In daily life: dealing with the paranoid

By Cristiano Antonino On Nov 24, 2022

At least once in your life you have come across it: it’s the paranoid. At work, at the gym, in the supermarket, among friends or even in the family. How to recognise it?

Living with a paranoid

A clue is provided by how you feel when you meet him: distrust and suspiciousness permeate the air.

The feeling is like walking on eggshells; you feel under scrutiny, breathing down your neck.

You feel oppressed by his mistrust, you would like to scowl, to free yourself once and for all from that tangle of tendentious questions in which you have got yourself into.

You begin to be elusive.

You hope to come out of it with vagueness, to escape from that relational claustrophobia.

But no.

Your answers become the object of analysis, meticulous of course.

At this point, your mind begins to long for deserted beaches where you can spend your remaining years.

You really can’t take it any more.

The irritation mounts and…tac…there’s your faux pas: now you too appear in his eyes as yet another one who wanted to screw him over.

And then that controlling, 41 bis-style urging gives way to aggression.

Now you no longer feel bridled, asphyxiated, but afraid. You represent the red rag in front of a charging bull.

Reacting peacefully and sympathetically in such a situation has the same difficulty coefficient as a quadruple somersault and a half reversal.

Like most living beings on this planet, you react by responding to the provocation or by walking away.

And there you have it, again the negative expectation of the paranoid confirmed.

The paranoid from the outside

Observing him more from a distance? As mentioned, you would notice suspiciousness, distrust and hostility permeating his relationships, you would see him reluctant to confide in or be intimate with others, guarded to the point of appearing ‘cold’, rational, lacking in affectionate feelings.

You would not see him or her with many friends around, because he or she strongly doubts their loyalty as well as being exaggeratedly suspicious of the fidelity of the partner, whom he or she therefore strongly controls.

Often rigid, critical, argumentative, angry, resentful and vindictive.

And to top it off, a brushstroke of touchiness and touchiness.

There, the picture is done.

References

Agnello, T., Fante, C., Pruneti, C. (2013). Paranoid personality disorder: new areas of research in diagnosis and treatment. Journal of Psychopathology, 19, 310-319.

American Psychiatric Association (2014). DSM-5: Manuale diagnostico e statistico dei disturbi mentali. Raffaello Cortina, Milano.

Benjamin, L. (1996). Interpersonal diagnosis and treatment of personality disorders. Second Edition. New York: Guilford.

Dimaggio, G., Montano, A., Popolo, R., Salvatore, G. (2013). Terapia metacognitiva interpersonale dei disturbi di personalità. Raffaello Cortina, Milano.

Dimaggio, G., Ottavi, P., Popolo, R., Salvatore, G. (2019). Corpo, immaginazione e cambiamento. Terapia metacognitiva interpersonale. Raffaello Cortina, Milano.

Dimaggio, G., Semerari, A. (2003). I disturbi di personalità. Modelli e trattamento. Editori Laterza, Bari-Roma.

Lobbestael, J., Arntz, A., Bernstein, D.P. (2010). Disentalgling the relationship between different types of childhood maltreatment and personality disorders. J Pers Disord, 24, 285-295.

Tyrka, A.R., Wyche, M.C., Kelly, M.M., et al. (2009). Childhood maltreatment and adult personality disorder symptoms: Influence of maltreatment type. Psychiatry Res, 165, 281-287.

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