“Key Characteristics
- Dramatic/Erratic Behaviors: Individuals may act unpredictably, have intense emotional outbursts, or display a lack of empathy.
- Relationship Instability: These disorders often create significant challenges in maintaining healthy, consistent, or stable relationships.
- Impulsivity: Poor emotional regulation often leads to self-destructive, volatile, or dramatic actions.
- Low Self-Esteem: Many with these disorders have an unstable sense of identity and extreme sensitivity to criticism.
The Four Types of Cluster B Personality Disorders
- Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD): Marked by a pervasive pattern of disregarding or violating the rights of others, often with a lack of remorse.
- Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): Characterized by instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and emotions, alongside high impulsivity.
- Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD): Defined by excessive, attention-seeking emotionality.
- Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD): Characterized by long-term patterns of grandiosity, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.
Treatment and Outlook
While these disorders can be challenging, they are manageable with treatment, which typically includes psychotherapy (such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy, particularly for BPD) and sometimes medications for co-occurring conditions like depression or anxiety. Those with Cluster B disorders may not recognize their behaviors as problematic, which can hinder treatment.”
That last sentence is the reason for this support group. Friends, family, and lovers of Cluster B individuals can suffer months and in many cases years of predictable but uncontrollable abuse and chaos, and the closer to the individual you are the worse the effects. The invalidation or lack of understanding of what is so obvious from the outside creates a terrible dynamic of empathy vs attack, or complete invalidation of the causes/effects of Cluster B, which are not so easy to ignore when they are happening to you. All available treatments are meant to help Cluster B people regulate their emotions and develop strategies for minimizing their potential damage. They do not offer much, if anything, to the victims of these individuals, other than further ways of operating in a caretaker role to those who have been the source of so much suffering.
The manipulation and loose grip on objective reality allows Cluster B individuals to create and control false narratives, and to avoid their own discomfort via projection, gaslighting, denial, lies, spin, and control. That burden falls to those who love them, and if you have been there you know how relentless that burden can be. We would like to let you TALK. To be heard, and seen, as you are, without fear or dismissal. Your experiences are very real, and shared by many others, and it is so difficult to find a place to really unburden yourself with people who understand and CAN actually empathize/sympathize, because we have been there too.
This is NOT a support group for people with Cluster B personality disorders. Those are ample and available. This is for the people those people have hurt.
There is no charge, and no judgment. If you can donate some cash to help keep the lights on that is great. The more we talked to people in the same boat the more we realised that the stories were almost identical, and the feeling of depression that accompanies that realisation is just another injury in a long line of them. We want to create a place where people can finally be free to express their pain in plain English and in good company, for the purpose of some actual healing, not just maintenance. If that is something you need, please join us.
Meetings will take place every other Monday starting April 20th from 5:30-8:30pm. Light drinks and snacks will be on hand, or you can bring whatever you like.
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