Symptoms of Complex Emotional Needs
Symptoms of complex emotional needs (CEN)
Overview
- A personality disorder affects how someone copes with life, manage emotions and connect with other people.
- Personality disorders are long-term patterns of behaviour and inner experiences that differ significantly from what is expected.
- They affect at least two of these areas:
- The way you think about yourself and others
- The way you respond emotionally
- The way you relate to other people
- The way you control your behaviour and impulses
Common features of a personality disorder
- being overwhelmed by negative feelings like distress, anxiety, worthlessness or anger
- difficulty maintaining stable and close relationships, especially with family, friends, and colleagues
- avoiding other people
- feeling empty and emotionally disconnected
- odd behaviour
- sometimes, periods of losing contact with reality
- difficulty controlling your behaviours and impulses
We all experience these symptoms from time to time. However, if you have a personality disorder, you’ll find these symptoms are causing you distress and make it difficult to function in everyday life.
When are these problems considered a “disorder”?
For someone’s personality difficulties to be considered complex or a ‘disorder’, those difficulties must be:
- Problematic: The individual’s personality characteristics need to differ significantly from an average person and be outside the norm for the society in which they live. They need to be a source of unhappiness to that person and/or to others, and/or to severely limit them in their lives.
- Persistent: Personality disorders are chronic conditions, meaning that the problematic characteristics continue over a long period of time, they usually emerge in adolescence or early adulthood, and can continue into later life.
- Pervasive: These problematic personality characteristics result in distress or difficulties across different aspects of someone’s life, such as intimate, family & social relationships. They impact how someone experiences the world around them, their relationship to this (inner experiences and processing of experiences); they can also extend into the work place, impacting on the person’s employment or occupation. Problems can also transpire when they seek treatment, and they can find it very hard to engage in long term work to support them. These are things all of us have difficulty with at some point in our lives, but the difference is it is rare, and it resolves. If you have diagnosable PD it is common and pervasive over time and environments.
Related problems
People with personality disorders often experience other mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. They may find difficult to manage negative feelings without self-harming (for example, abusing drugs and alcohol, taking overdoses, suicidal thoughts) or, in rare cases, threatening other people.
