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new faces which we then love and hate. Instead, every interpersonal arrangement is new, suspect and run on a cash-and-carry basis. We are made to feel like there are no seats for us inside of them. Even Debbie, with her history of selfless motherly devotion to her “children,” felt like an empty husk, encased in the exoskeletal armor of compulsive correctness. With their inner life unpeopled, the best we on the outside can hope for is to be valuable to them as tools, like forks and chairs.

In new and potentially therapeutic settings, for example a genuinely loving foster family, these children manipulate, testing for the feared loss and abuse that first generated their detachment. They provoke the very mistrust they fear. The sexually exploited child is seductive. The physically abused child provokes attack. Personality constellations which can be adaptive, when narrowed and fixated, become impediments to new and reparative experience. It is in this way that personality disorders are self-maintaining.

An irony is that these interpersonally empty and rigid patterns in personality tend to occur in the most constitutionally robust of the abused and neglected children. They are those who have escaped early death from failure to thrive, severe neuropsychological impairment, chronic depression, severe social withdrawal or the pediatric psychotic disorders. The children with sufficient flexibility to adapt quickly and survive often settle into empty-centered rigid caricatures of adult personality styles.

Of course, well-defined and characteristic personality patterns do not require abandonment and abuse or the pathological simplification of traumatic deforestation of neuronal connectivities in order to emerge. Demanding social selection of particular personality proclivities that are competitively advantageous for highly sought positions also results in the appearance of well-defined personality styles. Common examples are the technical types, “techies,” “nerds,” whose work require long hours alone to master and execute, as in doing mathematical proofs, solving problems in theoretical physics, unraveling computer programming problems or writing highly technical tracks. These activities can be aided by the personality inclinations of shyness and distantiation, the experience of discomfort in social occasions along with a rich private fantasy life. Diagnostically oriented mental health

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