Karen Horney’s 10 categories of neurotic needs tell a well-rounded story about me. Horney’s Psychoanalytic Social Theory revolves a lot around one’s attitudes and behavior in its most extreme form. According to my results from the personality disorder test, I am most likely to have Schizotypal, Borderline, Histrionic, and Avoidant disorders. I may have Paranoia and to be a bit too Antisocial, Narcissistic, and Dependent on others. At the very least, I have a low chance of having Schizoid or Obsessive-Compulsive disorders.
After the test results, what comes to mind first is how the quiz determines the disorders it did for me. Schizotypal and Avoidant disorders are pretty similar to each other in how they both move away and against people. They are opposite to Histrionic which moves towards people and wants everyone’s attention.
At a young age, I was already marked as an eccentric child. Going to a predominately white private Catholic school, an Asian girl with terrible English would never fit in. Thus, I was labeled as odd and weird. This made me a super anxious person later on. I avoided people. I never wanted to talk because I was afraid people would make fun of what I say. My way of speaking differs from others. At home I would speak Chinese with my parents, rarely practicing English; therefore I never picked up on common phrases or flow of words that other kids learned from their families. I remember people would often say I “grew up under a rock” because I never knew the latest hit music or the new hottest Hollywood movie to listen to or watch. I often had this basic anxiety that never went away.
A symptom of schizotypal includes having odd thought processes. For example, I had a desk critic in studio with my professor and I was explaining my thought process, but she had troublesome following my trains of thought. I tend to think differently than others. For instance, when a friend trips and falls, I would laugh at them instead of ask them if they are okay. On the upside, having different thinking means I think outside the box. This is good for my profession as an architecture student. You need to think creatively and innovatively in order to solve problems. Another symptom of schizotypal is believing in a sixth sense. I am pretty superstitious. I believe in fate and that everyone has their own destiny. Even cheesier, I believe in soulmates. Lastly, another symptom of schizotypal I relate to is having difficulty maintaining concentration. I get distracted a lot. I have trouble starting and finishing homework in a timely manner. Often I will procrastinate on work and end up staying up very late to finish projects the night before. Being easily distracted is a very bad habit and trait. I try my best to clear myself from distractions, even pushing people away from me to have the time to finish what I need to do.
The two disorders I’m highly likely to have according to the test is Avoidant disorder. Symptoms of this disorder include fear of rejection and criticization in social situations, embarrassment, poor self-image, and desire for a better self-image. Since being made fun of a lot as a child, I have developed a very low self-confidence level. Whenever I’m put at a social event, I have difficulty taking the first step in engaging others. I get anxious that people will turn me down and away. I fear for the answer no to any of my approaches. I am also afraid of giving people material for embarrassment. What if when I’m walking up the stairs and I trip and fall and a whole crowd sees this and laughs. Due to my fears, I don’t have a very large network connection in my profession. However, people always emphasize how important it is to make connections in order to find jobs. As a result, I have always found difficulty landing internships. I rely on my friends to help me find jobs and help.
Yet, I also have this pull to the Histrionic disorder. I believe this is because I never had a safe or satisfied childhood. I definitely developed basic hostility towards my parents. While I am an only child, my parents put a lot of pressure and effort on me to be perfect. Rarely were they satisfied with good results; everything had to be perfect to the T. This definitely influenced me to move towards other people and gain their attention and approval. What I could not seek or receive from my parents, I went to gather from friendships and relationships. I gather their attention by depicting myself as a humorous person. I always have the time to make sly jokes or chide people for absurd issues and matters. While I may be constantly talking and engaging my friends and peers, secretly I am seeking their approval. When there are awkward moments and silence, I would take these exploits as neglect and rejection. I experience in self-contempt and frustration for not foreseeing the failures in these situations. Another part of the histrionic disorder is being manipulative. I have certainly been told I am manipulative by some of my close friends. I will exaggerate situations sometimes to make my friends more empathic towards me. One time last year, I was late to club dance practice and everyone was waiting for me. When I walked in everyone was waiting for the instructor, who is a friend of mine, to call me out for being late. Instead, I walked up to my friend and told her in a low voice that I was late because I was on the phone with another friend dealing with a situation that made me cry, thus making me late. I knew that my friend had a weak heart for people who cry and is always ready to empathize with them. I manipulative my way around her heart and away with being late to practice.
Lastly, in my most likely to have disorders topics, there is borderline personality disorder. I expected borderline to appear as a disorder for myself because I tend to have very unstable moods. My friends say I am rather unpredictable; I am a time ticking bomb that will explode any minute. I tend to do things on impulse. I was in a group call with some friends once and we were playing Minecraft. I remember how all of them had administrative permissions and were flying around the world having fun. I had yet to figure out how to get these administrative permissions and thus I was complaining about the unfairness. While complaining, I passive-aggressively threw blame to one particular friend of mine who often is the “mom” of the group and manages everything. I knew she had the answer to how I could get admin access. She warned me to stop blaming her for things I could not get. I tried to exploit others. Getting admin access was actually an easy google search, but instead, I impulsively kept blaming my friend until she hung-up on the group call and left the game. I knew how to push her patience, and without a thought, I crossed the line. I had this neurotic need for power. I knew to show power it was to demand what I wanted and not give up. My friend hung-up on the call and in a way that showed that I had the power to get her to leave the group call. I realized my wrongdoings after this situation. I mulled over my stupidity and occupied myself with self-torment for being so impulsive and not thinking through my friend’s feelings.
Another time, I was in a group call with the same people. I hadn’t gotten the chance to join calls in a week due to being neck-deep in work and missed out on a number of inside jokes and memes. During the call, they would just talk and talk and then laugh about these inside jokes that no one has let me on into and I had to mute myself because I was fed up with being left out. I felt really mad that no one was letting me in on the conversation or at least including me in. I felt so excluded that I wanted to scream angrily at them for being unthoughtful towards me and leaving me out. I had the neurotic need for social recognition. I did not get any; instead, I got unstable friendships. It did not take long for us to have a consequential fight and then separate onto different paths. At the end of the day, a lot of the conversation between all of us was toxic and pointing figures at each other’s faults. Another symptom of borderline disorder is getting angry when expectations are not met. A very clear example of this is this one time when my food in the computer lab was thrown out. I was staying up late working on a group project with my friend in the computer lab. We both had food out, since we were working through dinner. I left in the morning to go shower, and in the morning the janitor comes in to clean up the lab. The janitor ends up throwing away my container of food due to the no food in the lab rule. When I came back, I went looking for my food, and my friend said the janitor may have taken it away. I asked my friend why her food was not taken away and she said it was because she packed away her food and hid it before the janitor came in. I threw my hands up in disbelief that my friend did not think twice to also put my food away along with hers and hid both of them. I could not believe that a simple step of also putting away my food too while putting away her own did not phase her. I was mad and annoyed and noted to myself that my friend is completely unreliable.
Then, the personality tests say I could have paranoia, narcissistic, antisocial, and dependent disorders too. My paranoia started with troublesome friendships. As a child, I rarely had friends in school. I was aware of the reasons why I did not have friends. It was all due to being different. Often, I was paranoid. I was paranoid about what people said about me. I wanted attention but was paranoid about what people would think if I gathered too much attention. There was a show and tell week at school, and I was scared of showing off too much. Thus I purposely messed up while performing. In second grade, math was my favorite subject and I would always finish multiplication quizzes first. However, I was paranoid at what my classmates would say if I always got up from my sit too quickly to turn in the test. I self-realized after that, that I grew to distrust and be wary of my surroundings. I cannot read hearts and minds, thus I am paranoid at what people are always thinking. I could never have enough pennies to pay for people’s thoughts.
I’m constantly testing my friends by asking roundabout questions if their intentions of things are true and pure. Sometimes people have hidden motives. For example, when a new freshman in the club started to talk to me, I was suspicious of her. I am not the most approachable person in the club and I was wondering why she wanted to talk to me. I later found out she was also an architecture student, which made me even more paranoid. I was not sure if she was being friendly to me to get more laser-cut time or leftover architecture supplies from me. Another time when I got really paranoid is when a guy part of my China study abroad trip started to talk to me a lot. He would constantly message me hi and ask how I was or what I was doing. He knew I liked cats and often sent me pictures and memes of cats. One time, a group of us wanted to go to the club. I was not for a late night and opted out. The guy planned on going but ended up not. I got a message from the guy once everyone left, asking if I wanted to hang out with him and watch a movie. I was paranoid that he was going to make a move on me so I ignored him and went on with my life. I tend to move away from single guys because I never know if they are “thirsty” and want to get laid.
This leads to my next disorder called narcissistic. Narcissistic is like a follow-up to my histrionic counterpart. There are some narcissistic aspects that I relate heavily to, while others do not. For example, I am somewhat self-centered. I have this sense of self-importance and putting myself first. I got personal admiration for myself. I want people to pay attention to me and focus on my success and the good things I have accomplished. The keyword here is through all aforementioned, I am making myself superior to the others. In a recent instance, I compare my grades to my two friends in the same class. Since I have a higher grade than them, I assert my dominance over the other two when we brainstorm for other homework problems and studies. This is because I have the highest grade; in relation means I am better at this subject than the other two. My neurotic ambition causes me to fail shortly in the future. I overshot my understanding of the class materials for our test and made a few careless mistakes.
Another part of narcissistic that is on point is the symptom to lie. I lie to myself and others a lot. I try to be as honest as possible, but many times I consider other people’s feelings (at least that’s what I convince myself I’m doing) and lie. A typical example of lying to my friends is when they ask for personal opinions on whether they are obsessing too much on a break-up or being too petty about an argument. However, the main aspect of the lying symptom is how I lie to myself. I have this self-idealization, the neurotic need for perfection. I try to make myself appear the way I want others to perceive me, all in good aspects. For instance, recently I had the impulse to dye my hair. I felt like it would make me different, mentally and physically. After dying my hair I fancied a wardrobe change. I felt like I need to dress up prettier to play the part. I bought a few party-like clothes and started to wear make-up when I go out. I made myself appear like a movie replica of Mean Girls. By dressing-up, I believed more people looked at me, thought about me, and approached me.
Next, I have some parts of the antisocial disorder. I see this disorder as an equivalent to the borderline disorder. On top of the symptoms of antisocial disorder, I started to have a conflict of self-hatred. Specifically, I expressed Horney’s self-destructive actions and impulses. A part of my fake self-idealized persona, I started to go to parties with friends on the weekend. Yet, since I’m antisocial, I’m afraid to approach strangers and interact. To combat my fears, I would drink alcohol until I am tipsy or drunk. By getting drunk, my brain stopped thinking and processing fears and worries, and I became more captivated by strangers. I remember making pretty irresponsible decisions while drunk. Some irresponsible decisions are like staying up until 5 am, ignoring doing homework, wasting money to buy McDonald’s even though I was not hungry, and throwing up from overdrinking.
The fourth disorder that I got a moderate rating for was the dependent disorder. I used to correlate to this disorder a ton. When I was a child, I used to cry when I lose games. I was dependent on others to know that I wanted all the glory of winning. Consequently, my childhood friend’s mother would tell her to lose on purpose so I could win. Being an only child, I was lonely a lot. When my family and I travel, I often felt bored and helpless because there was no entertainment for me. Back then, portable TVs and smartphones were still a luxury. Therefore, whenever I made a friend, I felt the need to drag them everywhere. I was dependent on their presence and wanted to spend every single moment together.
After entering college, my dependency needs grew. I entered my first relationship and I was definitely very clingy. I had this fear that if I was not spending time with my boyfriend, he would leave me. Especially when he spent time with other girls, I was afraid and would cling even more to him. The more I spent time with my boyfriend, the less time I spent with my friends back home. They grew less dependent on me and the same happened vice versa. When we grew apart, I acted out and threw tantrums because I thought they weren’t doing enough to keep in contact with me. I would also merciless self-accuse myself for not doing enough in keeping my friendships. My expectations of dating were all referenced from typical modern TV shows. My impression was that the guy would know what the girl wanted. I expected my boyfriend would know and understand my feelings and needs even without my speaking up about them. None of this was true, and our relationships got out of hand and toxic. Soon after, my boyfriend and I broke up. Shortly after the break-up, I had this neurotic need for a partner. I went out to find and start dating another guy. However, the relationship never sat well with me. One day, I had a realization that I had to grow out of my dependency on others.
My two lowest disorders are Schizoid and Obsessive-Compulsive disorders. My personality does counter to the symptoms of these two orders. I get more anxious at social interactions, therefore am more antisocial than schizoid. Schizoids solely prefer to be alone; I’m more alone due to circumstances. I can easily express anger to others while schizoids do not. For obsessive-compulsive disorder, one thinks in a very black and white manner. I tend to be in more grey situations and don’t believe in solely one answer to problems. I believe there are many paths and solutions to dilemmas. Also, I understand there’s no perfectness in this world. Therefore, the personality test is right that I have a low relation to both these disorders.
Horney ultimately wants us to have self-realization. To recognize that we should give up our idealized self-image. Through self-analysis, you would acquire the capability to be responsible for your emotional growth. In me, I had a self-analysis period when I was in China. China removed me from my toxic self-hatred and gave me an aerial view of all my problems. I realized I was too invested in self-hatred. I learned to grow independent. I was determined to become more self-confident and look less for other people’s approval and give myself more credit. I tried to minimize my need and thoughts to compare myself to others. Eventually, I’m trying to detach myself from society’s modern toxic cultural.
cdreamer215 