Personality Disorder Glossary

Anger - People who suffer from personality disorders often feel a sense of unresolved anger and a heightened or exaggerated perception that they have been wronged, invalidated, neglected or abused.

Baiting - A provocative act used to solicit an angry, aggressive or emotional response from another individual.

Blaming - The practice of identifying a person or people responsible for creating a problem, rather than identifying ways of dealing with the problem.

Borderline - Having, or exhibiting the characteristics of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

Bullying - Any systematic action of hurting a person from a position of relative physical, social, economic or emotional strength.

Chaos Manufacture - Unnecessarily creating or maintaining an environment of risk, destruction, confusion or mess.

Co-dependency - A relationship in which an otherwise mentally-healthy person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected by an addiction or mental illness.

Cognitive Dissonance - A psychological term for the discomfort that most people feel when they encounter information which contradicts their existing set of beliefs or values. People who suffer from personality disorders often experience cognitive dissonance when they are confronted with evidence that their actions have hurt others or have contradicted their stated morals.

Confirmation Bias - The tendency to pay more attention to things which reinforce your beliefs than to things which contradict them.

Cyberpath – A Cyberpath is an online predator or psychopath who uses the internet to recruit, stalk, abuse or exploit their victims.

Depersonalize - to make impersonal or to deprive of personality or individuality.

Depression - People who suffer from personality disorders are often also diagnosed with symptoms of depression. Targets of smear campaigns may also suffer debilitating depression.

Emotional Abuse - Any pattern of behaviour directed at one individual by another which promotes in them a destructive sense of Fear, Obligation or Guilt (FOG).

False Accusations - Patterns of unwarranted or exaggerated criticism directed towards another person.

Frivolous Litigation - The use of unmerited legal proceedings to hurt, harass or gain an economic advantage over an individual or organization.

Harassment - Any sustained or chronic pattern of unwelcome behaviour by one individual towards another.

Instrumentality - Instrumentality is when a person is treated like a tool for another person's own purposes.

Intimidation - Any form of veiled, hidden, indirect or non-verbal threat.

Invalidation - The creation or promotion of an environment or situation that encourages an individual to believe that their thoughts, beliefs, values or physical presence are inferior, flawed, problematic or worthless.

Lack of Conscience - Individuals who suffer from Personality Disorders are often preoccupied with their own agendas, sometimes to the exclusion of the needs and concerns of others. This is sometimes interpreted by others as a lack of moral conscience.

Lightbulb Moment - A Lightbulb Moment is the description many non-personality-disordered individuals use when they first discover the existence of personality disorders. For the first time, they have discovered a plausible explanation for the strange and frightening behaviours of a family member who suffers from a personality disorder and learn that their situation is not uncommon. It is as if a light were just turned on.

Manipulation - The practice of steering an individual into a desired behaviour for the purpose of achieving a hidden personal goal.

Name-Calling - Use of profane, derogatory or dehumanizing terminology to describe another individual or group. This is one of the most common tactics people use to hurt others or disparage them. It often occurs when someone has an emotional argument to make with little or no supporting logical argument.

Normalizing - Normalizing is a tactic used to desensitize an individual to abusive, coercive or inappropriate behaviours. In essence, normalizing is the manipulation of another human being to get them to agree to, or accept something that is in conflict with the law, social norms or their own basic code of behaviour.

Objectification - The practice of treating a person or a group of people like an object.

Projection - The act of attributing one's own feelings or traits to another person and imagining or believing that the other person has those same feelings or traits.

Proxy Recruitment - A way of controlling or abusing another person by manipulating other people into unwittingly ‘doing the dirty work’.

Self-Victimization - Casting oneself in the role of a victim.

Stunted Emotional Growth - A difficulty, reluctance or inability to learn from mistakes, work on self-improvement or develop more effective coping strategies.

Targeted Humour, Mocking and Sarcasm - Any sustained pattern of joking, sarcasm or mockery which is designed to reduce another individual’s reputation in their own eyes or in the eyes of others.

Threats - Inappropriate, intentional warnings of destructive actions or consequences.

Unchosen - Unchosen's are people who are in a family relationship with a person who suffers from a personality disorder. They are called "unchosen" because they had no choice in entering into that relationship. Unchosen's include children, parents, siblings or relatives of a person who suffers from a personality disorder.

Adapted in part from Out of the Fog