Over Christmas my family went skiing, and a few days after our return my right arm began to hurt. A few more days passed and I was immobilized with pain, my arm throbbing and my hand and fingers numb.

Luckily, an excellent chiropractor and muscle therapist, Dr. Joe Muscolino, lives in my town. Dr. Joe figured out that the problem was a pinched nerve in my shoulder. Although I felt pain and numbness in my arm and hand, treating those areas directly would have done no good at all.

Relationships problems are so often just like this! Couples tussle endlessly over their “issues,” but never seem to resolve them. That’s an excellent sign that they’re missing the real problem.

I was out for a walk with my camera, and it began to rain. I could see the road and trees through the raindrops, but here’s how the photo came out. Is this what personality disorder is like?

There’s no consensus on what causes mental illnesses, but here’s my understanding of one way personality disorders might happen:

Personality develops through childhood and adolescence, and is pretty well formed by the end of high school.

It makes sense for Nature to have designed this system. Kids use their growing-up years to learn about themselves (their inborn characteristics) and their environment (the people and circumstances they live amongst), and they wind up creating personalities which “work” given the mix of those factors.

Here’s a lesson I learned as a tutor: When kids feel bad about themselves, they don’t learn well.

Instead, they spend their mental energies hating the subject, being defensive, avoiding the work, making up excuses, etc.

The very same thing happens with adults. When a person feels failed or embarrassed or hurt, his mental energies automatically flow towards escaping or relieving those bad feelings.

Relationship change requires facing the problem squarely, with lots of energy, clarity, bravery and generosity. But if your pride is in tatters, you won’t be able to do this. You’ll be too consumed with protecting your own injured Self.

I read Don Quixote as a tale of personality disorder. Cervantes’ delightful-yet-deluded hero knows he is a knight in shining armor (he’s really a peasant); his old workhorse is his fine charger, his friend Sancho Panza is his valet, and Dulcinea the farm girl is his beautiful princess. The most famous scene in the story has Don Quixote doing battle with windmills which, to him, are dragons.

Personality disorders are forms of mental illness. Yet, they can be utterly charming. The Self-Sacrificing Knight…The Little Lost Princess…The Fairy with Magic Powers…The All-Knowing Wizard…people with personality disorders often experience themselves as stylized, fantastic characters. The creative, escapist, storybook world of personality disorder can be alluring. Many of us have been drawn into relationships with enchanting, personality-disordered partners.

My son Matt sent me this link to a comedy skit called “Dating Solutions.” A woman builds a lie detector and brings it on a blind date. I won’t say anymore; watch it for yourself below!

Besides being absolutely hilarious, “Dating Solutions” is a pretty fair portrayal of several of the features of the human mind, especially its capacity for deception as well as self-deception.

I was nervous about my recent post, Love Alone Can’t Cure Mental Illness. I worried that readers might misunderstand my message and read it as if I believe mentally ill people don’t deserve love or can’t ever be good relationship partners.

My position is just the opposite. I have known and loved and had my life enriched in so many ways by any number of wonderful people with mental illness. Mental illness in and of itself is definitely NOT a stopper in successful relationships of any kind (student/teacher, friendships, family, romance).

Back in the days of my previous career, I’d go to parties knowing that my job would be the hit topic of the evening.

You’re a professional matchmaker? Wow! Sex and the City, only for real!

But my job was actually amazingly mundane and conservative. No racy stories, no kinky requests. My clients were all busy, highly educated singles seeking long-term, conventional relationships. They sought the standard White-Picket-Fence Dream. Marriage was the goal for most of my clients, but the more open-mined would also consider long-term monogamous, living-together arrangements.

Recently I wrote about some of the ways in which people might use their relationships as dumping grounds for other deeper problems.

The human psyche struggles with locus of control;  it has trouble figuring out which events take place inside the Self and which ones are occurring in the external world.

Interactions between people are especially confusing since the line between inside and outside is particularly blurred. Our love partners are separate people, yes…but they also “overlap” with us emotionally so that they are essentially a part of our internal lives.

So, one of the reasons we often blame our partners or our relationships for our own personal problems is because we truly can’t tell where that line is, between our own lives and our shared existence with them. The pain and confusion and frustration may genuinely feel like it is coming from our relationship, when in fact it is our own life issues spilling over and tainting our love.

This is Nana Bear, one of my childhood toys.

I wonder which relative thought that this sad teddy bear was the right gift for me. I was an outgoing child with a sunny temperament; did someone think I needed a reminder that life wasn’t so carefree for everyone?

Nana Bear touched a nurturing, protective chord in me. I favored her over my happier teddies and made sure she joined in every game and tea party so she’d never have a reason to feel even sadder. I took Nana to bed every night and hugged and cuddled her, hoping that one morning she’d wake up smiling. Someday, surely, all my  love and attention would transform her!