Dependent personality disorder: A hindrance to self-care
| Wednesday October 29, 2014 17:10
Dependent Personality Disorder is a mental disorder classified under DSM IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th edition). This disorder basically describes people who consistently resist self-care or self-help. People with Dependent Personality Disorder do not acknowledge or give credit to their own abilities. They would rather rely on another person’s help, even if that other person’s help is not so useful, hence settling for less.
People with Dependent Personality Disorder learn to be over-dependent on others over a long period of time. They come from social environments or structures which do not foster self-reliance.
I remember a while ago when we sent our first child for an entrance assessment at a local pre-school. One of the requirements was to bring the children wearing tennis shoes (we call them takkies) to school on that day. We got particularly busy on that day, so we asked our then housekeeper, Lulu, to accompany her to the school. When they came back, Lulu was particularly surprised by the assessment given to the prospective pre-school children. She told me that one of the highly ranked assessment tools was to ask the children to tie their shoe laces.
Those who were not able to perform that task were sent back home and the parents were given homework to teach their children to tie their own shoe laces and come back for another assessment the following year.
Lulu being an inquisitive person asked the school principal why this skill was so important in their school, and she replied “Lulu, we are not looking for children who can calculate the area of a triangle, not at this stage. In our school, we give our learners an opportunity to play a lot and our caretakers cannot afford to go around tying shoe laces for all these children. If children cannot tie their own shoe laces, how then do you expect them to face other challenges at the playing ground?”
What the principal was saying was that her school did not want to give the learners a wrong and lasting first impression; that the world was waiting to tie their shoe laces. People with Dependent Personality Disorder have a fantasy that the world is waiting to tie their shoe laces.
I have met quite a number of people with Dependent Personality Disorder and Moses (not his real name) was one of them.
I met Moses a couple of years ago and taught him for eight months before he transferred to another school in a different part of the country, due to relocation of parents. What struck me about Moses was that he would never complete his class tasks without the help or approval of his peers. He also had a tendency of bringing some blank pages to me a day before an assignment was supposed to be submitted and asked me to discuss his homework with him. At first I thought he had a learning disability, so I decided to give him a task to write a story about his most treasured moments, under the condition that I was not going to disclose his story and Moses submitted some well written work, within the given time. I used that to eliminate any major learning disabilities. If he could write a story about his treasured moments, he could as well attempt to do his assignments. After a short private interview with Moses I learned that Moses experienced a lot of bullying and teasing in his early childhood, because of his peculiar, yet handsome physical features, so he learned to be on the safe side to avoid being teased by his peers. To Moses, being on the safe side meant he had to please his peers to avoid being picked on. He was overly sensitive to the slightest criticism.
I remember this other time when I had just commended Moses for completing a relatively easy task I had given him as homework, to try and boost his confidence. As usual, Moses went back to seek approval from his friends, who criticised his work. In his usual response to criticism, Moses changed everything by following his friends’ guidelines and made a mess of his work.
Moses knew very well that his friends did not mean well but had difficulty getting out of the friendships. His fear of being alone outweighed his fear of being misguided. He needed somebody who had the time and conducive space to give him professional therapy, so I referred him to a professional counsellor outside school to help him overcome his mental disorder.
Just like many other over-dependent people, Moses formed relationships with people so that they could control his life. He was looking for co-dependents to lean on. In his own dysfunctional world, life was all about dependents and co-dependents coming together to form partnerships. Unfortunately, these two types of people have one thing in common; they do not take responsibility to care for themselves. They don’t seem to appreciate that they will continue hurting until they take a step to acknowledge their pain and make their own decision to get out of it. As the Setswana proverb says:
“Mokoduo go tsosiwa yo o itsosang” which basically means the world embraces people who are willing to change positively.
That’s the golden rule.
*VICTORIA SEIKETSO SETHIBE
*Sethibe is a practising teacher