Personality "styles": the healthy version of each personality disorder

@QuietMagic I like the idea of this, but I think some of the details are a little odd.

The idea that there's a continuum is certainly a useful one. Some would say there are two continua.

One is a continuum of severity, in that some people's symptoms are mild and other people's symptoms are severe. I think this is the continuum referred to in the book: "a continuum from order to disorder – from function to dysfunction."

The other is a continuum of personality traits, in the sense that the boundaries between the ten personality disorders, and indeed between personality disorders and other disorders, are often very fuzzy. A person might have some symptoms from one disorder and some symptoms from another. DSM-5 acknowledges this way of thinking about personality disorders in its section on Emerging Measures and Models.

So all that is good. It's when looking into the detail that things get a little weird, in my opinion.

The first weird thing I noticed is that in the table for Borderline Personality Disorder there are only six traits listed. DSM-5 and the older DSM-IV-TR both list nine (and the book referred to as the source lists all nine on a previous page).

Next I noticed that some of the descriptions in the Optimal Functioning column don't seem to be optimal at all. For example, in the table for Borderline Personality Disorder the first one is:

"The person tends to experience passionate, focused attachments in all relationships."

All? Really? I think that's far from optimal, and very probably impossible. Many of the other "Optimal Functioning" descriptions also seem to be unrealistic. To understand this better, I looked at the book itself, Understanding Personality Style and Disorder for Pastoral Counseling, by Robert Tippie.

That book credits a different book for the tables of so-called "optimal functioning": Handbook of Diagnosis and Treatment of DSM-IV-TR Personality Disorders (Second Edition, 2013) by Len Sperry.

Tippie changed Sperry's table headings from "Personality Style" to "Optimal Functioning". Sperry didn't claim the styles were necessarily optimal. He described the continuum in terms of disordered, adequate and optimal functioning, but Tippie dropped the "adequate" part.

Sperry then corrected the tables in his next edition: Handbook of Diagnosis and Treatt of DSM-5 Personality Disorders (Third Edition, 2016).

In the later edition the table for Borderline Personality now lists all nine traits. The first column heading is still Personality Style, and the first of those is now:

"Maintenance of stable interpersonal relationships in which negative and positive perceptions of another are integrated rather than polarized."

I think that is much more accurate and realistic.

For anyone interested, I captured all ten tables from the third edition: Personality Styles.

Charlie