I’ve had mental health issues off and on for more than 50 years – started with an eating disorder when I was a teen-ager. Got over that and did kind of OK – worked professionally, got married, had children. Main problem I had at work was that when I disapproved of what management decided, if I disagreed then I couldn’t stand it, I felt I had to leave, so I would quit. Didn’t get outright angry especially, just quit. I had no internal way to just accept their decision and stay at the job. The job defined me and so a disagreement about what I “should” be doing was more important to me than the money or career path or anything else.

I'm pretty sure that I would have qualified for Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder then. I defined myself by my roles, my job, and I mostly “played by the rules.” After my late husband died, the role of wife was no longer there, the children were college age and moving out, and I had quit work to take care of my husband but because there had been that string of quitting my career was pretty much at a stall, too.

I became extremely depressed and then fell apart.

So I didn’t know that I had a personality disorder but it affected my whole life.

When I was diagnosed with PDNOS the therapist also diagnosed DDNOS – dissociative disorder not otherwise specified. She described my diagnosis by saying that I was “narcissistically wounded and fragmented.” From a dissociative disorders perspective it’s kind of like OCPD was my “adapted” self and then there were two unacceptable, unsocialized parts, one sort of NPD-ish and the other BPD-ish.

After successful therapy with this last therapist (and despite many unsuccessful and some harmful experiences with therapy), I have a much better sense of myself as a person. The “parts” are mostly integrated so that I can know, and say, what I’m feeling better than I could years ago. And the narcissistic wounding has healed to the point I can feel “hurt”. It used to be that I couldn’t, and I guess it was because the constant old pain had just gotten numbed out.

It also used to be that when I was with a group of people I would be self-absorbed and obsessed with thinking and trying to notice and figure out what I “should” be doing or saying. Usually I didn’t have a clue, and my social anxiety in unstructured social situations was horrendous. Now, if I don’t have anything to say, I’m OK just sitting and taking in what is going on. Support groups have probably helped with that, too.

What about you? What kind of issues do you struggle with? Has therapy helped any?