Stress, Personality Disorders, and Therapies

Avoidant Personality

  • Experience severe social inhibition. Social inhibition is when performance suffers when people are watching.
  • Feelings of inadequacy and hypersensitivity.
  • Deal with it by trying to avoid situations.

Dependent Personality

  • Need to cling to a stronger personality. This is due to unhealthy attachments during a critical period.
  • Excessive need to be taken care of and tend to be very submissive.

Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)

  • About the external environment.
  • Manifests as perfectionism and a preoccupation with orderliness.
  • People feel out of control, so they overly control their immediate surroundings.
  • Differs from OCD because it’s not about internal compulsions.

Difference Between OCPD and OCD

  • OCD involves intrusive thoughts that require specific tasks to be performed.
  • OCPD is about keeping extreme order and control of the external environment.

Coping Mechanisms

  • Depend and Befriend:
    • Focus on someone else’s problems to seek connection or as a distraction.
    • More commonly seen in females.
  • Problem Focused:
    • Analyze the problem and create a plan to solve it.
  • Emotional:
    • Control reactions to stressors.
    • Males tend to go more towards problem focused approach and females more towards emotion focused.

Main Therapy Approaches

  • Biomedical: Usually used with another form; mainly medication.
  • Psychoanalytic, Humanistic, Behavioral, and Cognitive.

Psychoanalytic

  • Goal: Improve the subconscious mind by gaining insight into unconscious conflicts.
  • Key Terms:
    • Free Association: Saying whatever comes to mind.
    • Dream Analysis: Interpreting dreams as symbolic.
    • Transference: Transferring feelings about someone onto the therapist.

Humanistic

  • Focus: Help the patient be the best version of themselves by closing the gap between the ideal self and the actual self.
  • Client-centered therapy focuses on the patient's needs.
  • Terms: unconditional positive regard, genuineness, empathetic, active listening.

Behavioral

  • Change responses to situations.
  • Adaptive responses are positive; maladaptive responses are negative.
  • Uses associative learning, including classical and operant conditioning.
  • Exposure Therapy: Exposing someone to what makes them anxious to teach better reactions.
    • Systematic Desensitization with Anxiety Hierarchies: Create hierarchy and become less sensitive to stimuli.
  • Flooding:
    • Inundating someone with the stress-inducing stimuli until they realize it's not dangerous.
    • Virtual Reality: Retrain the brain and relearn responses to induce fear.
  • Operant Conditioning: Incentivize change in behavior.

Cognitive

  • Changing how you think about a situation from irrational to rational.
  • Change thoughts to make them rational.
  • Rational Emotive Therapy:
    • Tough love approach to change thinking.