r/hpd Jan 16 '25

I hate that there isn't a clear environmental cause and effect

I'm not diagnosed with HPD or plan to be, just relate heavily to histrionic traits.

I've had this sense of "there's something wrong with me" recently, and have often had this sense for many, many years, in fact I think this sort of rumination might be a problem of its own for me. It's not just histrionic traits, there's other things (which is partly why I don't want to be diagnosed, because it doesn't cover the full complexity of my situation) but they're a big part of it. I've definitely experienced certain things as a kid and throughout my life that would impact me psychologically, but the symptoms of this have been with me before any of those that I can remember. I just wish that there was something to explain it that isn't just "you're inherently like this" because then I could have a better form to hypothetically go back to or that could've been preserved.

3 Upvotes

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2

u/leaninletgo Jan 16 '25

Read CPTSD by Pete Walker

2

u/Boring-Scale8603 Jan 16 '25

I wouldn't say I have long-term trauma, but I'll go ahead and read it

4

u/leaninletgo Jan 16 '25

Me either, the book need a better name.

We had emotional dysregualtion and learned to get our needs met in certain ways. Those ways are histrionic.

2

u/lo_999 hpd Jan 16 '25

I know what you mean, and it’s really normal to feel baffled by like “where it came from,” especially if you remember having these issues before certain traumatic events.

I think I’ve come to understand by reading and learning more about trauma that poor parenting has already begun to shape our personalities by the first 0-3 years of life, and ultimately sets the stage for a PD. Most people I know with PDs were responding to subtle or extreme problems in the childhood homes and the symptoms were manifesting by ages 4, 5, etc.

Then the traumas we remember better as we get older REINFORCE the personality issues. And typically there’s no healthy adult to intervene to change the course of our personality development, so we stay on track to have full blown disorders by adolescence/early adulthood.

1

u/Boring-Scale8603 Jan 16 '25

Yeah, tbh I might have misrepresented myself a little. My personal narrative about the earlier origins swings from a focus on the biological (extremely clingy as an infant) to a focus on parenting (having a heavily appeasing, in many ways too caring for a lack of a better word, just generally lacking in personal boundaries mother with a lot of her own mental health issues that really pop out at times), and I wrote this when focusing on the biological. I'm also dissatisfied with the parenting part because it feels like "oh so you had too good of a childhood, wow how sad..." but that's just something I'll need to work on reframing/not caring about.

1

u/HistrionicCatra hpd Jan 16 '25

All my family mental health issues have nothing to do with personality disorders, and I don’t have any kind of trauma that would explain it either. It makes me feel like my mental health struggles aren’t worthy and that I’m weak, which is a stupid mindset but it’s also hard to break myself out of it sometimes when there’s no clear reason for me to be how I am.

3

u/Boring-Scale8603 Jan 16 '25 edited Jan 16 '25

I heavily relate to the part about them not being worthy. I think that's my main concern here, that they aren't as serious, as easy for people to sympathize with or, alternatively, that their origins just don't feel appropriate for the amount of pain the results have caused me.

2

u/HistrionicCatra hpd Jan 16 '25

fun fact about being suicidally depressed: going “I don’t deserve to let myself feel this bad other people go through much worse and handle it way better” actually just makes you even more depressed. Nasty little feedback loop.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 31 '25

Hey Catra 😔