Transcending the Personality Disordered Parent

Book excerpt: Have you been especially troubled by your relationship with a parent? Have you struggled to understand the difficulties in that relationship? Despite your efforts, has this relationship failed to improve? It may be that your parent has a personality disorder. Personality disorders are long-standing in nature, undergo little change, and end up hurting others, particularly family members. This damage may occur through a self-centered approach to life as well poor decisions (such as addictions, problematic spending, and selecting poor relationship partners). People with personality disorders also harm through their inability to be honest (factually and emotionally), as well as their emotional or physical overreactions to situations. In this book, you'll begin to understand the essential nature of a personality disorder and how it applies to your parent. As examples, the authors describe two in-depth cases. Each case illustrates one of two personality disorder styles that appear to be relatively common: the intrusive personality style and the distant-hostile personality style. The authors offer a number of practical tactics for transcending, both psychologically and spiritually, the problematic past of having been raised by a parent with a personality disorder. This book is designed to offer supportive guidance in the murky terrain of toxic parent-child relationships. It's a must-read for everyone trying to understand and resolve difficulties in their relationships with their parents.