Self-Defeating (Masochistic) Personality Test: Score Your Self-Sabotage Pattern

A masochist, in the personality sense, is someone who seems to steer their life toward disappointment: taking the worse option when a better one is available, refusing help, feeling guilty after good news, and provoking the rejection they fear. The adjective is masochistic, and the pattern is also called self-defeating, the name the DSM-III-R settled on when it proposed the category in 1987 before dropping it in 1994. In personality theory the word has nothing to do with enjoying pain; it describes a way of treating good things as if they cannot be trusted.

This is not sexual masochism, which is a separate topic outside this page, and the test contains no sexual content. It is also not the same as depression, trauma or low self-esteem, although it overlaps all three so heavily that a high score is usually a signal to look at which of those fits rather than a label in itself; the Depression Test is the first place to check. The word names a pattern, not a person: these are behaviors on a dimension everyone sits somewhere on.

Typical signs are turning down help you need, giving to people who did not ask and feeling hurt when it is not returned, calling a win luck and a mistake proof, and ending up in jobs or relationships you could see would disappoint. The free test below scores self-sabotage, refusing care and pleasure, and guilt and self-punishment separately, so you can see which part carries your score.

This screener has 24 original statements about patterns that work against your own interests. Each is rated by how often it is true of you, from never (0) to almost always (4), for a total from 0 to 96. The statements are grouped eight apiece into three categories: Self-sabotage, which covers choosing situations that lead to disappointment, provoking rejection and undermining your own goals; Rejecting care and pleasure, which covers turning down help, comfort and enjoyment and giving to people who did not ask; and Guilt and self-punishment, which covers the inner response to success and to mistakes. The grouping is our own educational breakdown, drawn from the themes in the original proposed criteria, not a validated subscale structure.

The four bands, few patterns, some, marked and strong, are equal quarters of the range. They are readability ranges for an educational screener, not clinical cutoffs; there was never a validated public questionnaire for this construct with published cutoffs, and this page does not claim to be one.

In everyday speech masochism usually means enjoying pain, and often means something sexual. That is not what this page is about. In personality theory, masochism has a different and older meaning, going back to psychoanalytic writers who described people who seemed to arrange their lives around disappointment: taking the worst option when a better one was available, refusing help, feeling guilty after good news, and provoking the rejection they feared. In 1987 the DSM-III-R included this pattern in an appendix of proposed categories needing further study, first under the name masochistic personality disorder and then, after objections, as self-defeating personality disorder. The proposed criteria included choosing people and situations that lead to disappointment, rejecting attempts to help, responding to good events with guilt or self-harming behavior, provoking anger and then feeling hurt, refusing opportunities for pleasure, failing at tasks despite the ability to succeed, rejecting people who treat you well, and sacrificing for people who did not ask.

The category was dropped when the DSM-IV was published in 1994, and the reasons matter. Critics, including the psychologist Paula Caplan, argued that the diagnosis would mostly be applied to women, and that it risked blaming victims of abuse for staying in harmful situations by labeling their survival strategies as a disorder. Research also struggled to separate the pattern from depression and from other personality patterns. The field concluded that the proposed diagnosis did more harm than good as a category, while nobody disputed that the behaviors it described are real and painful.

That is the spirit of this page. The pattern exists, people recognize themselves in it, and it is treatable. We measure the behaviors without reviving the label, and we do not use the result to explain away anything that was done to you.

Almost nothing in the self-defeating pattern is unique to it. Feeling you do not deserve good things, refusing help, and finding fault with every success are core features of depression, and a high score here often reflects a depressive episode rather than a lasting trait; our Depression Test is the first place to check. People who grew up with neglect, criticism or abuse frequently learned that good things do not last and that needing people is dangerous, so choosing the unavailable partner or turning down care can be an old survival rule still running; the Childhood Trauma Test looks at that history directly.

Low self-esteem supplies the belief underneath the behavior, that you are not someone good things happen to, and the inner critic supplies the voice that enforces it, the one that calls a win luck and a mistake proof. Giving to people who did not ask, and feeling hurt when it is not returned, overlaps heavily with the fawn response and with dependent patterns; the People-Pleasing (Fawn Response) Test and Dependent Personality Disorder Test (DPD) tests cover those. And the guilt after success that so many people with this pattern describe is close cousin to the feeling that you will be found out, which Imposter Syndrome Test measures. A high score here is a signal to look at which of those neighboring patterns fits you best, because that is where treatment is aimed.

Every component of the self-defeating pattern responds to therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy targets the beliefs that drive it, especially the conviction that you do not deserve good things and that disappointment is safer than hope. Schema-focused therapy works with the deeper rules learned early, such as self-sacrifice, defectiveness and punitiveness, and is designed for patterns that have run for decades. Compassion-focused approaches address the inner critic directly, teaching people to respond to their own mistakes the way they would respond to a friend's. Where depression is driving the pattern, treating the depression often lifts the pattern with it.

If your score is marked or strong, the single most useful step is to tell one person, ideally a therapist, about the specific behaviors you recognized. Naming them out loud takes away some of their automatic quality. If the pattern includes choosing partners or situations that hurt you, please also know that nothing on this page means you caused what was done to you; survival strategies are not character flaws. Our Self-Esteem Test is a good companion for the belief underneath, and the therapist directory on Psychology.com can help you find someone who works with these patterns.

For a less label-focused way to explore recurring self-defeating expectations, Schema Test: Early Maladaptive Schemas (Lifetraps) examines several possible patterns without establishing their cause.

Masochistic, in the personality sense, describes someone who seems to steer their life toward disappointment: taking the worse option when a better one is available, refusing help, feeling guilty after good news and provoking the rejection they fear. In personality theory the word has nothing to do with enjoying pain; it describes a way of treating good things as if they cannot be trusted, which is why the pattern is also described as self defeating. The DSM-III-R proposed masochistic personality disorder in 1987, renamed it self-defeating personality disorder after objections, and dropped it in 1994. The behaviors are real and treatable; the label is not a current diagnosis, and this test measures the pattern without reviving it.