Does your estranged adult child have a personality disorder (PD)?
If so, how much does it matter?
Armchair diagnoses of PDs such as Borderline PD or Narcissistic PD are often flung back and forth between estranged adult children and rejected parents, to explain the problems between them.
Often, it may simply be that parent and adult child don’t see eye to eye.
But some PDs are real.
What do you do if the person estranged from you is suffering from a genuine, properly diagnosed PD?
The first thing to do, according to Tina, is to get clear on what you really want. If your child has a PD like Borderline that makes him so difficult to deal with, how close do you want to be?
Assuming she were willing, how much time would you want to spend around an adult daughter with full-blown Narcissistic PD?
In this episode, Tina gives a brief sketch of what PDs are, what they’re not, and some implications for estrangement and reconciliation.