Personality Disorder Series: Paranoid Personality Disorder (2 of 11)
Imagine you woke up in a world where everyone planned to betray you. No one was safe to trust. The ones you loved were the ones who would hurt you the most.
You would learn to suspect everyone. Your circle of trust would be an outline of your own body, as if you were already dead. There would be no such thing as an innocent remark, only a disguise for deception. You would obsess over a loyalty no one could ever demonstrate, for you would never accept.
Your behavior in that world would be perfectly natural. That behavior in the real world would, however, demonstrate Paranoid Personality Disorder. The core feature of Paranoid PD is an inability to trust. The worst is assumed of strangers and loved ones alike. Paranoiacs fritter their lives on hallucinating offenses they then use to invoke pre-emptive attacks. They have the dubious cognition of a Borderline without the self-harm or anxious attachment. But instead of projecting primarily on intimate partners, they suspect everyone.
