Personality Disorders and Altered Perception

Here’s an interesting fact about Cluster B personality disorders and why the perceptions of people suffering with these disorders is so off kilter.

Normal people depend on their eyes to give them feedback about the world around them. They see something and their brains process the incoming information through their visual sense. This is how incoming information and stimuli was designed to be processed.

Not so with toxic individuals. Here’s the kicker: This process operates in reverse in people with disordered thinking. Instead of their eyes providing relevant information for their brains to process and sort, the opposite is true. Before they even see anything, their brains tell their eyes what to see. It’s like they’ve already made up their minds how they will interpret incoming information.

It all goes back to interpretation…

This also explains the shallowness and superficiality of toxic people. Rigid thinking patterns do not promote expansion, but rather constriction. Their worlds become smaller and smaller, due to their disordered thinking.

This faulty perception, and skewed sense of reality, is an underlying mechanism into how disordered people create chaos and confusion for the people in their lives. Nothing you did, or could have done, would have been enough to change how they perceive the world, this thinking is hard-wired into their physiology.

Disordered people do NOT see things as they are…

They see things as they believe them to be. They’ve already made up their minds. These unhealthy and unrealistic thinking patterns, and thought processes, enable toxic people to live in an alternate reality of their own making.

Now go wrap your normal brain around that fun fact…I hope this provides some clarity into why it’s so darn hard (cue – virtually impossible) to make abusive relationships work for the long haul or to change for the better.

P.S. Please consider joining my private Facebook Group: The Toxic Relief Room. I created it to support women who are navigating toxic relationships.