What to do with a neurotic personality

One of the things that makes you more at predisposed to develop a depression is a neurotic personality type. 'Neurotic' is an old-fashioned word these days, and when we use it we don't always use it in its correct context. High natural anxiety is the main feature of this personality type along with an overwhelming need to be approved of and liked and, therefore, a pressing need to please others. Reasearchers have found that, among the other things that put you at higher risk of developing depression, having neurotic personality characteristics is right up there along with family history and being female. Look at the neurotic personality characteristics listed below and see if any are an apt description of your own modus operandi.

1. Having high expectations of your partner 2. Having a need to control everything 3. Iron will 4. Having a high drive for achievement 5. Wanting to be self-sufficient 6. Needing others to like you 7. Desiring recognition 8. Perfectionism

Here are some suggestions for 'managing' your personality tendencies so that you are in less danger. What's important to bear in mind, however, is that because your personality is 'who you are' it is very difficult to see faults in it from your own point of view, and even harder to change it. It's like asking you to be a completely different species. To do this kind of work on yourself, properly, you would really do best to work with a professional counsellor. So this information is meant more to make you AWARE of the way that you operate in life rather than to instigate major changes.

Let's go into each of the neurotic personality traits in a bit more detail.

High expectations of your partner

This is where my neurotic personality becomes most difficult. A few days ago I overheard a conversation between two mums waiting to take their children in to the library. Both had children of about a year old in push chairs and the one mum was telling the other that she had fallen pregnant again. She said that her partner was not impressed. "Frankly, I think it's all a bit of a shock for him, poor man, but I am really happy to have them so close together," she said. I thought to myself, "There's the difference between you and me, darling." I can NOT seem to separate my partner from myself very easily and so, if MY partner were unhappy that I was pregnant for the second time, I would be angry, I'd take it personally, I'd lambast him and I would not be able to laugh about it and be happy on my own.

If my partner doesn't live up to my expectations of him I am not just mildly annoyed, I start to feel like my world is crumbling around me. My expectations of myself are too high for comfort; my expectations of others are similarly high and so others annoy me often; my expectations of my partner are unrealistic and can bring me pain. While this neurotic personality trait is not just going to go away because I am aware of the pain that it causes me, the awareness that the high expectations are MINE, and my husband's failure to live up to them does not constitute a weakness of character or a deliberate attempt to be obstructive, does go a long way in helping me to live more sanely.

Just remember that your partner has a different experience from you of your pregnancy; he is dealing with his own emotions and confused feelings; he is finding his own way in to the role of father-to-be; in all likelihood he cannot read your mind or possibly know how you want him to behave. If possible, continually remind yourself to have no expectations at all of how he should behave. Take all that energy that usually goes into maintaining your neurotic personality's need to control other people and use it to be very gentle and nurturing with YOURSELF. Now there's a challenge!

Need to control everything

You may or may not yet have realised that this is the root of a great deal of your pain. If you still think that the reason you cannot be happy is that other people just won't behave as they should, then I would urge you to think about the possibility that trying to control everything is a little unrealistic. It's even harder to see that you are doing it if you are doing it with everyone else's best interests at heart, but , believe me, it's part of your neurotic personality.

I find that my tendency to try to control situations leaves me exhausted. If I do manage to control my surroundings then you can bet your life I am living in a very 'small', rigid and not-very-happy personal universe. It has taken me ages to learn that I cannot control what happens to me, what other people do (especially what my husband does), how my child behaves.....and that if I try to control them I make myself very miserable and tired. This is a big one in pregnancy when a great deal is suddenly out of your control.

My neurotic personality wanted a home birth because, strangely, I'm afraid of hospitals and, not-so-strangely, I thought that if I was at home I'd be more in control of my environment. But then I went over my due date and I was devastated that I might have to go to hospital to have labour induced. I found it excruciatingly difficult to not be in control of where and how I had my baby. That's just one example of all the possible things that could NOT go according to plan in a pregnancy. Trying to be in control means that you are inherently INFLEXIBLE and that you fear change because you find it hard to go with the flow. So it's easy to see how this neurotic personality trait can lead to depression.

I couldn't control my husband's reaction to my falling pregnant and I couldn't easily adapt the life that I had built for myself to the physical experience of being pregnant. So I got depressed. Go to 'my story' to read more about how my neurotic personality factored in my pregnancy depression.

Iron will

This neurotic personality trait is also a part of the attempt to control everyone and everything (paragraph above) but I think of it more as it applies to the way that I force MYSELF to do things, however difficult.

Pregnancy can be an obstacle to the 'iron will'. Because being pregnant can be a bit like having your body taken over by an alien (i.e. the baby appropriates it for its own need), the 'iron will' can become much less effective than it was before. This can feel anything from frustrating to fear-inducing and may put you at risk for pregnancy depression.

It took me a while to accept that I could no longer force myself to work ridiculous hours or to exercise to the level that I once had. When I did accept that use of the punishing iron will might damage my pregnancy I began to be willing to be more gentle with myself.....Of course my neurotic personality head sees that willingness as 'letting things slide', 'wimping out', 'being seen by my husband and my employer as weak'.

Call it what you will, but know that the superwoman persona might have to take a back seat from now on if you are to remain sane!

Personal drive toward achievement

If you are reading this then personal achievement is as important to your sense of self-worth as being a good person. For me, my whole sense of self-worth is linked up with achievement. "What could possibly be bad about that?" I hear you say. Well, nothing, in principle, but it is a neurotic personality trait that can lead to depression in pregnancy or postpartum depression. This can happen in one of two ways.

Either pregnancy and motherhood can put the brakes on your personal achievement goals, OR you can have expectations of your mothering achievements that you fail to live up to.

In my case, I fell pregnant before I had arrived at the career level I would have liked to have achieved before having children. Make no mistake, I wanted to be pregnant, but I felt that I had failed in my career and that it would be too long a time before I could achieve what I wanted again. Because of the physical tiredness that I experienced I also felt that I was unable to achieve anything while I was pregnant. Since career achievement was pretty much the whole basis of my self esteem at that point in my life, I really struggled to feel any sense of worth and purpose....even more so after I had my baby. I had to learn to feel a sense of achievement from more simple things like being as healthy as I could in my pregnancy, doing one small thing to plan for the baby's arrival or doing something kind and nurturing for myself. Perhaps it sounds a bit 'wimpy' to you, but it has led me to a more rounded and grounded sense of self-esteem that gives me a greater enjoyment of my life today.

I also had ideas of 'personal achievements in mothering', which also fits into the high expectations department of the neurotic personality whole. So it was to be ONLY BREASTFEEDING for me and my baby, which meant that I forced myself through two bouts of agonizing mastitis and daily expressing sessions (because baby MUST also learn to take a bottle!). Also, no environmentally-unfriendly disposable nappies for us; cotton nappies, nappy buckets and endless washing and trying to dry nappies in the middle of a British winter was MUCH more the self-punishing style my neurotic personality was accustomed to. And there were many many more 'perfect mum' aspirations to drive me into postnatal depression.

Hopefully, I'll manage to be more gentle and kind with myself if there is a next-time, now that I am so much more aware of my neurotic personality and my self-punishment style.

Wanting to be self-sufficient

The true neurotic personality does not like to accept help. "I can do it myself" was my mantra; it still is a lot of the time. This can contribute to pregnancy depression in two ways.

If I don't ask for help I get tired more easily because I am doing it all. In pregnancy, you're pretty tired already. If you are determined to do everything yourself you can tip yourself over the edge into beyond-coping, chronic stress and depression. It's not easy for me to ask for help. If I ask my partner to help me or to take on more of the household chores, I am dead certain he is annoyed about it. If I ask other people I feel like I am imposing on them. It's important for me to remember that I cannot control how other people will respond and I cannot know what their true response is because I am not inside their mind. The fact of the matter is that I need help. I have had to learn to not need other people to like me so much that I put my own health and wellbeing at risk.

If I am too proud/shy/arrogant/neurotic to ask for help then if I become depressed I will suffer for longer because "I can fix it myself, thank you very much, without having to involve anyone else". The cliche that no man is an island is never more true than when you are pregnant. If you can't ask for help for yourself, then ask for help for your baby's sake. You are putting your baby at risk if you suffer from untreated depression in pregnancy.

Need to please others and to be liked

Ah! This, to me, is the root of all evil and pain in a neurotic personality. I have an overwhelming need to have people like me and so I will bend over backwards to be in everyone's good opinion all of the time, no matter how much time and effort it costs me. I will even do it to be in the good books of people that I don't personally LIKE! It sounds insane but I tell you that it feels like my whole world stops if I think someone does not like me or is speaking badly about me. This used to control my life and take up all my energy but I have now done a lot of work on it with the help of a counsellor. Now I can experience the feeling of panic that someone may not like me, but not feel the need to adjust my behaviour accordingly.

When you are pregnant the need to have people like you can cause you pain in a multitude of different ways. For exampe, if you can't abide having anyone touch your belly but someone wants to touch it, you will let them do it, and feel discomfort yourself, rather than hurt their feelings. People may offer you opinions and you will pretend to agree with them when your beliefs are different. You might compromise your birth plan to be pleasing to your midwife. Taking time off work to go to antenatal appointments might cause endless conflict in you because you want to be pleasing to your employer. And CONFLICT is the key word here. The inner conflict that you feel from all the compromising you do so that others will approve of you, takes its toll on your psyche and can tip you into a pregnancy depression.

A good way to overcome this is to get yourself some Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and work on this neurotic personality thinking.

Desire for recognition

I think that most of the points that are relevant here have been covered in the section on the need for personal achievement. All that I can add is that, in addition to needing a sense of personal achievement to satisfy a neurotic personality, there also needs to be a sense of the achievements being recognised by someone else. Pregnancy IS usually something that brings praise and attention, although not always from one's partner. However, the real personal achievements of motherhood can go utterly unrecognised because they are common and it is not society's norm to praise mothers for being mothers.

I have found it necessary to constantly recognise MYSELF, to praise myself for the effort that I put into being the best mum that I can be, into the awareness that's required to prevent myself from slipping into depression again. Because I never cared about my own opinion of myself before, the opinion and recognition of other people mattered much much more. Now that I recognise my own efforts, however small, I am less needy of the recognition of others to satisfy my neurotic personality, and, as a consequence, I am much more contented.

Relentless perfectionism

Perfectionism is the crowning glory of the neurotic personality. If you have skipped to this paragraph from the top of the page, I would strongly suggest that you read through all the other paragraphs. While having a neurotic personality is not the only thing that predisposes you to developing pregnancy depression, being perfectionistic can be something that may cause you difficulty when you are pregnant or the mother of a small child. Perfectionism makes you have high expectations of yourself and others; it may also mean that you give yourself scant praise for what you do achieve, or that you move the goal posts all the time.

In pregnancy and motherhood, when things seem mundane and high standards seem frustratingly impossible to maintain, being a perfectionist may lead you to frustration and stress. One good thing, for me, that's come out of my experience of pregnancy depression has been a greater awareness of how hurtful perfectionism can sometimes be. Oh, I do like everything to be done properly, still, but I have learned to praise the effort, no matter what, whether or not the goal is achieved. It's made for a more pleasant atmosphere in my marriage. And I hope it means that my son will have a more pleasant, joyful, experience of his upbringing than I did of mine.

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