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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

After reading the article, I have gone through the inventory of people who left a mark in my life.

One or two people fits to this template perfectly. Weak, soft, approachable in the beginning but, becomes silently more dominant and sucking your energy for their survival. If you cannot regenerate fast enough, they throw you to the side to find their new victim. Sad, damaging.

> These issues are probably intransigent...

My guess is TIV is not intransigent if you can attack it from right angle. The profile looks like grounded in good person turned bad for real or so, this looks like a winning strategy. Both foundations can be disassembled. First one needs someone who can cut through to anger to reach to the core of the personality. Second one needs an encounter with a bite-resistant person so, they have to think their strategy.

I'm overly generalizing here, but hope I could communicate the idea behind my rationale.

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> Weak, soft, approachable in the beginning but, becomes silently more dominant and sucking your energy for their survival. If you cannot regenerate fast enough, they throw you to the side to find their new victim.

That sounds a lot like Borderline Personality Disorder. Another tricky one because the disorder itself causes resistance to diagnosis and treatment.

Just took a quick look to BPD. There seems to be a difference. If I understood correctly:

- BPD stems from a real distorted self image and manifests itself to protect one from abandonment or being left behind.

- TIV uses victimhood psychology to appear weak (or it already feels weak) but, can use this allure to slowly and surely feed itself. More importantly, TID lacks the wild or fierce side of BPD and narcissism. The process is slower and less painful until it ends. The pain is felt when the process is almost over, and the victim is ejected when it's completely powerless.

Even writing this brings memories back. On the bright side, experiencing these kinds of people once or twice is a very maturing experience (with an expense of course).

Sure, TIV has appearing weak and BDP has rages but since you didn't state that explicitly, I wondered if you'd omitted it because it wasn't present in those people you knew.

I kind of wonder though, if the way we end up classifying these things is unreasonably influenced by the existing classifications which maybe just sort of coalesced from observations that psychologists have made of their patients. Since they're often things that people won't get treated or don't even think of as disorders. The data must be very biased and flakey.

> I wondered if you'd omitted it because it wasn't present in those people you knew.

Yes, I only mentioned people which were consistent with the TIV template in the article.

> I kind of wonder though, if the way we end up classifying these things is unreasonably influenced by the existing classifications which maybe just sort of coalesced from observations that psychologists have made of their patients. Since they're often things that people won't get treated or don't even think of as disorders.

Unfortunately, It's possible. Moreover, some traits are not considered as illnesses until it starts to affect one's life (hoarding, some forms of OCD, etc.).

Another problem is, as noted by some other comments, TIV looks like a siamese twin of narcissism when looked from a specific angle. It might be just narcissism without self esteem, or as I've seen in one person might be completely different trait because it can be devoid of narcissistic traits or traces while being extremely efficient in draining someone without giving itself away until just before the victim proverbially dies.

Since psychology is not an exact science, it'll always be up to debate I think, however this trait is a good candidate to think well on. It's much more common than it seems.

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