Toxic Behaviors, Disordered Personalities: Narcissistic, Borderline, Antisocial Personality Disorders With Dr. Daniel Fox

February 1, 2025 Staten Islander News Service Staff Writer 0 American Culture, Babies and Kids, Equality, Health, Interviews, Media and Communication, Morality and Ethics, Science, Science and Technology, SI Communities, Staten Island Culture, Staten Island Families, Staten Islander Exclusive, Staten Islander Videos

Toxic Behaviors, Disordered Personalities: Narcissistic, Borderline, Antisocial Personality Disorders With Dr. Daniel Fox

Dr. Daniel J. Fox is a licensed psychotherapist practicing in Texas who specializes in the treatment of management of complex personality disorders. These include Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

Of the three, only BPD is treatment seeking. The other two tend to be not seek treatment. With NPD, it’s more because the individual doesn’t want to be discovered as being weak or unable to function. Of the three, ASPD is management disorder, which means that is not really treatable. There isn’t going to be a day when that person has overcome their Disorder, but they’ll be able to function moderately well in society if they have been to therapy before getting in trouble with the law.

People with ASPD have traits and behaviors that make it difficult to function with others around them. They also lack empathy and they tend to take advantage of others. Each of the three, and really all of the personality disorders, have what Dr. Fox calls “core content.” This is the part underneath that the Disordered person wants to protect. In ASPD, these individuals are all about power and profit, and they tend to take advantage of others. Because at the same time they lack empathy and a sense of personal responsibility, they tend to lack understanding of how they are hurting others, and often they don’t care. Since they lack empathy, they aren’t able to conceptualize what someone else is feeling. They are often in therapy for an insincere reason such as a judge’s orders or some other ulterior reason. ASPD is what people often mean when they refer to psychopathy, which is the extreme form of this Disorder.

NPD has underlying core content of fear, shame, doubt, guilt, or inferiority. As a result, they have an inflated sense of their own value and demand to be always treated as special. While in the past, these individuals would be very unlikely to seek treatment, that has begun to change in the last several years.

People with BPD tend to have fear of abandonment, rejection sensitivity, and emptiness. Of the three disorders, only BPD is treatment seeking. The other two are treatment rejecting. However, for people with NPD, treatment is possible, it’s just more difficult. A therapist has to have a different approach where they are allowing the patient to describe what the issues are, whether it’s at work or with a partner. Often people with NPD will come for therapy because they’ve acted out at work. Acting out means engaging in their maladaptive behaviors. The chart below describes some of those behaviors.

Much of the interview is spent on NPD, particularly as it relates to family patterns and dysfunction. These patterns include the tendency of children to adopt certain patterns such as the scapegoat, hero, or golden child as a response to the treatments and behaviors enacted on them by the parent with NPD. These patterns are adopted by the kids to survive, but they become problematic when they affect their lives as adults, attracting to them partners with the same maladaptive behaviors as their parents had.

We also talked about how divorce can exacerbate these issues, particularly when they involve parental alienation and subsequent confusion regarding familial roles. Parental alienation is the scientific way of describing what many divorced mothers do where they try to turn the children against the non custodial parent. This is all too common in divorces, and it can severely damage the children mentally and emotionally. Often the parent doing this doesn’t understand the confusion and pain they are causing, but when a parent has NPD, the children will also have to couple this issue with their now upended world where a new family has just formed. Humans do tend to have a lot of survival mechanisms available, which may be why there are so many scarred adults today who survived insane and tumultuous childhoods.

Finally, we discussed treatment, and whether it is always necessary to have a professional therapist. For those with mild to moderate personality disorders, workbooks utilizing Dialectic Behavior Therapy and other tools can be veer helpful. It is possible to get past these emotional scars and maladaptive behavior patterns on one’s own. However, for those with severe or extreme levels of the disorders, professional help might be necessary. Such individuals won’t be able to see it on their own, and they many not be able to apply the techniques and new patterns that might help them.