Personality disorders are emotional disorders.
When we talk about ‘emotional disorders’, what are we referring to? Well, contrary to what the inept professional community (as a group) will have you believe, we are not talking about anything that involves ‘mental health’ - that is, the malfunctioning of your mental capacities. Instead, we are talking about something that involves emotional health.
(There are many excellent and insightful individuals within the professional community. I myself have a couple of exceptional individuals within the professional community to thank for finally, after two years of misdirection and bullshit, providing me with some amazing insights which led to me eventually ridding myself of Borderline Personality Disorder, authentically and permanently, over a period of seven years. But the professional community as a group is utterly incompetent.)
Emotional disorders occur when we walk around with subtle misperceptions and misconceptions about the very nature of some fundamental aspects of life which, we as human beings, must understand accurately in order to be able to enjoy inner contentment. What I’m referring to is our perceptions relating to the inherent nature of feelings, self, and life.
When I talk about feelings, self, and life, I’m not only referring to the perceptions you harbor toward your feelings, self, and life. For example, whatever perceptions you have toward the nature of your own feelings naturally determines the perception you will have towards feelings in general; that is, what the nature of all people’s feelings is.
Is it starting to become clear why people with emotional disorders, such as Borderline Personality Disorder, cannot experience authentic empathy, which is the ability to value what other people feel, and to feel as they feel, for completely altruistic reasons?
(Many people with Borderline Personality Disorder will argue until they are blue in the face that they are ‘empaths’. They are not. They cannot experience genuine empathy. The very nature of the disorder makes genuine empathy impossible. Their form of ‘empathy’ is a selfish, superficial approximation that serves their own unhealthy purposes.)
When people live with inaccurate perceptions and conceptions regarding the very nature of what the fundamental aspects of life are (feelings, self, and life) the natural result is disorder. The only possibility is disorder. The filter they see the world through - that is, the understanding they use to approach life - is not accurately describing the reality in which they are operating. Harmony with life cannot result.
Personality disorders have their name because a common misperception, or misconception, that people adopt is that their feelings are inherently irrelevant and shameful, devoid of worth. When one is certain that his or her feelings are inherently irrelevant and shameful, devoid of worth, by extension, they very naturally conclude that this reality applies to they themselves, as people, as well.
People who are certain, either unconsciously or subconsciously, that they are devoid of worth, do not voluntarily present their true selves to others. Doing so would be a total contradiction to what shame - intense humiliating repugnance towards something, in this case themselves - is, and how it behaves. So people with these emotional disorders live with the certainty that others only like them as long as the truth does not become obvious: That they are worthless.
In other words, they believe that anybody who likes them has been ‘fooled’ into liking them, or for some reason has not figured out the true nature of who it is they are dealing with. Because their underlying certainties about the nature of self has them convinced that their inherent nature - their natural state - is that they are unlikable.
What is your personality? It is your genuine self which you freely allow others to see.
Does a person who is ashamed of himself, who is bitterly humiliated by himself, freely allow others to see his genuine self? No, he or she does not. So instead these individuals perform a constant act for others. They do their very best to conceal the very thing that they are intensely ashamed of. Hence, the reason these conditions are often referred to as ‘personality’ disorders. They directly affect and influence the very ability of a person to authentically display his or her personality.
At what stage of life do we cement our perceptions about things such as the fundamental nature of feelings, self, and life?
This happens for all of us as human beings within the very brief, early years of our lives. And where do we get the education to form these conclusions and cement these fundamental perceptions?
From our emotional teachers; our parents.
Whatever attitudes they live with, this is the source of our education for forming and cementing our own perceptions towards the very nature of the most fundamental of things like what feelings, self, and life involve.
So perhaps you’ve read, or have been told, that it is ‘trauma’ that is the cause of emotional disorders. This is an incompetent lie.
Emotional disorders are not a strange form of PTSD, or shell shock, brought about by periods of intense fear or stress.
No, emotional disorders are merely the result of being improperly educated about the inherent nature of feelings, self, and life, through the unhealthy attitudes that our emotional teachers live with themselves.
It is unhealthy attitudes which do the damage, and the messages they communicate to us while we are young and absorbing information in everything around us.
Hopefully by now you have arrived at the answer to the original question on your own:
People can adopt emotionally-unhealthy practices later in life (passive aggressive communication/behavior is a common example of this), but they cannot develop emotional disorders later in life.
Emotional disorders are merely the naturally-resulting chaos and disorder that results from living with misperceptions and misconceptions about fundamental aspects of life that are necessary for inner contentment. Our understanding about the nature of these fundamental things are cemented into place before our first day of kindergarten. We then use these perceptions, no matter how accurate or inaccurate, to navigate the world around us for the rest of our lives.
…Unless, that is, circumstances and consequences coalesce to make us go back and truly reevaluate our concrete certainties about the nature of these fundamental things, as happened in my case.