Recently we have been talking about death and how to cope with both the overwhelming feelings of despair that accompany the end of a life. We also looked at just what is a reasonable time spam to get over the loss of a much loved friend or family member.
In How Long Does It Take to Get Over a Death I asked readers to estimate what they thought was a standard time to really come to grips with loss through death. The standard benchmark suggested by mental health experts is a minimum of a year. Yet society seldom gives us such a luxury length of time to do so. And readers reflected that experience and also confirmed that you doesn’t really get over a death, you just learn to adjust your life with that particular person missing.
In Coping with Death we continued the theme and looked at developing better techniques for coping with our own death, because that is the source of our fear about death in general. We looked at how some people are actually able to embrace death as a natural life occurrence (which of course, it is) and plan for their funeral and life for their loved ones without them. As I commented, what started out as an article on death ended up being a blog on better living!
We also looked at the phenomenon of Histrionic Personality Disorder, whereby sufferers of this disorder exhibit overly dramatic behaviors, dress and speech patterns, yet conversely seem like shallow cut-out cardboard shapes with no real substance to their personalities.
In the case study of Sarah-Kate, we saw instances where Sarah-Kate was never comfortable unless she was drawing attention to herself, and displaying a rapid shifting of emotions from moment to moment, none of which seemed genuine to an astute observer. Her speech style was overly dramatic, she made exorbitant promises that she seldom kept, considered her relationships to be more intimate than they really were, and became overly intimate with a person within the first few minutes of meeting them. It was also noted that, having little sense of self, sufferers of histrionic personality disorder are particularly prone to scams, easily influenced by others and often suffer marked depression due to their lack of ability to form genuine long-lasting relationships.
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Related articles:
How Long Does It Take to Get Over a Death?
Histrionic Personality Disorder (1)
Histrionic Personality Disorder (2)
Histrionic Personality Disorder: Diagnostic Criteria