What is a self defeating personality and what are self defeating thoughts?

Answer 1

To answer this question I first need to explain, what a personality disorder or PD is. Basically PDs are a group of thought disorder conditions suffered by certain humans of both genders. If you suffer from a PD your thoughts and behaviours are characterized by a general failure to learn from your mistakes or experiences in life. So you fail to adapt appropriately to changes in your life. The consequence is most usually you suffer personal distress and impairment in your social functioning during life and that can mean other people tend to take a dislike to you and/or take advantage of your inadequacies, so you have difficulty making trusted friends throughout your life and are likely to become a loner and you may also have great difficulty in finding work and/or holding down a job without getting into trouble with your employers.

The fact you have a PD may not be understood by yourself although it may become apparent to others particularly during periods of stress in your life when PD traits are most likely to be activated. Many PDs (such as antisocial PD, schizoid PD, paranoid PD, avoidant PD. histrionic PD, borderline PD, narcisstic PD etc. ) are defined in what are termed personality disorder clusters in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) recognised in the USA, and are covered individually elsewhere in wikianswers.

But a Self-defeating Personality is rather a paradox in this context. Because it involves you having habitual self defeating thoughts and behaviour and setting yourself up to fail in your life and be taken advantage of by others which may seem extremely weird, but such people do exist. It is also sometimes termed a masochistic PD but it has never as yet been formally admitted into the USA's DSM as it is not really comparable with other PDs. But the existence of a self defeating personality is nevertheless widely recognised by eminent psychologists and psychiatrists and mental health researchers all over the world as real. I have certainly encountered people who have this disorder in their thinking and so do as a result suffer much personal distress in life to varying degrees. It is really an extreme form of masochism, meaning you gaining bizarre pleasure, (often but not always sexual pleasure) through your own mental or physical pain or anguish, such as from your failure or you being defeated by somebody else in some undertaking, so your victor feels really great and you are publicly humiliated at his or her expense.

To be diagnosed as having this your behaviour will include four or more of following reflected in your mindset and behaviour:-

1. You tend to choose persons and situations in your life that lead to disappointment, failure, or mistreatment of you even though better options are clearly available.

2. You reject or render ineffective attempts by others to help you.

3. You habitually engage in excessive self-sacrificethat is often unsolicited by the intended recipients of the sacrifice, and you enjoy being on receiving end of discipline.

4. You react to positive events in your life instead of with elation, with depression, guilt, or a behaviour that results in physical or mental pain or punishment.

5. You set yourself up to be taken advantage or be a victim of piss-taking or incite angry responses from others whether at school or work, in your family or socially.

6. You feel a habitual need to be punished or on receiving end of disciplinary action, but make it your norm to reject opportunities for pleasure, and are reluctant to acknowledge enjoying yourself despite you having adequate social skills and the capacity for pleasure.

7. You try to fail to accomplish tasks that may be crucial to your personal objectives despite your ability to do well in such, so enabling others to get the credit so you become the victim of their success, such as them getting promoted instead of you through your efforts to help them at your expense.

8. You are uninterested in or reject people who consistently treat you well and are unattracted to caring sexual partners but may be very attracted to relationships with people who perhaps cruelly abuse you either mentally or physically.

9. You may never desire to share your bed with any other person and enjoy only solo sex alone in bed throughout your life often involving fantasies about being a victim.

9. You seek work where you are treated virtually or totally as a slave,on very low or zero wages and where your boss or co-workers enjoy making money from your sweat and toil which they profit from.

10. You may set yourself up to take the blame for someone else's wrong doings or be found guilty and perhaps punished for some offence you know was committed by someone else, so the person who really committed the offence escapes justice and in extreme cases you perhaps end up in jail after having confessed to his crime while he thoroughly enjoys the benefits and profits of that crime in luxury laughing at your misery.

Both males and females of all races can have this personality trait to varying degrees , and their victors can be the same or opposite gender to themselves. But many seemingly keep their disorder secret. If you or somebody you know has four or more of these traits and particularly if you or them get sexual arousal, perhaps leading to solo masturbation from fantasies imagining nasty things happening to you or them or experiencing these kind of situations in real life, you or the other person need to seek help, ideally be seeing a doctor and getting referred to a mental health practitioner for treatment.

However experiences suggest most people who do have this disorder in their thinking, which may often be blended with one or more other cluster PDs rarely come out nor seek treatment because they bizarrely enjoy the pleasure experienced by their victors at their expense and/or through their suffering and enjoy being disciplined.

The cause of a self defeating personality if it is indeed a PD are believed to be physical emotional and or sexual abuse in childhood resulting in a negativistic explanitory style and subconscious fears of success and failure in own life, that often being a consequence of borderline parenting.