Loving Relationships Can’t Always Heal
Loving relationships can promote character growth, that’s for sure. But when someone has significant character disturbance no amount of loving care alone can fix things.
Tag Archives: relationships
Committed Relationships Can Fuel Growth
We grow in character by learning to love rightly. That takes considerable, committed effort. But the payoffs are immense. Unfortunately, in our character impaired times, too few among us are willing to pay the price.
Loving Relationships Grow Character
You have to have some decency of character to make a relationship work. But there’s also nothing more powerfully character-building than a truly loving relationship.
Why Relationships Fail
You have possess character yourself to make a relationship work. But you also have to be able to rightly judge the character of another.
The Character Disturbance Spectrum
We all have distinctive, preferred ways of relating to others. And those distinctive “styles” of relating define our personalities. But when our very manner of relating is in itself the source of problems, we call it a personality disturbance. A style of relating to others so rigid, so ingrained, so extreme in its manifestation, and so deviant from the norm of a culture that it severely and negatively impacts a person’s ability to function well has traditionally qualified as a disorder.
Grandiose Narcissists Don’t Care
Grandiose narcissists will use and abuse you. And they’ll do so without compunction. They lack two important capacities: shame and empathy.
Vulnerable Narcissists and Relationships
Relationships with any narcissist suffer because it’s always about them. They’re so wrapped up in themselves and their desires that there’s no room to consider others. And because they can’t really concern themselves with you or your needs, intimacy suffers.
Ways Vulnerable Narcissists Relate
Vulnerable narcissists haven’t fashioned a balanced or well-grounded view of their own worth. Pay attention to them and revere them, and all is fine. Ask anything of them, and you’ll quickly learn how “shallow” they are. This makes true intimacy impossible. They may do all sorts of things to “prove” they’re love-worthy. But they don’t know their true worth. And they neither know how to love nor how to be loved.
Character Is About How We Relate
Disturbed characters see the world and others in some pretty unhealthy ways. And their unhealthy perceptions and attitudes predispose them to relate in a destructive fashion.
Character Disorders and Relationships
Everyone has a distinctive way of seeing things and doing things. And we develop unique “styles” of relating to others. That’s what defines our personality. But sometimes a person’s style of relating is in itself problematic. Character disorders always present problems for relationships.