# Is this a Personality Disorder?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-a-personality-disorder/744531>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [January 29, 2016, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-a-personality-disorder/744531 "2016-01-29T00:47:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![P-man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/p-man/32/3606_2.png) [@P-man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/P-man)\
**Post date:** [January 30, 2016, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-a-personality-disorder/744531/21 "2016-01-30T03:24:09Z")

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My wife would say I leave out important details. I would say she sometimes takes 10 minutes to relate 1 minute worth of information. I skim when she goes on and on (like I do when I read anything longer than a picture book), and she makes up details to fill in my gaps.

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**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\
**Post date:** [January 30, 2016, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-this-a-personality-disorder/744531/22 "2016-01-30T14:29:02Z")

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> [@monstro](#):
>
> I have a coworker who does this to a mild degree. She’ll mention “that” without specifying what “that” is. Or she’ll reference a “he” or a “she” without giving any indication of who the hell she’s talking about.
> 
> She doesn’t get irate when it’s pointed out, though.
> 
> I have always assumed she does this it to drag out a story for dramatic effect. By being intentionally vague, she forces the listener to ask for more details, which may feed her desire to be the center of attention. But another hypothesis is that she just lacks self-awareness. Maybe she has some degree of “mind blindness”, whereby it is hard for her to intuit when she knows something another person cannot possibly know. I actually think this might be it, since she tends to be very judgmental towards people who aren’t as detail-oriented as she is. Which is kinda ironic given her conversational style.

OTOH, when I do this, it’s because I don’t quite remember the details as I’m speaking, and am hoping there’s enough information that you can intuit who I mean. You can tell because, if you stop to ask, I’ll have to pause and think for a bit. Heck, likely, I’ll have to describe characteristics about the person, since I will have completely forgotten their name.

My friends generally do figure out who I mean, so the conversations work more quickly without getting bogged down due to my deficit in remembering names and instant recall of details.

And it seems to run in the family, BTW. My dad does it really, really badly, to the point that we actually do often not know what he’s talking about. Mom forgets a whole lot less, but uses this strategy when it happens. Only my sister seems to be able to on the fly change how she says something based on what she remembers. (This is why she is the multilingual one–if she lacks the word for one thing, she instantantly thinks of another way to say it. So she’s functional on a lower vocabulary.)

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