Masochistic Personality, Revisited
Masochistic Personality, Revisited
Blog Article
Pervasive self-defeating behavior deserves diagnostic recognition.
Key Points:
- Masochistic tendencies—excessive self-defeating behavior, a constant need to please others, and the reflexive denial of positive regard—are not formally recognized as a personality disorder.
- But some clinicians continue to diagnose what was once called "masochistic personality disorder," and such traits may benefit from treatment even without a formal diagnosis.
- Therapists can help patients "unlearn" negative core beliefs about themselves by reinforcing the patient's worth as a person and showing genuine interest in them.
Unfortunately, we don’t choose our personalities. Personality is a combination of inheritance/genetics and how early life experience/nurturance influences us. Inherited components are called traits, and, collectively, traits are termed temperament. Learned behaviors are called habits, and the collection of habits is termed character. Join temperament and character, and you have a personality—all the things that influence how a person views themselves, the world, and how they interact with it.
While we all have personality quirks, perhaps an anxious temperament, or being too trusting, these individual quirks don’t likely cause global ripples in our optimal functioning. Those with disordered personalities exhibit collections of maladaptive thoughts and behaviors, which can be downright problematic, like Antisocial and Narcissistic Personality Disorders.
Recently, I was reflecting on people with self-defeating, or masochistic, qualities to their personalities. Masochistic personality is not officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). In the 1980s APA deemed there is too much overlap with Dependent Personality and the behaviors are better accounted for thus. Despite this, Jefferson (1986) noted, "The consistent and considerable literature which has evolved regarding the masochistic personality suggests that clinicians see this category as descriptively useful." It was also alleged masochistic personality is a sexist diagnosis and that political forces contributed to its erasure by the APA (Ruffalo, 2019). Report this page