hurts, we make ourselves constantly busy. Each of us must have done it a couple of times in life, right?
It works. But it is again very positive, productive and constructive strategy because dark version of the same strategy deployed for the same agenda could be addiction. For a reason, even when it comes to semantics, alcoholic and workaholic share common denominator. And further into semantics, the word “business” indicates one’s choice to be rather busy, and it’s very relevant here.
Narcissistic Personality
Next swing of the life’s blade: narcissistic personality. What I’ve learned during my expeditions is that narcissism is very well defined by self-preservation, and self-preservation is defined as effort to protect oneself from being destroyed or harmed. We all need certain amount of self-preservation. That’s absolutely necessary for healthy functioning. It could be labelled as “healthy narcissism.”
When we have no self-preservation whatsoever, as some claim they have no narcissism whatsoever – and some really do – then they fall on the other end of the continuum: dependent personality traits, deficiency of self-preservation. Neither is better because either you harm others or you allow others to harm you; in the end, somebody’s being harmed – the overall balance is the same. As an explorer, you need excessive amounts of self-preservation to maintain yourself for a lengthy amount of time in a completely uninhabitable environment without injury, period.
It’s an unavailable skill for regular people. But where science went wrong is where it assumed that this excessive self-preservation needs to manifest itself as excessive careful looks, as it was in the case of mythical Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection, and from where the name “narcissism” was derived. This excessive self-preservation typically is a response to excessive devaluation in the childhood, among environmental factors.
And it’s not even the only one, but it’s the main one – I’m simplifying it – or the common one, and it can be processed in different aspects of life, such as fame, power, status, wealth. And these individuals are not necessarily obsessed about their physical appearance, but they properly cultivate narcissism, and therefore, I would like to postulate renaming “narcissistic personality disorder” into “excessive self-preservation,” just like “borderline” was properly renamed into “emotional instability” because it would help in two ways: One, it would help to indicate the right context when it comes to grasping the complexity and the background of it.
Two, it would help to initiate the healing process because it would help one understand that “okay, I was excessively devalued, and I decided to overprotect myself. I raised my guards up. I never managed to put them down. I decided to attack others, abandon, or devalue them before they devalue me because these are the ways of cultivating my self-preservation” – it gives valid clues. Now, I mentioned where OCPD or schizoid people contribute to our humanity, but where do narcissistic people contribute?
Well, most likely, they would want to end up in the places where you shine the most and you do the least, but sometimes they also often master, as a result, the art of presenting themselves. And it’s pretty pleasant to listen to them and look at them because admiration coming from the outside increases self-preservation and the power aspect, and that builds an industry called entertainment industry, for example, which is one of the biggest industries that we deploy – we pay for it, we need it, and it is a valid contribution. They also happen to be political leaders.
Sometimes personal aspirations may happen to be aligned with national ambitions, often for bad, but sometimes for good. They also may happen to become entrepreneurs, but nothing like OCPD entrepreneurs looking for a compulsion for work; quite the contrary, they will be the most opportunistic entrepreneurs looking for the shortest way to success, they will climb the ladder of success in the cruel way – cut the corners, break rules, break law – and their biographies will be interlaced with pretty massive amounts of hedonism.
Lastly, the dark diamonds of narcissism: income. Today, narcissism is the main pillar of fame, and attention is nothing unless it translates itself into income. If you look at the most followed Instagram celebrities, they harvest ginormous income fueled by, most of all, narcissism, and this is not a gift to humanity, but it’s a gift to ourselves: We all care about income; it matters. Sadly, this particular dynamics often inspire others.
Dependent Personality
Last swing of the life’s blade: dependent personality. Analogically, I would like to postulate redefining, renaming “dependent personality” into “deficiency of self-preservation” because, again, it would indicate the right direction when it comes to grasping the complexity of it. Dependence may make us assume intuitively that it’s related to maybe somebody depending on another person financially, which may rarely be the case, but it’s often quite the way around. The dependence is very complex; it’s more like they depend on others depending on them.
Let’s keep the complexity apart. What defines these personalities deficiency of self-preservation? Narcissists was someone who, as a reaction to devaluing our critical parents in the childhood, took a power path and decided to overcompensate, overprotect, and fight back. Dependent person decided to comply and decided to give away self-preservation to compliance path, and as a result, gave away time, energy, space, feelings – in the future – also money.
And often a strategy to cultivate compliance is care, and this care defines this dependent personality very well. And I would like to focus on the most touching and explicit example of a personality disorder, when this care is elevated to extra orbital level and we are facing the phenomenon of parentification. Parentified child is a child who at the very early age assumed parental duties because it decided to take into its little hands the mess that the family environment was objectively perceived to be and take it to a better place, and as a result, this child lived the duties of three lives.
I say duties because there were no pleasures left. Duties of a child: continued education. Duties of the head of the house: make sure that the food is on the table and that everybody is well – siblings, parents – not always because parents failed, often so, but sometimes they were sick or, sadly, they died. And lastly, duties of adult: generating income, working. All of it, simultaneously, as early as even at the age of eight – seriously.
As a result, this child develops superhuman capacity and skills, and in the future also often creates incredible enterprises, not because of, like schizoid people, they need to validate basic birthright, not like OCPD people, because out of compulsion to perform, not like narcissistic people, out of need to increase the power aspect and self-preservation, but because nothing will ever feel difficult again in comparison to the hell the childhood was. And I would give you an analogy to it.
When I come back from all those journeys lasting two months and holding ores in my hands with pretty tight grip on them nearly continuously and I stand on the dry land and I touch my hair, to my desensitized sense of touch, this hair doesn’t exist – each time I hope it exists – because on the continuum of the state of matter, it doesn’t make it to solids, it is perceived to my desensitized touch, this softness, as something between liquids and gases. So it is for a parentified child in the adulthood when it comes to the perception of optimal workload: what for most of people is perceived as optimum, next to overloading, for this child, it is just a prelude to work.
Also, as dependent personalities happen to choose this care as one of the main strategies for cultivating compliance, they also, professionally, often end up in places or professions where you can cultivate this care, and this care can be directed towards humans, animals, or nature. There’s their major contribution. They also often happen to be the engine behind the career of another person, but due to their deficiency of self-preservation, they will not claim rights of recognition or exposure.
There is this famous statement dating to prior to gender-equality times, “Behind every great man, there is a great woman” – today, outdated – that indicates these dynamics very accurately. And also, as they offer this care excessively easy because of the deficiency of the preservation, many will take advantage on them – unfair advantage, personally or professionally – but there, of course, will be also people who will genuinely benefit. We know stories of orphaned children who were raised to become presidents – thanks to somebody’s genuine care like this.
Now, the question arises: What to do with all these individuals? To heal them while they contribute so much? Or to let them contribute while they suffer and their nearest circle suffers? There is no definite answer to it. We all have to answer ourselves.
Today, I would like to encourage each of us to contemplate our own scars and diamonds and think how we can relate to them and how we can harvest them, but also to contemplate the scars and diamonds of those who lived before us. Thank you.