the human condition – Page 59

Writing Avoidant Personality Disorder

Avoidant Personality Disorder (AVPD) is characterised by extreme action taken to avoid certain feared stimuli, usually social. Social anxiety, feelings of unworthiness, timidity and sensitivity lead to a pattern of avoiding situations that involve interacting or socialising with others. This article looks at how to write engaging and realistic characters with the condition.

AVPD is a Cluster C personality disorder, which means that it’s primarily an anxious condition. The essential characteristic of it is an inability to form social bonds brought about by an extreme desire to avoid particular feared stimuli. For example, people with AVPD tend to be very sensitive to social rejection or humiliation.

It is believed to be caused by abusive or neglectful parenting patterns. In particular, rejection by one or both parents is thought to correlate highly with the condition. It can be observed in other mammals that rejection by one or both parents sharply reduces the ensuing life expectancy for that creature. No doubt the trauma from such treatment makes an impact on the behaviour of human survivors.

If your protagonist has AVDP, it might be that they experience loss and social rejection so strongly that they are simply devastated by it. They might have an internal monologue that heavily plays on fears of social encounters going wrong. A story featuring them might read very strangely as it involved a number of events that ended up not happening or not being attended by the protagonist, who felt too anxious to participate.

This can easily lead to a darker, resentful pattern of behaviour, especially if a protagonist with AVDP comes to feel a malicious desire for revenge as a consequence of their rejection. Social rejection need not lead to learned helplessness and submission in every case – it can lead to violent reprisals, especially if the rejected person feels that they have been treated unjustly.

Someone with AVDP might make a convincing villain if the author can convincingly portray a character who has become nasty as a result of their pride. It might be that the villain received some mild slight or insult and their massive ego was punctured, leading to narcissistic rage. They could be the sort of person who never forgives an insult, leading to complicated revenge schemes.

To many outside observers, AVPD looks very similar to just having low self-esteem. People with the condition tend to believe that their social presence is unwanted, and that they are unworthy of the time and attention that they are given in their social relationships. In cases of parental rejection it’s obvious how such thinking might come about, but it can be caused by other things, such as a generalised perception of social rejection.

In the mind of a character with AVPD, the everyday experience might be one plagued by self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness, in much the same way that it can be for a depressed person. Indeed, one particular strain of AVPD has a number of depressive features, in particular the casting away of, and refusing to deal with, certain traumatic memories.

A protagonist with the condition is likely to consider themselves socially inept. There might be a lot of blame directed at the self in their internal monologue. It’s possible that there is a personal quality of their own that they fixate on as an explanation for their lack of social success. As mentioned above, this can easily become projected outwards onto society.

People with AVPD can be difficult socially because they can be very needy and very resentful. There is a particular strain of the condition that is hypersensitive in a way that is not dissimilar to those with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This type can become easily wounded by jokes or banter, to the extent that others might call them “precious”.

Feedback loops are an unfortunate common effect of this condition. Anxiety about being socially rejected often leads to a range of behaviours that themselves increase the likelihood of social rejection. Anxious eye contact often appears shifty to other people, who then come to distrust the person with AVPD. Because these people trust the person with AVPD less, they speak to them in a less friendly manner, which validates the initial feelings of anxiety and strengthens the avoidant behaviours.

A protagonist with AVPD might find their everyday experience tormenting, because people with the condition have a normal need for social interaction and intimacy – they just fear it. Because of this fear, and sometimes because of resentments, a protagonist with the condition might find their everyday experience tormenting. It might be a relentless march of anxiety, blame, missed opportunities, guilt and rejection.

AVPD sounds, and is, similar to Schizoid Personality Disorder, but there are crucial differences. For one, a character with AVPD will like be more anxious than a schizoid. For another thing, schizoids don’t generally care about other people, whereas people with AVPD will still desire positive social contact.

This article is an excerpt from Writing With The DSM (Writing With Psychology Book 5), edited by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

Why Neoliberals Love Mass Immigration

Mass immigration is often supported by the left, but it happens to also achieve a number of major right-wing goals

Neoliberalism is a right-wing movement in the sense that the ultimate aim of it is to take power away from the poor and give it to the rich. However, it is not a conservative movement, because neoliberals don’t care at all about the disruption that their policies have on people’s lives. So some of their positions are hard to understand at first. This essay seeks to explain why neoliberals love mass immigration so much.

Classical conservatism recognises that the wealthy already have the power, and so the wealthy try to keep things the same to preserve their good position. Change is therefore considered bad. Where this differs from neoliberalism is that the neoliberal tries to entrench the already strong position of the wealthy by further weakening the position of the poor. Accordingly, changes to the social structure are permissible if they make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The basics of labour solidarity work like this. The rate of pay is a function of the supply and demand of labour. As long as labour is not available below a certain level of pay, then the rate of pay must rise above this to meet a higher equilibrium. So if all the workers in a certain area or industry get together and agree to not work for less than, say, $15/hour, this constricts the supply of cheap labour, which presses the price of labour upward.

To counter this, employers like to import cheap labour from outside of the area. The most infamous example of this is the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but the importation of labour doesn’t have to be involuntary. To the contrary – there is a virtually infinite supply of cheap labour in the world that can willingly be brought in to work for less, because there are always impoverished shitholes with high birth rates that people want to escape from in exchange for the McDonalds lifestyle.

Seen in union-busting terms, immigrants who are brought into the country by capitalist interests to work for less money than the locals are effectively scab labour. After all, there’s no real difference between scab labour that breaks a picket line and someone willing to immigrate to another country to do work at a wage lower than the locals would accept: both push wages down.

Not only does this outside labour have the effect of lowering wages through the scab effect, but it also makes future labour organisation more difficult. It’s much harder to conduct the conversations necessary to start a union when the workplace has no common language, and no-one is going to start a union anyway if their work visa is dependent on pleasing their employer.

It can be seen, then, that liberalising immigration through globalising the workforce has the immediate effect of not only driving wages down by increasing the supply of labour, but it also makes it harder to agitate for a higher wage, a double effect.

In other words, mass immigration is simply another example of the same union-busting behaviour that the ruling class has always used. The only difference is that it destroys the bonds of solidarity on the national level, instead of only destroying them in a certain area or industry. With a menagerie of different languages and cultures in the same area, the solidarity necessary to resist the divide and conquer attempts of the ruling class cannot be achieved. If that area is the whole nation so much the better.

Regular conservatives are a bit leery about destroying the working class in quite so brazen and irreparable a manner. The fear seems to be that they might rise up in anger and riot. Neoliberals have to be understood as significantly different to regular conservatives in this manner. They’re not at all shy about rubbing the faces of the Western working class in dogshit, knowing that their complete media domination makes the threat of retaliation essentially nil.

The real beauty of the mass immigration issue, from the neoliberal perspective, is that they can destroy the Western working class in this manner with the kindest of rhetoric. Mass immigration is presented by the mainstream media – almost completely owned by banks – as a compassionate solution to foreign poverty, only opposed by racists, bigots and rednecks.

This means that the already disadvantaged classes tear themselves in half as the globalists feel solidarity with the immigrants and refugees and the nationalists with the indigenous people. The neoliberals laugh all the way to the bank.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

Can North Korea Teach the West How to Have A Humane Cannabis Policy?

Our media has been giving us the Two Minute Hate about North Korea for over two decades. Anyone who has read 1984 knows that most of the reason for this is to distract from the crimes of our own politicians and industrial leaders. One of these crimes is the War on Cannabis: Western Governments could learn from the North Koreans how to have a humane, honest and fair cannabis policy.

For the past 40-50 years, Western Governments have conducted a War on Drugs against their own people, without the consent of those people. Trillions have been spent during these decades to persecute tens of millions of Western citizens, many of whom had not caused any harm to anyone. This mass human rights abuse – because that’s what it is – continues to this day, despite small wins for the people in some areas.

This War on Drugs has been justified with a rhetoric so clumsy and corrupt that even a 1930s-era propagandist would be embarrassed by the lack of subtlety. From the infamous “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men” to “Cannabis use causes psychosis” to today’s horseshit stories about how buying cannabis is supporting Mexican narcoterrorism, no more hamfisted effort has ever been made to sell anything.

For roughly half a century, Western families have been ripped apart from having one of their family members sent to prison for a cannabis offence. Tens of millions have been forced into a traumatic encounter with the Police and justice or prison systems, treated as criminals when most were mentally ill and needed help. In America in 2016, there were 574,641 people charged with the crime of simple cannabis possession.

One would expect then, that the punishment for cultivating cannabis in a place as fundamentally evil as North Korea would be horrifically draconian and senseless. If it’s up to seven years imprisonment in New Zealand it must surely be life in prison or even execution there.

To the contrary – far from scheduling cannabis as belonging to the most dangerous category of addictive drugs with no medicinal value as America does, North Korea doesn’t even consider cannabis a drug. Not only are people free to cultivate it without sanction, but it grows freely by the roadside in many places, being a weed and not being subject to eradication programs. North Koreans are free to harvest and smoke it every single day – and they do.

Many would personally be happy to trade all the supposed Western freedoms to drink booze, watch television and chase loose women for the freedom to smoke cannabis, have quality conversations with intelligent people and at the end of the night still be capable of maintaining an erection. So one has to ask: who’s actually better off?

The thawing of relations between the West and North Korea might have implications for cannabis policy in the West. Those Westerners who are still labouring under primitive superstitions such as “cannabis causes brain damage and therefore people should go to prison for it” might learn something from the more enlightened approach taken by the North Korean Government.

Perhaps North Korea could send advisors to the West to educate our politicians about how large industries conspired to make cannabis illegal for the sake of wiping out a competitor, and that keeping it prohibited is actually an immoral thing to do. These North Koreans could also be tasked with going through our Police and justice system employees to root out the sadists who believed that imprisoning someone was ever a fair or reasonable response to drug possession, because they are morally defective and cannot be trusted to serve the public.

Writing Histrionic Personality Disorder

People with Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD) are colloquially known as “drama queens” or “shit-stirrers”. Fundamental to the disorder is a desire for attention that borders on the narcissistic, as well as strong, shallow, rapidly-changing emotions. This article looks at how to write realistic and believable characters with HPD.

As is the case with many of the conditions in this book (and especially the personality disorders), people with HPD are often high-functioning in several ways. As with most of the conditions in this book, people with HPD can often be entirely competent and effective in their niche. For instance, they excel at screen and theatre acting.

A simple (if crude) way of conceptualising HPD is that, for people with it, drama is like a drug. They get hooked on it, they seek it out compulsively, they try to get bigger and bigger doses of it. The more attention they can draw to themselves the better. A cynic might call them a “psychic vampire” because dealing with them frequently leaves a person tired.

For these reasons, HPD is a fitting and excellent choice for some of the characters in your fiction. A character with HPD will naturally liven things up – even if they end up causing chaos. Because they seek drama out, it is never far from them. Not only do they like drama, but they tend to have just enough narcissism to bring some truly dark emotions out of others.

From the perspective of other characters who might encounter a character with HPD, one of the most difficult things about them is their apparent need to be overly emotional and dramatic all the time. Because emotional reactions are contagious to some extent, a person with HPD will tend to trigger those around them – a great quality in a bartender perhaps, but if there is a need for calmness and order this is usually unhelpful.

Other characters might also find the constant self-aggrandisement extremely tiresome. People with HPD like to use elaborate and flowery speech when unnecessary or even unhelpful, and love to tell stories that feature themselves looking good or being heroic. Such typically unsubtle attempts to draw praise are sometimes described as “needy”. Indeed, it is common for people with HPD to display symptoms typical of Dependent Personality Disorder.

Several common characteristics of HPD overlap with common characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. One of these in particular is the usual reaction to criticism. For the histrionic, any and all criticism is a brutal personal attack, an act of the utmost cruelty. It is so bad that any retaliatory measures are justified (although a character with HPD will tend toward passive-aggressive revenge tactics).

Related to this is the constant seeking of reassurance or approval. A protagonist with HPD might have compulsive thoughts about not being a good enough person and so seeks out ways of being told that they’re worthwhile. If a character has HPD, there might also be very clear ways that this can be shown through their clothing choice: “Loud and proud” would sum up their dress style.

Other characters might find it very stressful to be around a character with HPD, partially because of the narcissism but mostly because they don’t leave other people in peace. Because of their need to be the centre of attention, a character with HPD might continually butt into other people’s conversations, or make it all about them. They’re also generally happy to spread rumours around, especially if they think that doing so will make someone angry.

A character with HPD might strike other characters as superficial or false. After all, their emotions might strongly rise, but they also strongly fall and quickly transform into other ones. A second character might come to feel that they can’t really trust the histrionic one. It’s hard to know whether they’re acting or genuine.

One area in which the lives of people with HPD tend to be in particular disarray is romantically. They commonly perceive sexual interest where none exists. This makes their own lives difficult, as they often end up misreading the signals and making a move on someone who then rejects them. It can also make other people’s lives difficult, as people with HPD tend to perceive sexual infidelity where it doesn’t exist. This jealousy can fuel untold dramas.

On a darker note, people with HPD are well-known for hitting on people who are already in established relationships. This is partly because of the aforementioned tendency to perceive sexual interest where none exists, but this can also be influenced by a narcissistic refusal to respect other people’s boundaries and an inability to delay gratification.

Having said that, people with HPD are often very engaging to make love to. Excessive sensitivity and dependence on other people’s approval can make for a powerful contribution to the bedroom magic.

Adding a character with HPD to your story, or adding aspects of it to a character in your story, has the potential to liven things up but there is a risk that it can also make things more trivial. Because histrionic characters can get upset over small things, they can be hard for the reader to relate to, and therefore are often better as a foil to another character or as comic relief.

This article is an excerpt from Writing With The DSM (Writing With Psychology Book 5), edited by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.