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Book Review:  Please Understand Me

10/1/2016

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In Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types, authors David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates discuss the differences people display in their thinking, beliefs, desires, and emotions. However, rather than simply recognizing and accepting these differences in others, we tend to pathologize them: “Seeing others around us differing from us, we conclude that these differences in individual behavior are temporary manifestations of madness, badness, stupidity, or sickness.” Having viewed others this way and experienced this kind of treatment myself, I can relate to the authors’ claim that, “our attempts to change spouse, offspring, or others can result in change, but the result is a scar and not a transformation.”
 
To help create better acceptance and understanding of oneself and others, the book includes the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, a short questionnaire to help readers determine their personality type. The four-letter result will look familiar to anyone who has taken the Myers-Briggs.


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Book Review - Highly Sensitive Person 

8/28/2016

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In The Highly Sensitive Person, psychologist Elaine Aron, PhD describes what it’s like to be an HSP. Comprising 15-20% of the population, people with this trait have nervous systems that are more sensitive to stimulation than average. According to Aron, this increased sensitivity can mean “that you are more easily overwhelmed when you have been in a highly stimulating environment for too long, bombarded by sights and sounds until you are exhausted in a nervous-system sort of way.”

Many people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) may also relate to the description above. Individuals with BPD are often very sensitive to environmental factors and other forms of stimulation (or lack thereof). For both HSPs and people diagnosed with BPD, there is often an optimal range of stimulation that is very narrow. In fact, there are many parallels between BPD and being an HSP, and Dr. Aron’s book provides information that can be helpful to both groups.


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Dissociation: An Adaptive Defense

7/11/2016

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I stare at the TV without seeing what’s on the screen. My mind switches between replaying an upsetting conversation with a loved one from earlier in the week, to an image of myself laying on the couch in the dark, as if I’m watching it all from a distance. I tell myself to get up, to move, or to at least pay attention to the movie, but I remain still, feeling blank, numb, and exhausted. Suddenly, the movie on TV has ended, and I realize I’m unable to recall anything about the plot or the characters.

What I experienced was a form of dissociation, “an adaptive defense in response to high stress or trauma characterized by memory loss and a sense of disconnection from oneself or one's surroundings.”

Dissociation varies in severity, existing as a spectrum from mild dissociative symptoms to dissociative disorders including dissociative amnesia, depersonalization/derealization disorder, and dissociative identity disorder (previously called multiple personality disorder).


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