I’m wondering, can he be putting on a mask with each new test for whatever the current situation is? Each test tends to show only what is happening right now.
I think many of us put on a mask unconsciously. We do that primarily to not feel pain, and to feel that we work as a person. That we can effect in our environment that which secures what we need, while not giving rise to anxiety or other bad feelings, as we do so.
We want to feel intact. We will do almost anything to do so. To say that we do that to manipulate, fool, fake-out, has truth--but we are the greatest fools. We manipulate in the main, ourselves, by our masks.
Because he is in trouble. When he is in trouble, he clings to his dad and avoids socializing and sleeps a lot. BUT this does not fit him AT ALL normally.
What the psychologist is telling you is that what you are seeing, during these regressive periods, is the cracking of the mask. His personality (or mask) is not working for him. He regresses and he withdraws.
I have experienced this very thing. I was one person before my mother died, and turned into another one. The mask I had had (unconscious) no longer worked. I stayed in bed. I did not want to work. I was very sad. Etc. When the rigid defenses we use are challenged by circumstances and environment or aging or crisis, the real us seeps through. It is called decompensation. Not only your stepson, suffers this. Many of us do in the course of our lives.
I want to add something anecdotal here. A week or so again I took one of those free personality tests you can find on the internet. This one was based upon the work of Reich on Personality Character structure. It came out that I had strongest results in Schizoid and Oral. I was appalled. In real life I am extremely attuned to others, socially appropriate and responsive, etc. I made my living at this very thing. But the reality is that when I am under great stress, I withdraw. When I am really pushed against the wall, I become dependent. Not unlike your stepson. In my prior life, which I used to think of as "me" I had lived a life that was extremely independent, out there, and outwardly successful. It had been a compensation; to some extent a "mask." I feel convinced. Should I move beyond this period of my life, I will have integrated warded off feelings of dependency, isolation and abandonment so that they experienced in a way that they can be met and I can be nurtured and authentic.
This would be the goal for your stepson too. He can be helped by therapy.
Now. The psychologist is saying another thing, too. The treatment itself will bring forth this decompensation, but hopefully in a way that is titrated, so that your stepson can integrate these feelings and thereby come to have a more flexible and functional personality, more in touch with his own real feelings, more in touch with reality and more resilient.
It also doesn’t explain the things he is doing to get in trouble. It also doesn’t explain his aggression.
To me it does. I think those are defenses against his feelings seeping out, inside of himself. Anger is the first defense. Anger (and its cousin aggression) is a screen emotion. It is a cover story. It covers inside oneself the real feelings which are terrifying. Typically that feeling can be a sense of dissolution of self. I have felt it. And I have felt the anger that seeks to bind it.
Think about it. These aggressive acts show him to himself to be in control. Powerful. They push out and away feelings of helplessness and impotence and powerlessness. That is probably why extremely troubled kids torture and kill animals.
Your decision here as I see it is whether you will look at the situation in terms of the family and preserving it or whether the perspective is focused on your daughter. What SWOT says has merit.
In the short-term it will be easier for your daughter to make a stand for her. It is just that I am unsure if this is in her long-term interests or in yours. I am hoping that she is in therapy, and that the family is in family therapy.
After all you raised one. I am more concerned with the girl and believe this SS is sexually deviant, dangerous and without empathy and wont get better. I am thinking antisocial personality disorder, not schizoid. But who know? Nobody. There is no way to verify any psychiatric diagnosis. And that is the problem of psychiatry. Its opinion.
