Does Dyspraxia relate to Personality Disorders?

A place to talk about your experience of living with Dyspraxia

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MDS
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Does Dyspraxia relate to Personality Disorders?

Post by MDS »

Over the years I have realized that certain aspects of my life were not to my satisfaction in the way I coped with life, with the result that my career pattern was always disastrous and at 73 I have a track record of realizing that my personality and certain motor skills are not quite fully normal.

For many years I wondered whether I suffered from Aspergers, but none of my symptoms are definite enough. They are only vaguely of that ilk, in that I used to find it difficult to relate to people, difficult to know to say the right thing and be spontaneous, difficult to take the right decisions. Then I thought it might be Dyspraxia because I have always had certain problems with very fine motor skills, such as I was always terrible at sport as a child, not very good hand-eye coordination, have a very tight handwriting scrawl, where I find it difficult to write in an easy way. Sometimes I feel I am just a little bit clumsy. But there is nothing grossly obvious to the outsider who sees me for the first time. However, when I am with people I often feel that I am on the outside. Consequently, I have an idea that it is Dyspraxia amongst other things that I suffer from, and so I am seeing a GP next week to see if I can obtain any form of diagnosis, but how that should happen I haven't the faintest idea, so any help there would be appreciated.

Despite all that I have just said, I realize that there is another condition that exists in my family, definitely over 3 generations and maybe even my grandchildren. I feel that I, my mother, my siblings and definitely my son suffer from the same Personality Disorder, that of Dissociation, an inability to communicate emotionally and share. That is a problem that has bugged my life, family and career. My son admitted to me he cannot share.

So therefore my question is - in the experience of people reading this - does Dyspraxia relate to the Personality Disorder of Dissociation, or is just a coincidence?

Any light that readers can shed would be most appreciated.
BeatrixPlotter
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Re: Does Dyspraxia relate to Personality Disorders?

Post by BeatrixPlotter »

It's interesting that you bring this up. Last year I was diagnosed with a whole raft of mental health issues, including Borderline Personality Disorder. Now that I have these names, I really feel as if my dyspraxia feeds into my problems with BPD, and vice versa. However, when I tried to bring this up with my GP and asked for help with dyspraxia to help alleviate the BPD, I was referred to a psychotherapist. Um... not what I asked for!!

I'm not really with it tonight so I can't really contribute any more, however, I'd like to see what others have to say.
sanahasacat
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Re: Does Dyspraxia relate to Personality Disorders?

Post by sanahasacat »

Hey, MDS. I think the answer 'does dyspraxia relate to personality disorders' is very much a thing which depends on the person, but it is absolutley possible for a person to have both, if that is what you are worried about.

I am actually in a fairly similar situation to you, though my symptoms are different and I am quite a bit younger; I almost definitley 'strange' or 'off' in a way beyond just my motor issues, in a way thats very hard to pin down. Like you, I considered at length the possibility I might be autistic, but decided against it (in my case, on the basis that I don't have any real difficulty relating to others; I'm just spacey and weird and a llittle awkward and have a lot of odd behavioural quirks), and am currently thinking I might have a personality disorder- though, mine would be more likely to be schizotypal (which, to be perfectly honest, almost just means "clinically absurd").

I don't think it's nessesarily that dyspraxia (or any developmental condition) is comorbid with a personality disorder by biology, but the symptoms definitley can feed into eachother. I am very 'eccentric' by nature, for example, but my clumsy, scatterbrained nature definitley led me to exaggerate a lot of my idiosyncracies as a coping mechanism, so that I would be the 'weird girl' rather than just 'ditzy' or 'stupid'.
MDS
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Re: Does Dyspraxia relate to Personality Disorders?

Post by MDS »

Thanks for those replies. I have crawling over this forum looking at various descriptions of how people feel and function in the outside world, and it is a relief to discover what I am really suffering from. Another person spoke about having BPD as well as Dyspraxia.

However, I am wondering what BPD really means. Is it like cancer, a catch-all. Beatrix, did your doctor say more when you were diagnosed?

I certainly have both dyspraxia and some form of personality problem that runs through the family for as many generations as I can contemplate, and the Dyspraxia in my daughter and her children, but always very mildly so one is quite often not sure. I liked the adjective dyspraxic rather than being full-blown dyspraxia, because the feeling I get is that goes for most of the people on this forum.
cluttered
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Re: Does Dyspraxia relate to Personality Disorders?

Post by cluttered »

It sounds like you have some level of dyspraxia, although that doesn't rule out Asperger's Syndrome or anything else; it actually makes it more likely. However, self-diagnosis, while often accurate, can be wrong in both directions: thinking you meet the diagnostic criteria, and thinking you don't.

Most people can relate to most developmental disorders a bit. For example, even people with excellent social skills have memories of things they've said that make them cringe and think they might be autistic. With dyspraxia, even professional dancers can remember times they were clumsy or forgot a motor sequence too easily and felt silly. For reasons I'll post a link about in the next paragraph, these people are actually more likely to blow such incidents up out of proportion. Symptoms of most disorders (there are some exceptions, e.g. Tourette's Syndrome) have to be severe and frequent enough to have interfered with your functioning or happiness significantly at some point, for diagnosis.

In the opposite direction, people with developmental disorders like the autism spectrum, which feature symptoms that are not often explicitly pointed out to the individual by teachers or others, and are not in other ways made obvious to them as the cause of their social, academic or occupational struggles, sometimes under-estimate their own symptoms. If you read about the Dunning-Kruger effect, our poor ability to self-diagnose and rule out certain conditions starts to make perfect sense.

Autism symptoms can be particularly difficult to be self-aware about, because there's often a lack of helpful feedback from others in daily life. Adults tend not to point out others' sub-par social skills, or the unusual or off-putting nature of their autistic habits, to the person in question, except if they've seriously offended them, and even then the complaints tend not to delve into the underlying symptom, e.g. "you can't read anyone's body language well enough".

Thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect and lack of helpful feedback in daily life, you really need objective cognitive testing methods and honest, unbiased feedback from others, such as a professional and people in the assessment room who've known you for years and have no self-interest in you having the condition or not. (Sometimes family members don't want to believe you have the disorder in question because of guilt they'd feel, or do want to believe you have it for various reasons, so watch out for that.)
BeatrixPlotter
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Re: Does Dyspraxia relate to Personality Disorders?

Post by BeatrixPlotter »

Hi MDS, no, nothing was really said about BPD to me when I was diagnosed. I was literally handed a pamphlet before I left the doctor's! As far as I know, though, it's a condition that develops in late adolescence, rather than conditions such as autism or asperger's that are present from birth (at least I think so, please correct me if I'm wrong). It usually seems to come about as a result of certain experiences in childhood.

Saying this, I don't think BPD and Dyspraxia have any links, as such. I just happen to have both.

i'm not sure I've answered your question, as I have an awful time organising my thoughts! Please ask if I've missed something out.
cluttered
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Re: Does Dyspraxia relate to Personality Disorders?

Post by cluttered »

BeatrixPlotter wrote: Saying this, I don't think BPD and Dyspraxia have any links, as such. I just happen to have both.
I've been a huge nerd for developmental and mental disorder research for years now, and the only study I've come across regarding the rate of co-occurrence of dyspraxia and personality disorders, was not looking at dyspraxia alone but at the extremely common combination (up to a quarter of dyspraxics have it according to current studies) of dyspraxia and ADHD. It's well-established that ADHD (including, to a lesser extent, the subtype with no hyperactivity) is very common among people with borderline personality disorder and in people with antisocial personality disorder, and at least one study, mentioned in the first link above, has indicated that this risk is even stronger when the ADHD is combined with dyspraxia.

I've not found any studies looking at whether dyspraxia without ADHD is more common in people with any personality disorder, however. Dyspraxic children without ADHD do still have lower self-esteem and higher rates of anxiety and mood disorders by the teen years (the boys far more so than the girls, probably due to gender-related social demands), and if personality disorders can develop as a result of low childhood self-esteem and mood/anxiety disorders (there is an association but no one really knows if it's causal), then you would expect there to be some degree of increased risk. But that's not been investigated yet (or if it has, the papers aren't accessible through Google Scholar 8-[).
sanahasacat
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Re: Does Dyspraxia relate to Personality Disorders?

Post by sanahasacat »

MDS wrote: However, I am wondering what BPD really means. Is it like cancer, a catch-all. Beatrix, did your doctor say more when you were diagnosed?
Like a lot of personality disorders, BPD describes quite a few different things that feed into eachother rather than one specific thing, but the basics (to the best of my knowledge) include intense but unstable emotions, impulsivity, difficulty maintaining long-term relationships, and a weak sense of self described as feeling "empty" or "fake".
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